Olt

by Kenneth Gangemi

Olt unfolds in the course of three vividly described interludes in the life of the title character, an imaginative and detached young man. Enjoyable and precisely structured, this highly original miniature novel gains the body and weight of a work many times its length. Critics praised Olt as "Delightful" (Chicago Sun-Times), "Charming and mysterious" (Life), "Fascinating, unusual, sometimes bewildering" (Publishers Weekly), "More like poetry than storytelling" (Village Voice), "The style, the focus on one main character, and the cool listing of experiences tend to remind one of Meursault in The Stranger" (Library Journal).

Genres: Fiction, American Fiction, Literature

60 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

American poet and fiction writer.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non-boring surrealist shortie containing imaginative lists, salacious meanderings, sometimes shocking and inappropriate twists, and nothing as recherché as a plot or believable character or Higher Purpose. Streamlined and rib-tickling for your pleasure.

[Andrew]

When I was a child who was fundamentally incapable of dealing with the world around me, I retreated into my own world and I made lists. Lists of cities and countries, baseball players and long-defunct teams, minerals and insects and god knows what else. Hell, I still kinda do it. Films I haven’t seen, wines I haven’t drank… the list goes on.

So does Gangemi’s Olt. And he walks around, and his lists are the world. The world is made up of his lists. I have never felt so seen.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I haven't read one of them I suspect there are ~ 732 recent novelettes written a la Olt and just the suspected existence of these 732 novelettes negatively affected my reading of this, the original spare affectless novelette with spare affectless humor, absurdity, and sex scattered throughout. I don't know... why? I read an interview with Gangemi wherein he describes his reading practice of circling all the non-boring sentences of his favorite novels, which led to the decision to write a novel (this one) with only non-boring sentences, but sometimes when you remove the boring you only succeed in revealing the boring beneath. I'm not sure this book stimulated a single thought in my cranium; and it's not that I went into this lunchtime reading (45 minutes start to finish) with any prejudice, but after the first sentence - Robert Olt felt the pain again when he bent down to pick up a cracker from the floor. - I very quickly developed a prejudice. There was just something about his use of "cracker" that rubbed me the wrong way. Also, the word "Olt" was used way too much; it started reverberating in my thoughtless cranium.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keep the Pope off the moon.

[🐴 🍖]

stately (?) plump (?) robert olt bends to pick up a cracker and we're off to the races, tasting smoked sturgeon, riding escalators, telling jokes about the pope, overhearing cocoa brokers, feeding otters. above all olt browses, surfeiting himself with information as though the city were one big tweetdeck, liking, subscribing, reviewing memories on his timeline... rewarding and sui generis, albeit a little like eating the seasoning packet without the ramen. bring your own noodles folks

[Gabe Cweigenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Fun one

[Alex V. · Rating 5 out of 5]

OLT by Kenneth Gangemi is one of my favorite books, 55 pages of adrenaline detail rushing at the speed of idle sex thoughts and newspaper filler. It's like reading a book about everything except in fast-forward.

The book is hardly anything. Robert Olt wanders around, recording every detail like a seismograph, not really doing anything or even being that moved by it all, and somehow, in that, it is the realest book. Maybe it's the best depiction of being manic-depressive, sensitive to an entire world just out of actual touch.

I read this book in a class on Surrealist novels a quarter-century ago and still remember a number of the vivid random details hurled forth from its pages. I re-read it about every five years or so, but could probably re-read it every month, then once a week and then get to the point where I could just about recite it. I find some significance in that this book is exactly as old as me only because reading it makes me - for a bit - find empty, shattering significance in everything.

[Robb Todd]

Kenneth Gangemi has done something quite brilliant with this book. So brilliant, I'm not even sure what I just read. The narrator moves around a city, but the reader only moves around inside the narrator's head. Themes emerge and feelings emerge--for the reader, though, not the narrator. The narrator doesn't seem to feel much of anything. We don't need to be told how the narrator feels because we can feel it for him. We are him for 55 pages. Demands to be read again.

UPDATE: Read it again on Christmas day. Damn. Damn good. Have to get my hands on more Gangemi. "The Volcanoes from Puebla" is probably next.

[Phillip Freedenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kenneth Gangemi’s Olt is a brilliant, fractured, experiential micro-novel that burns with a greater dizzying sense of humanity than some thousand page novels. The book is what I would coin “information-fiction,” or “micro-maximalism,” which weaves a wild patchwork of a world which only seems to slip immediately away from our grasp as the words course through us once the fragility of our senses lose their way. Olt has flashes of Nicholson Baker, and David Markson all the while embodying a literary spirit unlike much of anything but itself. You can devour Olt in one swift sitting, and I highly recommend that you do, as you may just want to start it all instantly over again as your mind wanders over that bountiful, irreplaceable feeling of being alive in a book that somehow, even if only in those brief moments when your consciousness inherits the life on the page, captures that fleeting profound sense of the current of the world as it passes you by.

Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic

Buffalo, NY
July 2022

[Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderfully weird little book. I can’t remember why I purchased it for my library but I think I read about on the Neglected Books blog (which you should check out if you haven’t already). No plot, just a short collection of anecdotes, lists, and musings of a character named Robert Olt, who clearly had a wide variety of interests besides clearly being a horn dog.

[John Molina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, disturbing while reminiscent of The Stranger. Great, short read if you have about an hour or less.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I don’t believe in plots. A plot is obviously something that is made up by the author. it’s artificial, an aspect of form, and for me the form of my books is almost an afterthought. The content always comes first.” Kenneth Gangemi, 1996

For Robert Olt, life is lists. Lists of things he sees, lists of things he remembers, lists of things he reads, lists of things he fantasizes about. In places, that makes the novel read like a combined index for National Geographic and Fortean Times. Here’s Olt reading the paper:

Olt “read about electric bubble-taxis, Japanese bullfights, skyscraper universities, California supermarkets, anti-VD vaccines, porpoise races, cardboard coffins, 100-pound turkeys, Chinese cowboys, skin-diving safaris, Hitler dolls, power toboggans, poker schools, butterfly farmers, Shanghai subways, chicken bricks, Henry Luce, motorcycle raffles, midget surgeons, plastic manacles, nude ballet, Australian gamblers, paperback reform, Masai milkshakes, bearded clams, solar crematories, dwarf Arabs, and chocolate dinosaurs.

He turned to the classified ads and read the ‘Help Wanted – Men’ section. No men were wanted to repair greenhouses, dam brooks, build sailplanes, paint tugboats, or make surfboards.”

Surprisingly this works (though it helps that the book is just 60 pages long). As Olt rambles through an unnamed American city, the incoming data, coded in simple, noun-laden sentences, start to create a composite image of a life, a time, and a place that still strikes me as original and inventive – even after fifty years. Brief but distinctive.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written, according to the author, in 1967 and published in 1969, Olt brings to mind the mid-60's fiction of Georges Perec and interestingly prefigures David Markson's "anti-novels" such as Wittgenstein's Mistress and Vanishing Point with their compilations of factoids. A thoroughly engaging mini-novel you can read in about an hour.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's rare when you find a book no one has reviewed, because then it feels like you're really doing something. This has its problems at times, feeling dated, as two of our other editors pointed out to me on different occasions, but still deserves a look for its wonderful pacing and anti-plot.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book written by an engineer about a guy with appendicitis who reads newspapers, makes lists, objectively describes his surroundings, reads more newspapers and thinks about teenaged girls-- and by some unlikely miracle this is actually an engaging read!