Moving Parts

by Steve Katz

A man removing the skin of a woman and wearing it, a package containing human wrists that spawn human body parts, a trip through Tennessee searching for fictional material, the ubiquitous number 43, are four separate stories that come together to form Moving Parts. You follow the author through several communes, greyhound bus trips, and a Cherokee burial ground, always searching but not finding anything. The obsession of the author with Wendy Appel, the human wrists, the number 43, become his identity. Moving Parts is a unique look into the mind and traveling of the author.

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Steve Katz (May 14, 1935 – August 4, 2019) was an American writer. He is considered an early post-modern or avant-garde writer for works such as The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), and Saw (1972).

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unexpectedly brilliant when it's brilliant. The punning titles of more recent Katz novels made me wary of possibly excessive literary zaniness, not always my cup of over-sweetened tea. But this, though often completely insane, does it with a sharp balance of wit, metafictive daring, and deft grotesquery eliding into a kind of discomfitting funhouse delight. Published by the original Fiction Collective in 1977, this contains: two stories, a travelogue, and an essay, all more complicated than such simple identifiers suggest -- the binding thread seems to be that this is a kind of skewed work of autobiography.

Female Skin: I've just said that this is a sort of autobio, and that I was worried it would be overly zany. Any reservations these may hold for me or other potential readers should be buried by the sheer shock of the first page. Katz is after a few serious points here, but he dives into them with something that briefly appears a medical horror, then slides into a relief of absurdity, sharp self-interogation, memoir, subtle questions of identity hidden in unsubtle but wholly original plot maneuvers. Page by page, this is sheer unmatched unpredictability of form and content.

Parcel of Wrists: continuing with another premise certain to cause great unease in 1-line synopsis, the narrator, one morning, receives in the post a carefully packaged set of 43 human wrists. Again, potential grotesquerie is instantly offset by the actual execution -- the narrator plants them in potting soil in his apartment and sets out on a road trip to Tennessee to attempt to learn who has sent them and why, weaving a few macabre suggestions into a rapid survey of mid-America. The ending, again, cannot be anticipated. These two stories could be the beginning of a five star book.

Travel: But they're only the first third, and the rest, though inventive and absolutely worthwhile, veer more towards essay and so lose some of their vitality in Real Information. Still, another unique endeavor: three years after the last story, the author (rechristianing himself as a third-person Protagonist) sets out to live out the path taken on his fictional Tennessee roadtrip, seeking the truth behind his earlier invention. The result is a clever metafictive travelogue interspersed with photos, often of the route 43 road signs. And why?

43: Finally, the closest memoir/essay, an explanation of the self-inflicted numerological obsession Katz developed with an arbitrary number, dodging between clipped articles and statistics, and observation on the powers and dangers of numerological and other sets of symbolic meaning. These longer two sections can't really maintain the concentrated punch of the stories, and maybe the whole thing is arguably more a diversion than an essential, but still they make up the connected moving parts of a very memorable and uniquely executed work of semi-nonfiction. I will absolutely be pursuing more Katz in the immediate future.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katz continues to impress me with another peculiar work that mixes photographic montage, travelogue, surreal short stories, and autobiographical elements into one nearly coherent whole known as Moving Parts. It all begins after the disorienting ‘Female Skin’ when Katz receives a package with 43 wrists in the mail (‘Parcel of Wrists’) and unfolds from there into a freewheeling trip across America in ‘Trip’ and a recollection of his fascination with a certain number in ‘43.’ A later collection from Katz, 43 Fictions, furthers this obsession. Does this work stand up when assaulted with the hard logic of those postmodern theorists and test-setters? Perhaps not. A surreal curio that was never released in paperback and FC2 has let slip out of print. But never a dull sentence. Heaps of wristy amusement for ages 43 and up.

[knig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Blah.

[🐴 🍖]

aka now that's what i call metafiction! vol 43... the whole collection's a lotta fun but perhaps the most "far out" thing (as the commune folks in "trip" would phrase it) is the pairing of "parcel of wrists" with "trip," where the latter superimposes itself on the former with a "realer" version of the same trip thru tennessee -- which, is it less fictional for featuring photographs of rt. 43 road signs? is "the protagonist" any more "steve katz" than "steve" or "i," or "seven," even? (brains and eggs, indeed...) plus, given the numerological spookiness at hand in the final piece, it was fun running across some resonances in here w/ mcelroy's women & men, which i started roughly concurrently ("wide load" on a pic of a house, skylab making an appearance). nothing like a steve katz book for recalibrating the tinfoil on your hat!