Motorman

Moldenke #1

by David Ohle

For a long time I was scared to read Motorman . It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell. Books were not often spoken of so potently to me, as contraband, as narcotic, as ordnance. There was the whispered promise that my mind would be blown after reading Motorman. There was the assurance that once I read it I would drool with awe, writerly awe, the awe of watching a madman master at work, David Ohle, awesomely carving deep, black holes into the edifice of the English language.
—from the introduction by Ben Marcus

This dystopia is a tour de force of scabrous invention. It is also uncomfortably real. As a kid I flipped through Science News and got an unpleasant shock when I inadvertently put my finger on a close-up of a spider's mandibles. Similarly, something about Ohle's prose closes the gap between the representation of a disturbing thing and the thing itself. You feel you ought to wash your hands after touching the page. But if you think that wiping will remove the stain, consider Doing time in the French Sewers (don't ask), Moldenke learns that they supply the bakery where edible paper—"for money, for waivers, for wiping, for books"—is made. Shit is books, books are food, food is shit. The conclusion? We're in it. Deep.
—Shelley Jackson, from a review in BookForum

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Novels, Literature, The United States Of America, Novella

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

David Ohle is an American writer, novelist, and a lecturer at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. After receiving his M.A. from KU, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1975 to 1984. In 2002 he began teaching fiction writing and screenwriting as a part-time lecturer at the University of Kansas. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, the Transatlantic Review, Paris Review, and Harper's, among other magazines.
While it remained out of print for over thirty years, his first novel Motorman (initially published in 1972) gathered a quiet cult following, was circulated through photocopies, and went on to become an influence to a generation of American writers such as Shelley Jackson and Ben Marcus.
His subsequent novels The Age of Sinatra (2004), The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013) take place in the same dystopian setting as Motorman. Ohle's fiction is often described as weird, surreal and experimental. His own influences include Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Flann O'Brien, and Raymond Roussel.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Motorman is an acid trip in a post-apocalyptic world of many artificial suns and moons where the mutants of many implanted hearts sordidly exist.
“He experienced a shortened boyhood, a small degree of youth and carelessness,” – that’s a complete biography of the main hero…

He knew that vertical activity invited dazzling exposure, and that to seek is to be sucked. He recognized loneliness as the mother of virtues and sat in her lap whenever he could. He practiced linear existence and sidewise movement, preferring the turtle to the crane, the saucer to the lamp.

And his stream of consciousness turns into a paranoid rave… And he writes and receives weirdest epistles…

Dear Doctor, I woke up to the sirens this morning with a chestful of nellies. I couldn't avoid it. I behaved accordingly. It was good to get your letter. Your patient.

And there are the weirdest and absolutely poetic culinary recipes…

Halictine bees, dried, make a hearty, bracing tea, good for the imagination. Eaten raw they leave blisters in the mouth.
The cicada killer, boiled and iced, resembles the quahog of the old days.
While the robber fly has a disturbing pungency and tends to irritate the chuffs, it does have beautiful eyes.

But whatever happens, the battle between good and evil never ceases.

[Fionnuala]

When I tried to write a review of this book, I kept wanting to make a drawing instead, and given the dream-like quality, or should I say nightmarish quality of Moldenke’s world, such a drawing would have to have a 'trompe l’oeil' feature built in as in that Escher drawing of a hand drawing itself, so I looked up Escher and found this animated version of his Relativity picture and, for those of you who’ve read Motorman, it comes with its very own jellyhead!
I couldn’t resist posting it in lieu of a review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY43EW...

[knig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ben Marcus is suitably impressed in the intro to this ‘experimental’ post-beatniky stream of something or other, and his mewling noises of approval loosely translate into a (I’m sure subconscious) emulation in the creation of in his ‘Flame Alphabet’’s Murphy, with more than a passing nod to Mr Buncy: an omnipresent morphological creature with megalomaniacal tendencies and a ‘centralised’ mode of operandi.

Theres absolutely no telling whats going on in this clusterfuck: and this type of whimsy either engages or drives you nuts. I’m not using the term ‘clusterfuck’ facetiously: its a military term, nudge nudge wink wink and herewith we have a military theme: 1971, ‘Apocalysis now’ (which features heavily here, and I’m not just referring to the surreal boat ride which Conrad started in Heart of Darkness and Brando finished off with aplomb), but in general it was that kind of era, and it birthed that type of dystopian authorships: how about le Clezio’s ‘War’? Or ‘Zanzibar’? Man, that 70’s feel: its so unmistakeable: just like ABBA and knickerbockers.

Theres this reviewer on here who likened this novella to the literary equivalent of a Pollock on paper. Which idea made me mull a hell of a lot more than Motorman. As in, can we actually have that in literary geist (apart from the Dadaists, that is). I mean, yes, Ohle is totally fucking around with plot, time-sequence, and sense data, the klieg light is skimming the periphery and object-subject ontology takes on non euclydean propotions, BUT. Is it Pollock-ian? As in a randomly strewn rhizome of a mobius-striptedness? Well, no. Ohle is very, very circular in his approach. And I truly believe this MUST be so: language induces thinking, and thinking induces (De Bono-inian) patterns: yes, I’m Whorfian about it, but any piece of writing long enough eventually makes sense: if not in the mind of the originator, then certainly in the mind of the recipient, who, as Andre Breton posits, will rearrange her mind to make sense of it. And I’m pretty sure Bertrand Russell stakes his life on it. So, no: we don’t have Pollock in lengua.

In Sherlock Holmes style, I’m parsing this out: and I don’t care if Ohle didn’t mean it: thats always irrelevant. Its the reader who OWNS the Word. Moldenke, the protag: a Norman Bates, he of the split personality. Moldenke is his escapism, Bufona is his name. This guy is evidently in the looney bin, luxuriating in post traumatic stress disorder. He’s been in a ‘War’, prior to which there was one sun, one moon, and he had one heart and two lungs. Afters....Well. Bring it on. Jelly babies, ‘bottoms’, Cock Roberta, and multiple hearts and suns. Anything onwards now will make sense only to those who have partaken of this modern Homeric odyssey: but, yeah: he killed Roberta, she of the jelly baby fame, this was somehow captured on tape, and now...he sits ensconced in the warm cocoon of a sanatorium whilst Headmaster Bunce tries to make him come to terms: ‘the tapes’, he says: and Moldenke demurs. Everyone knows his name: duuuh. Cause they are all inmates or nursing staff. And Eagleman: ho,ho, ho. And ho. I think Moldenke IS Eagleman. Or, he worked for Eagleman.
Seen in this context, this becomes a nightmarish journey into the subconscious, an exacerbated version of ‘One flew over the Cuckoos nest’, a study of madness and hoplessness: the eureka of nothingness.

Still. I needed a little more oomph.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, messy, cryptic, and totally entertaining. In Ben Marcus' intro he refers to a rumor that David Ohle worked for William Burroughs, typing out his dreams each morning. Which is a great angle on this book regardless of veracity. This is sci-fi like Naked Lunch is, mostly by shear weirdness. But Motorman is actually far more coherent, and far more capable of pulling me in and making me care where we're headed. Trapped in his appartment under uncertain terms and uncertain-ter context (something has gone wrong, everything is dying, the government replacement suns are acting up), our protagonist re-reads his letters, monitors the phone, tries to remember how he got here and how he will get out. The words themselves are sometimes unfamiliar but executed with a kind of deadpan urgency that comes out as totally natural, though clearly operated by unique logic. Tune up your hearts and get reading.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In its reflection of certain aspects of current times (e.g., human isolation and emotional numbness; preponderance of the artificial, in part to replace the natural; ignorance of history and loss of collective societal memory; self-centered nature of the power elite to the detriment of the powerless; and so much more), this still resonates as much today as it presumably did in 1972, though could stand a slight revision to include even more jellyheads. An impressive blend of horror, humor, and prescience.

[Kinga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone told me that it was the best book he has ever read. I’d never heard of it. Is it possible that this is somehow the world’s best kept secret?

‘Motorman’ was out of print for decades until a few years ago a small publisher from New York brought it back to life. Or semi-life, should I say, because they still don’t want you to know. The cover is minimalistic; except for a bizarre illustration, it only tells you the name of the book and its author, all in a very small font. The back is absolutely bare – there is no blurb, no encouraging quotes, not even the price, just the barcode and ISBN number. Essentially, every hipster’s dream.

The introduction by Ben Marcus is full of phrases like For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. And I discovered an oddly tender book that used imagination as an afterthought, however potently, as if beautiful fires on the horizon are precisely the backdrop that might restore life to our identity-quest stories and make us care again about the most elemental things.

When the expectations are this high it is easy to be disappointed. Is the best book I have ever read? Most definitely not. Although I’d agree with Ben Marcus that it is oddly tender. Neither the introduction nor the reviews will tell you what the book is about. I probably won’ tell you all that much. It’s about Moldenke who is trying to escape Bunce who keeps him a semi-prisoner. It’s all very weird and Moldenke has four sheep hearts. He has also sacrificed his feelings in the Mock War, which causes problems in his relationship with Roberta (who suffers from some punctuation-related affliction). It’s very complicated. It’s part George Orwell, part William S. Burroughs and part Stanisław Lem. Make of it what you like. I don’t want to say too much about it. Given how popular I am, I might just accidentally push the book into the mainstream and the hipsters will never forgive me.

I will leave you with a quote which is taken from Moldenke’s report when his job was to taste weird foods for Mr. Featherfighter:

“Mr. Etcetera,
My second report:
1) Both fleas and cantbarides lead to self-abuse.
2) I feel I should resign.
3) I feel. I feel. Therapy helped me.
4) I do resign.
No longer yours,
Moldenke”

Moldenke is getting his feelings back! Be careful, it might happen to you too – it might make you quit your job.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The word that came to mind when reading this book was "whimsical" which is not a word you'd associate with a dystopian novel.

This has hints of Kafka (Mohldenke's persecution by Bunce) and Dick (the artificial flora and fauna, the black humour)

Ohle's books are hard to come by, but I'll definitely be looking for others in this series

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew little about this book, other than it has a reputation of something incredibly wild, transgressive even. But I found this an easier read than Michael Cisco's work (the only author I could compare it with). I suppose you could file this under bizarro science fiction, written in a very disjointed manner. The story jumps back and forth in time, although this is one of the least puzzling parts of the reading experience. The challenging part is understanding what the heck is going. Eventually the going gets easier, but the weirdness doesn't stop.

I'm not a fan of science fiction, but I like this. The vision of the future offered here isn't clean and chrome-plated, it's rusted, rotted and dirty. It's dystopian with a pervading totalitarian surveillance. It's also absurdist to a Kafkaesque level. The protagonist seems to be desired by two competing forces, but their reasons are obscure at best and anytime he is given tasks to do they're always bizarre and nonsensical.

The world is populated with "jellyheads" (beings full of jelly that wear human disguises) who are a menace to our protagonist and are always leaking or releasing deposits of jelly. There are multiple artificial suns and moons, and one man has taken it upon himself to create one similar to the original. We're not sure if this is out of nostalgia, but it seems important because humans are no longer able to keep track of time or predict the weather. And yet no one seems to care about either.

Other weirdness: Our narrator was recruited into a "mock war" where soldiers voluntarily lose limbs and lives. He was also hired to eat insects. In short, we're thrown into a world that makes no sense, and very little is explained and we try to make sense of it. It's quite comical at times, but ultimately is a bleak, and muted portrait of the future.

My main criticism of this book is that it ends right as it seems to be heading somewhere, when all the chaos is congealing around a purpose. It's feels like Ohle simply got tired of writing. I give it four stars...but just barely.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

MOTORMAN was first published by Knopf in 1972. Then it went out of print for almost half a century. That author David Ohle’s novel was published by a mainstream press feels as impossibly possible as the dystopian world he creates in his writing. Dystopian stirs up a pot of influences, some of which season Ohle’s post-sense metropolis, but his creation is wholly his own and still wedded to our own. It feels much more like the future we’re living in today than other works that get that prophetic credit. The trials and tribulations of Moldenke, MOTORMAN’s main character, are nightmarishly banal and surrealistically hilarious. I wouldn’t call this book a page-turner, though practically speaking all physical books are, yet, once I started reading, it was hard to stop, pulled in by Ohle’s talent, a creativity that cannot be parsed but must be taken whole. It makes no sense to try and make sense of MOTORMAN, like life you should just try and enjoy the ride.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bizarre science fiction mumblings(if Beckett wrote sci fi) that is cartoonish, creepy and despairing in a comic way. It resembles a more abstract George Saunders(or Matthew Derby) or a more accessible Ben Marcus(who provides an enthusiastic intro) and would be probably be considered derivative of those writers if it hadn’t been written in 1972! So Ohle probably inspired by Beckett and Burroughs(and 60’s Avant Garde,) produced this weird child on his own and inspired a group of writers.

[Jay Sandover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Relentlessly strange. Totally loved it. Hard to describe. It's an experience. Sort of rewired my brain a little bit as I read it. Could not stop thinking about it.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ohle's book might have received bad press when it was orginally published in 1972..

The only virtue of this absolutely atrocious book is its brevity (Kirkus)

..but it has since gone on to become something of a cult classic in the sci-fi / dystopian fan community.
It is a type of noir/science-fiction/surreal blend. Moldenke, a man who has been rebuilt (rather like Steve Austin) after an injury in a war, operates on four sheep hearts and is without an eye. He is chasing two men; Burnheart and Eagleman. Eagleman is a mad scientist, responsible for at least one of the many moons that now circle the earth.
The style takes a bit of getting used to.
Occasional sentences stand out, though I am not sure the whole thing holds together. But it could well be that it’s not supposed to..
It is very 1970s, full of the experimentation, typical of Gilliam/Python, with plenty of toilet humour, You can almost visualise a Gilliam style animation.
Here's a clip..

Dear Moldenke,
Whether or not you have feelings for me, or feelings at all, I do have feelings about you. They increased when you compared my nipples to pencil erasers. No one has been so gentle to me.
The clouds are promising rain.
Love,
Cock Roberta.

and

That was the way with Moldenke, a brightly burning candle with a shortened wick, destined to burn low and give off gas.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know I liked books like this anymore. The introduction by Ben Markus, which I read just after finishing it, is a great survey of the book's strengths (even if it's a bit obnoxious, with its long meditation on canonization and respect as a work of literature), so I'm not sure how much of that I'd like to restate here aside from how much I enjoyed it. The prose is this perfect tightness, shot through with imagination from sentence to sentence that reminds me of In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan, or a more focused (but also more distant) Sayonara Gangsters, which a lot of people know is one of my favorite novels. I especially like the claustrophobic delicacy of the first half, though it becomes more of a spacious, surreal road novel in the second half and loses some of its emotional intensity, which made the ending trail off a bit for my taste. This was still really excellent though, and one of the most polished pieces of writing I've seen in a long time.

[Juan Fuentes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completamente original, creadora de un ambiente irreal y poderoso, con un elenco de personajes de los que no llegamos a saber nada pero con una presencia innegable. Deja el buen sabor de una comida nueva y especiada.

https://liblit.com/david-ohle-motorman/

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction to Motorman by David Ohle, Ben Marcus says that for a long time he was scared to read it--"It's existence bothered me, and I grew leery of being artistically paralyzed by its reported high oddity and invention, its completely unexampled decimation of fiction-as-we-have-come-to-know-it." After reading the introduction I was scared to read it. Could anything live up to the hype, causing you to float into the air or render you "gummy and mute"?

Some novels you read to nostalgically revisit places you've traveled or lived. In the case of Motorman, Ohle fabricates a whole new world. I guess you could call it science fiction or speculative or futuristic, but more in a human and believable way reminiscent of Blade Runner or the worlds that George Saunders creates in his novels. Or think of Radiohead's OK Computer, but in a textual, novel form, written 15 years before. These are the emotional landscapes it invokes.

It's always amusing to read sci-fi novels from 30+ years ago--before the internet, before cell phones, before CDs, before life as we know it now--and see which depictions hold true. But like Saunder's, to Ohle it's not so much about describing geeky future gadgetry as it is the emotional disposition of futuristic societies and the predicted human interactions, a lot of which rings true in today's world. The cold detachment and alienation. The superficiality. The organ transplants (though we limit ourselves to one heart at a time, unlike Mondenke who has 4 sheep hearts to back up his failing human heart). Back when Motorman was written, this probably wouldn't been the stuff of science fiction, and in Ohle's world, such reconstructive surgery abounds, not out of necessity, but as fashion statements, or as units of emotive barter (he gets discharged from a "mock war" by volunteering for a minor fracture (subsequently inflicted to his knee by a nurse) and he throws in a "list of feelings" as a guilt-ridden after-thought, as if he is not giving enough, or as if feelings were detachable commodities that could be sacrificed for a price.

The "he" is Mondenke, the lonely and hen-pecked (yet ever-resilient) protagonist trying to eke out an existence in a bureaucratic and oppressive government controlled-world (if you have seen any of William Kentridge's movies, think Felix Teitelbaum). Mondenke receives menacing and intrusive phone calls from a Mr. Bunce, who seems to know and monitor everything of Mondenke's whereabouts or even his thoughts. Mondenke spends most of the book trying to escape Bunce and find Dr. Burnheart, his old confidant and physician, and the apparent object of his affections, Cock Roberta, whom he woos by saying her nipples are like erasers. During his escapist travels, he alludes and in at least one instance dismembers, dunce humanoid "jellyheads" who are made of jelly and speak in scrambled sentences before catching and correcting themselves. This is enough of an adventure narrative to keep you grounded and turning pages. Not that its told in a prosaic or straightforward manner--its pieced together brilliantly in the form of questionnaires, odd ephemera, frequent letters and interspersed weather reports.

After a day on the job he tries to quit, but his employer Mr. Featherfighter (a.k.a. Mr. Etcetera), who addresses Mondenke as Mr. Bufona even after Mondenke repeatedly corrects him, does not allow him to resign: "The road to Etcetera was paved with such intentions. I do not accept them as anything, much less resignation."

It was great read not just for the story it tells and the ride it takes you on, but for the richness of the language and its poetic bursts that disguise themselves within the prose. Reading Motorman may not quite induce levitation, but like Mondenke, you will ride sublimely on the ethereal and viscous jelly of Ohle's language, moved along by the river of his words.

[Emrys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having only just finished Motorman, I really have little idea as to what was actually going on in it. The world of Motorman seems to be a dark future seemingly of our own world. Rather than be ruled by a government, the world seems fairly anarchic with the majority of the power being held by capitalistic monopolies. This earth seems to have been so heavily polluted that people appear to refrain from going out of doors and instead essential menial tasks are performed by an android sort of species that are filled with jelly but wear believably human masks. If this is sounding weird, then you are getting a good feel for the book. Nothing is laid out or explained. Nothing, including names, character motivations, and other basic reader assumptions can be trusted. This feeling of confusion we get from trying to understand this Earth and the characters on it mirror what must be the general mood of the world itself.

The weather is a perfect example of this. It is accepted for the volatile mess that it is. It is created by the conflicting and devastating egos of scientists and businessmen with too much power. The weather is almost constantly broadcasted, listened to addictively by most every citizen, but they all openly accept that though the weather is potentially extremely dangerous on the daily, it is all made up. People will openly acknowledge this fact in the same breath that they acknowledge how unceasingly it determines their actions and opinions on the world.

Moldenke himself, is a man who has an emotional incapability to understand himself, though strangers seem to know him rather intimately at a glance, only to immediately deny it. At first I thought maybe he had a hidden important job, or maybe his heart surgery was a widely publicized medical innovation! But no, his jobs seem mundane to the point of being degrading, and there seem to be many others who have had surgeries equally as strange or stranger than his. Perhaps Bunce is just one step ahead of him, informing the peons on the path before Moldenke so they can be there waiting to distract and disturb him.
The falseness of all of Moldenke’s interactions with the people he runs into merge beautifully with the general falseness of the whole world. Everything from peanuts to war to his range of emotions are falsely constructed.

Parting my way though the oddness of the book, I sympathized with Moldenke. In a world of oppressive apathy, in a body that can hardly register curiosity, and never love, he is a man searching to find something better for himself, and yearning towards a woman who he is kind and soft with. In his simple complacent way, Moldenke actually does something quite brave, he risks everything to break free from monotony, to find himself a better life. If a man with three faulty sheep’s hearts, a collapsed lung, an eye infection, and a severely stunted emotional spectrum can do that for himself, then I can do it for myself too.

This would be a wonderful book to read in a class or a club. if anyone wants to discuss any aspect of it I would be excited to learn other's thoughts.

[k-rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look, you're not going to like this. Don't even try. You'll pick it up, start reading, maybe get a few chapters in, at which point that itch running along your brainstem will begin to try to figure out what the hell is going on. Hesitating on the street corner, looking around, you'll feel as though you're missing something. It's like that time you were in the art museum and wandered into the contemporary section. After a few minutes you cursed yourself for paying to look at all this crap. You've been bamboozled, how can they call this art? It's just some crap vomited up on a canvas with a title. So you leave, and seriously, it's not even worth trying to explain away the money you just spent on staring at all that egregious flimflam. So please, don't read this book. It's not for you. There's a reason it disappeared for two decades after it was originally published. And by published we're talking some professor at Bumblefuck Jr. College mimeographed it for his students, then Joe Goofball spent too much money xeroxing it a few years later on a lark, and a stoner picked it up and thought it was good. It wasn't! You've been warned. Oh and the ending sucks. Five stars!!!

[Samuel Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great recommendation. So bizarre at yet also prescient. Are we living now in Moldenke world?

[Keith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was recommended to me as a must-read by two people whose opinions I respect, and who assured me I would love it. I did not love it. In his opening, Ben Marcus builds up the work so much that it almost seems unfair -- I'm not sure any book could live up to the wild praise that precedes this text.

I'd like to at least argue that Motorman seems like an important book, even if it's one I don't enjoy. As Marcus says, it does seem to cast a shadow over literary science-fiction, one that encapsulates everything from Brazil to The Giver. But this shadow is cast more obviously by earlier, more well-known works, with the paranoia of 1984, the mundanity and dark humor of Waiting for Godot, the body horror of Naked Lunch.

In his introduction, Marcus describes the experience of reading Motorman as something akin to touching the sublime. While there is something interesting in the scope of the book's worldbuilding efforts, for the most part its view is small, repetitive, and bleak. I don't really get it, but I'm done with it. Anyway.

[Borbality · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of what I wish the Blade Runner book was like. (I know the name I just didn't feel like typing it all out.) Weird, cool, short.

it's definitely post-modern, right in the height of it in 1971, which means it won't make a lot of sense. I mean, just look at the cover art. Awesome.

Thankfully it's not that really wordy, 1000-page Po-mo nonsense. it does even have a weird (almost) sex scene, so I guess that counts.

Really neat world, set up with just enough to let your mind fill in the blanks and keep it interesting without spelling everything out. cool dialogue and just overall spooky tone. You kind of share the paranoia felt by the main character Moldenke, and the mystery of the setting is more interesting than confusing.

I mean, you're not going to close the book when you're done, let out a deep sigh and be all, like, "that was a nice story." But it is a real short trip you'll wish you had more of, if you're into that sort of thing.

[Rachel Adiyah · Rating 1 out of 5]

FYI: If you are offended by just about ANYTHING, you probably don't want to read this book.

For about the first 2/3 of the book I enjoyed it in a darkly humorous, satirical fashion. It is experimental-surrealist-science-fiction on the edge. Then the racism started. It was sexist entirely the whole way. The racism against black people is genocidal; I was absolutely horrified. Then the main character - labeling him a "protagonist" would be jumping the gun - who has been eating insects, starts eating massive quantities of insects! I wanted to vomit.

There is some talk of this book being "meaningful", a "trip through the subconscious". You want to read a meaningful experimental-surreal-science-fiction book/novel? Read The Lathe of Heaven, read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, read Ubik; don't try to tell me that this book has any meaning other than the author on a major drug trip because there isn't any.

[Sabra Embury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chugging through the get-go, the more I tried to find sense the less there was, triple-reading lines and letters, insects as meals, trenchpants, loudspeakers broadcasting airbursts, cat cranks, banana flowers, Featherfighter opening a door.

C-minus, son. C-minus; the ski lift, brown cigars, pig hearts, sheep hearts, calf hearts, the weather report as opera, government moons. "Is that you, Bunce? Mr. Bunce?"

Eventually from a third to end autopilot gleaned the rest of the analysis, weight applied to the break to stare at random scenery with awe and furrows. "A houseboat?" Maybe. You might say that." 66]67]68] oh man. From the upper limbs a bone fell dry; snakebites took a toll.

Was that a nightmare? A vacation? Words, but not just words? An unraveling, deprogramming, make-over, conquest,

jellyheads, jellyheads, jellyheads.

[Michael Seidel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking astounding. Will need to revisit.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect piece of writing, occupying its own cloistered space between Beckett and Burroughs... freakish and moving in equal measure.

[Toshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep asking myself how I feel or what I'm thinking about after finishing, and my mind is both still but teeming with activity below the surface.

I'm struggling to distill what this was all about and I can't help but think that Ohle is trying to get us to detach from our notion of reality. He lets us into his fictional world full of jelly and gauze, and has a way to make it feel so convincing and real that we have no choice but to begin to empathize with and humanize Moldenke. For all we know, he's just a motorman, or worse full of jelly.

I feel like we are asked, how can we completely trust both internal and external worlds, being memories as well as oral or written history. For events that we believe actually occurred, what was the "realism" of them? As in, maybe it happened, maybe not. But if we assume that it actually did, were those involved just going through with the motions or were they completely conscious? For example school is a huge mock test for life, attempting to correlate report card letters with traditional success. There's a sense that life is a loosely connected, somewhat correlated series of chronological events that we may take way too seriously.

What do I feel like I'm taking away from this experience? Ohle does an incredible job IMO of commanding simple words and sentence structures in such a way that is lighthearted, efficient, yet fresh. His word choice does not stale, thereby highlighting certain words and themes that are being driven home. Complicated language need not be required for something like this. Would I recommend this for others? Difficult to say, it depends on the individual.

Find me with a moon hat watching the 7 suns.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinarily strange and heartfelt.

Some of the language reminded me of the great Moderan stories, but this book is completely singular.

If you like Barthelme, I imagine this will be something you will want to read. But...Barthelme is really the only experimental author I've read so my comparison may be disregarded.

[Andy Ritz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Two suns up, a bright day.
American hearts beating in the street."

Motorman, originally published by David Ohle in 1972 as part of his thesis, is a surrealist(?) scifi(?) dystopia(??) that follows Moldenke, a man with one working lung, a few supplementary hearts, and a host of physical ailments you get to spend 144 pages reading about, as he attempts to escape the control of the enigmatic Mr. Bunce, embarks on an odyssey to find the man who implanted four sheeps' hearts in him, Dr. Burnheart, and searches for his drifting lover, the charming Cock Roberta. And that's not even the half of it.

The first thing that sticks out about Motorman is the bizarre reality its characters take as normal. Through Moldenke's adventures you are shown the symptoms of some strange changes to the world, such as the artificial moons, artificial plastic people known as jellyheads, and the lack of breathable air, but are given very little to deduct how things came to be the way they are. The horrific conditions Moldenke lives in never seem to register with him, he complains of little and wants for less. Later in the book, you are told that he gave up some of his feelings during the Mock War, which may explain his indifference, though the other characters we interact with seem to be either equally ambivalent towards the world, such as the false weatherman, or actively architecting it, such as Eagleman. I think too many apocalyptic works try to have their characters judge the world by current standards of comfort and morality and it's cool that Motorman evades this.

I've yet to read anything else that feels like this does, including Ohle's other work. I don't think I've experienced a book that takes such full advantage of the medium of text and the ambiguity it offers. Ohle tells this story in gestures and impressions, forcing you to fill in and revise what's actually physically going on with every passage, to a truly straining degree. You'll think you have a pretty good idea of what's going on and then Ohle will describe how Moldenke longs for "A sky with color, no trace of architecture" and suddenly you realize that the entire world as depicted so far is indoors (Synecdoche New York style), or at least...... not "outdoors" as we typically understand it. The heavy use of dialogue in scenes and scant circumstantial description make it feel like literally anything could be happening while characters are talking to each other. Moldenke can be talking to Roquette (with two t's) on a riverboat, on a highway, in a movie theater all in the same conversation and it's up to you to decide if a) Moldenke's insane and confused b) the characters went somewhere else while you weren't paying attention or c) someone is changing the set. It's so compelling.

If I had any critique it would be that the way this introduces the racism of its society is incredibly jarring and clunky, to the point where it alone is enough to keep me from wholeheartedly recommending this book. If you've read it you know exactly which specific chapters and which specific wording I'm talking about. It's clear that Ohle matured a lot between this and his later work, which handles the subject with a lot more tact. That said, I do still find this element of Motorman valuable. Moldenke's letter to Cock Roberta about finally realizing why the Roosevelt Teaset exhibit felt wrong is one of the most moving parts of the book.

What is Motorman actually about? It's so winding, plotless, absurd, obtuse, and hostile that it's easy to say it's about nothing, and I don't think that's necessarily untrue. I've fully read the novel twice now and both times the endings have left me frustrated, as if I'm still waiting it to explain itself. There are some ideas about how American fascism manifests that are in here if you look hard enough. The collapse of our natural ecosystems is a major factor in the story's world, even if the way this collapse manifests is a lot more fantastical than most projections. The concept of the Mock War, where men go for an arbitrary period of time to receive a pointless staged injury, would have been especially poignant when this was published in 1972, with sentiment against the Vietnam War at its peak. But ultimately, I think that Motorman is about the fear that the modernization and privatization of the world will eventually strip all life of meaning. Nothing matters in the Moldenke world; the weather doesn't matter, his jobs don't matter, his various injuries don't matter. His hearts stop and he thinks he's going to die and then they start again. Everyone in the world knows who he is, but they won't help him, but even if they did help him what could they even do? The world is in ruin beyond his comprehension and everything he does is under the control of the man who runs his electric company. By the end of the story he's no better off than if he had just stayed in that apartment forever, eating ants and rereading Burnheart's letters until his sheeps' hearts stop.

Anyway yeah I'm so glad I randomly happened to pick up this book during my high school library job, read half of it, thought it was weird, and remembered it enough to get back into it four years later. I gotta get around to Facebook messaging David Ohle eventually.

[Christopher]

Immortal

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Turn the volume up, folks. The weather is improving in spurts. Remember the old sun? The old moon? The old songs we used to sing about them?”

My first exposure to David Ohle's Motorman was hearing the author himself intoning the above words over the opening bars of Venus Bogardus' 2007 artrock album of the same name. It took me 12 years to finally get around to reading this book, in part because it's so damn hard to find a copy. I shared a stage with Venus Bogardus a number of times back in the day and their collaboration with Ohle really captured my imagination. Frontman James Reich is now an accomplished author in his own right, and if Motorman was your cup of banana flower tea then I'd definitely recommend you check out both his musical and literary output.

So, on to the book itself. I went into this fully expecting it to be a somewhat difficult read, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it flowed. Prose-wise, it's got a lot more in common with Vonnegut and Brautigan than Joyce and Eliot. Ohle's writing is full of dark, playful humour and never feels pretentious. I was amazed at how fresh and vital this book feels; if I didn't know it was from the 70s, I'm not sure I would've guessed.

The story is ostensibly a unique take on the roaptrip through hell, with shades of Mad Max, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Road, etcetera. Ohle's worldbuilding is exquisite, with zero hand holding and no lengthy exposition. From the get-go, we're immersed in the setting through non-sequential vignettes from the life of Moldenke, a physically and mentally fractured figure existing against the backdrop of a polluted post-apocalyptic dystopia populated by mysterious jellyheads. It's a world where nothing is as it seems, from deliberately falsified weather reports to a 'mock war' in which people queue to voluntarily suffer injuries for their country.

The plot is (deliberately) full of holes and chronologically confused, but the basic premise of the narrative is as follows. Moldenke, our protagonist, is literally falling apart. He's missing several body parts and is kept alive by a series of crudely implanted animal hearts that stutteringly augment his own failing ticker. As the story opens he's under some kind of house arrest at the behest of Bunce, a kind of all-seeing Big Brother figure. Everything is failing, including the electricity, water, and Moldenke's body. He decides to flee the city and seek out his surgeon Burnheart, who lives somewhere to the South (ah, but which South?). He's also trying to find Cock Roberta, his lost love who he was separated from before he went to fight in the mock war, a war in which he voluntarily suffered a broken bone along with the loss of some of his feelings.

Moldenke's journey is on the face of it an attempt to reassemble himself, both physically and mentally, in the face of the various wounds inflicted on him by an ersatz post-truth world. However, Motorman leaves plenty to the imagination; thankfully, Ohle sticks to his guns and gives us space to decide for ourselves, never seeking to neatly wrap it all up as, say, a dream or a drug trip, an annoying tendency I've noticed in some early modernist writing (e.g. The Third Policeman: a perfect example of a work of surrealist fiction with a disappointingly conventional ending).

I will go out on a limb here and say that I don't think I've ever read a book which so closely evokes my personal experience of dreaming. Motorman is full of surreal, hypnagogic imagery that at times felt unsettlingly familiar. My own dreamscape is a broken place where familiar people and locations are sometimes present, though they're always off-kilter and distorted. Events and dialogue are infused with poignance and sadness but at the same time there's always a degree of emotional detachment. I'm sure I'm not unique in this respect, and if this sounds familiar then you'll definitely feel right at home reading Motorman.

[sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange, psychedelic little novel released to obscurity in the 70s. Motorman has, in decades since, garnered something of a (deserved) cult following amongst literary surrealists and fans of the wackiest verges of sci-fi, but it’s no great surprise it landed with a relative splat. There are clear influences—Burroughs, PKD, bits of Beckett—but it feels to me like Ohle is writing in a lineage all his own, disconnected even from the concurrent New Wave of SF.

Motorman is constructed as a patchwork. Letters and feverish snapshots of Moldenke’s past life intermingle with his “present day.” (Or is it? Does it matter?) A seemingly interminable struggle with an omnipotent bureaucrat named Munce slowly gives way to a psychedelic road trip through the wreckage of the world in search of a mad scientist with excellent knowledge of Moldenke’s bizarre, four-hearted anatomy. No such thing as a spoiler here. Good luck getting much of a grasp on the plot beats and their intermingling.

As in many science fiction-ish books of the era, the setting is as much a character as any man or beast. A post-apocalyptic uncanny valley, lit by two moons and two suns, in which all technology is moldering or moth-ridden, and with a properly queasy cuisine—grubs and rodents and foraged things. There’s an eerie, off-kilter feel to it all. Funny, too, darkly so, but played deadpan. Like the Dadaists got tossed in a blender with Brautigan and, sure, Kafka.

Weird, weird stuff, though not quite as dark—no, dangerous—as the Marcus intro and blurbing make it out to be. Nothing is resolved; all is loopy and circular. I’m taken enough with the otherworldly aesthetic joy of the thing to brand it a five-bagger.