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Convalescence
"Convalescence", the first book by artist and musician Grant Evans, is a raw, looping meditation on friendship, memory, and death.
110 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2020
2 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 10, 2020
In an unknown location, existing on another plane, outside of time and space (perhaps inside a dream) two friends exchange memories and regrets. As the novel continues, it jumps backwards and forwards in time, but keeps returning to this place of the opening scene, a room too grotesque to be real. Intentionally disjointed clips begin to emerge as a semi-singular narrative that envelopes otherwise dissonant phrases and distills them into profound truths about life, love, and death from the most mundane of experiences.
Innocent teenagers trespass an old haunted mansion; the aftermath of a drug-deal gone horribly wrong; a group of stoned and drunk friends recorded encounter with spirits through a ouija board; someone’s voicemail relaying message after message of another’s (an acquaintance? a close friend? a lover?) desperation; on the back dirt roads of a southern town a boy comes face to face with a ghost (is it his own?); a walk through a cemetery that may not exist; entries from a diary of observations and suspicions that a cult is just down the street; childhood moments from grandparent’s houses; the loss of a beloved pet; a visit to someone’s grave; a tourist in Japan having wet dreams in the shower; an auctioneer breathlessly rambling.
With layouts that remind one of Danielewski meets Sebald, and text that reads like Knausgård, but more fucked up like Burroughs, pulsing with vivid imagery as if Lynch and Brackhage made a high-contrast baby, with succinct moments of clarity like Jaeggy, and character sketches that remind one of a less privileged silhouette from Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This work reads like an artist’s scrapbook collection of found photographs and magnetic tape, that when collaged together forms a beautiful yet eerily poetic film, stitched up to make something whole - like the very cover of the book itself.
There’s a striking wisdom that rises from the repeated, white-out and redacted phrases: “Love is a mansion with many rooms” and “this is the closest thing that there is to dying” are the two that infected me and are stuck in my head indefinitely. It leaves you wanting more - much more - wondering what text was removed, and longing for the full story of the mere glimpses you’re given from any random set of pages. Yet the white (and black) space is like a canvas with precise composition. If I were given more, my experience of the work would be too directed. The author has allowed for the reader to hallucinate, and in doing so fill in the gaps and guess at connections.
What is the timeline? Whatever it is, it disintegrates with each loop. It is as if you’re holding an artifact that you cannot be certain of the date it was authored, who authored it, or the periods in which it was set. An ambitious first effort, it requires several reads before any attempt at deciphering it can be made.
Innocent teenagers trespass an old haunted mansion; the aftermath of a drug-deal gone horribly wrong; a group of stoned and drunk friends recorded encounter with spirits through a ouija board; someone’s voicemail relaying message after message of another’s (an acquaintance? a close friend? a lover?) desperation; on the back dirt roads of a southern town a boy comes face to face with a ghost (is it his own?); a walk through a cemetery that may not exist; entries from a diary of observations and suspicions that a cult is just down the street; childhood moments from grandparent’s houses; the loss of a beloved pet; a visit to someone’s grave; a tourist in Japan having wet dreams in the shower; an auctioneer breathlessly rambling.
With layouts that remind one of Danielewski meets Sebald, and text that reads like Knausgård, but more fucked up like Burroughs, pulsing with vivid imagery as if Lynch and Brackhage made a high-contrast baby, with succinct moments of clarity like Jaeggy, and character sketches that remind one of a less privileged silhouette from Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This work reads like an artist’s scrapbook collection of found photographs and magnetic tape, that when collaged together forms a beautiful yet eerily poetic film, stitched up to make something whole - like the very cover of the book itself.
There’s a striking wisdom that rises from the repeated, white-out and redacted phrases: “Love is a mansion with many rooms” and “this is the closest thing that there is to dying” are the two that infected me and are stuck in my head indefinitely. It leaves you wanting more - much more - wondering what text was removed, and longing for the full story of the mere glimpses you’re given from any random set of pages. Yet the white (and black) space is like a canvas with precise composition. If I were given more, my experience of the work would be too directed. The author has allowed for the reader to hallucinate, and in doing so fill in the gaps and guess at connections.
What is the timeline? Whatever it is, it disintegrates with each loop. It is as if you’re holding an artifact that you cannot be certain of the date it was authored, who authored it, or the periods in which it was set. An ambitious first effort, it requires several reads before any attempt at deciphering it can be made.
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May 31, 2020With Convalescence, Evans guides the reader through the fever dream of an unnamed narrator and his old friend. In poetic episodes, the reader glimpses a world of pain the narrator survives, his current life as an artist, an imagined future far from home. Time and place are fluid here, and the book is at its best when Evans overlays multiple “scenes” on top of each other like a Man Ray image, or segues from one to another with the reader coming to after a bit of delay. I also like the use of negative space to control the pacing and emphasis. Evans rarely if ever takes layout for granted, think something along the lines of The Tunnel, but more punk, less maximalist. Recommended.
Note: Grant is a friend.
Note: Grant is a friend.
May 28, 2020
Very detailed, multi layered book. I enjoyed reading it and will read again to dig into the story a bit more
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews