The Periplus of Spur Tank Road

by Rick Harsch

In The Periplus of Spur Tank Road, Rick Harsch again reimagines the tavern confession novel, this time sending a writer from white man's land to his beloved India (Chennai), where he intends to write his venomous opus, his last book, a massive fictional representation of colonialism in India, making the case that that loathsome event exceeded all other human atrocities; yet a most unexpected interloper, interlocuter, and eventually perhaps co-author or author condenses the novel to a singular one night event that takes the reader to the safe place where Cioran found himself in the end.

In his introduction David Vardeman wrote: The physical body evolves and at the same time assumes a moral position, depending on the use to which it is put, which is only to say that the physical and spiritual will always be linked. The question of use always involves its effect on other people, other species, the environment. The missing piece of Darwinism is that it addresses not at all our moral and intellectual evolution, if such can be said to exist. Pagan would say un-happening. It is the genius of this periplus to address all that. This chilling exchange sums it up:

Rick: When the monkeys were watching, did they know what they were seeing?

Pagan: We know what we see.

Rick: We think we do.



Author of Oskar Submerges, Zachary Tanner observes "There's more packed in here than in most 900-page novels. Three lines of dialogue and I beheld Darwinian simians emoting."

Steven Moore read the book and wrote:

"Well. I just finished reading The Periplus of Spur Tank Road, and liked it better than the only Krasznahorkai I've read (The Melancholy of Resistance, which I abandoned halfway through). Allowing for the premise that a bonnet macaque could learn to communicate in English, I wondered why his language was so elaborate (so Urquhartian, so Carlylesque), and had trouble following some of your superheated sentences (like the one that occupies most of p. 39), but overall I enjoyed it, so thanks for challenging me to read it.
As ever,
Steve"

I replied:

"...I just read page 39 and it is precise to me, though I think given the bit of Tamil required and the thought that must follow mine it is reasonable to consider it too much torture for readers. The answer to my own mind of the language of our monkey is that Indian English is very Brit still, so his language is an echo of the high degree of colonial detritus that remains in the Indian person."

I asked if I could use his letter and he wrote:

"Sure, you can use my statement any way you want, though it sounds bland to me...You might consider enveloping it in your remarks above."

67 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2022

About the author

Publisher, chief editor of corona\samizdat press; Izola, Slovenia....www.corona\samizdat press; rick.harsch@gmail.com
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a novel;
and
Walk Like a Duck, a Season of Little League Baseball in Italy
As of April 24, 2020, these two books are available in a world edition from corona/samizdat, as explained in the following youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JUl...

I have finished a two volume anthological novel, The Assassination of Olof Palme, a an anthological novel, which involves the contributions of at least 50 writers from about 20 countries, and extracts the fungus of the Reagan years, montagerates the murderous manners of secretive Nato/CIA folk in Post WWII Europe, particularly in Italy and France, pays some attention to the Assassination of Olof Palme, while exploring a sort of alternative notion of the autobiographical novel and putting an end to proofreading.




Skulls of Istria, published by River Boat Books, June 26, 2018
Not available on Amazon, only direct from:
http://www.riverboatbooks.com/our-books

Voices After Evelyn was published by Maintenance Ends Press, the Avant Garde wing of Ice Cube Press, in November of 2018
This novel is available at 19.95, from http://www.icecubepress.com/


Author of three novels published by Steerforth press:

The Driftless Zone
Billy Verite
The Sleep of Aborigines
[The Driftless Trilogy]

These three were published in translation in France, two were subsequently chosen for mass market publication and I received a copy of each before the press went bankrupt.



Author of a chapter in Creative Nonfiction's Anatomy of Baseball, prefaced by Yogi Berra.

Living now in Slovenia, where Amalietti&Amalietti of Ljubljana has published:
Several of my own novels have now been published by corona\samizdat, along with works by
Chandler Brossard
David Vardeman
Vesna Radić
Jeff Bursey
Bori Praper,
and coming soon
WD Clarke
Joao Reis
Mark Douglas
Phillip Freedenberg (with Jeff Walton)
Jomme Keller
Giuliano Vivaldi (with a co-translator)
Roberto Alt
Prasenjit Gupta
Zachary Tanner

and more

Arjun and the Good Snake (memoir)
and, in Slovene:
Arjun in dobra kača
and the novels:
Kramberger z opico (Kramberger with Monkey)
Adriatica Deserta
Istrske Lobanje (The Skulls of Istria)

2019:the novel Voices after Evelyn by a new imprint of Ice Cube Press (Iowa)
here is a review by Chris Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISsr...

Reviews

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where better to seek the measure of Humanity's Humility than in a Land of Many Gods. And Holy Animals. And Ahimsa and Karmic Consequence. In a so-called Subcontinent, India: sub, prefix, L. under beneath below inferior subordinate lower rank – so there we have it, already feeling superior are we? Think, Darkest Africa. I know, I know, just bear with me. Along with amble swing and arboreal scramble and leap comes Pagan, he of the singular syntactic structures endowment, of Black Box Transchomskyan Grammar, a philosophical-biological anomaly rivaling nipple-fixated Koko of the thousand-word GSL, Kanzi of the 400+ symbols, and Noam-Taunter-Nim-Chimsky. An emergent frontal lobe of Broca's design? Perhaps, how else to explain these simian semantic tasks. Biological and linguistic irregularities aside, this Anthropoid Ape of unique Semantic and Phonological Anatomical Specialization, impulsively christened Kripkean Rigid-Designator-Style Pagan, has Vascodagamian subhumanal-subcontinental-atrocities, past-present-future Anglotrocities, to get off his heartfelt hirsute Simian chest, preaching the devolution of Humanity's moral center, if ever a cent's worth of morals there were, writ large in the blood and bodies of innocents, and those not-so-innocent, as witnessed and historicized by ever watchful simian generations. Is this a dream, a Wonderland rabbithole of censorious macaques, intoxified by malted beverage and Chennaified air, a writer's hallucinatory lapse, or the real deal, a nightmarish monkefied periplus into the Heart of Darkness? Does it matter? It's the inhumanity that counts. This could have been 300+ pages of Darwinism's high and very low points, but its dense and bitter brevity propels like a carrack in a gale, yet introspectively, sadly, through to the final chilling end.

Appadiyaa.

[Lee Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's forget a moment that this book is written by my publisher, and imagine (well, I will; you don't have to) that I found this in a bin, this curious little yellow monkey-masked booklet which, upon opening, caught my attention. Lookee here; dunno this author but something’s happening. The first words come at you in torrent, as rich and clattering as any riverside street in Chennai, India, which is where this novella is set, right alongside the fragrant flow of that lushest of rivers, the Cooum (it’s not). A writer has sat himself at a café with the intention of wasting time, such as possibly writing a little something. Small or epic, it doesn’t matter. And this is summary and I don’t care for summary but it’s summer; it’s hot, it stinks, and there’s a Bonnet Macaque who swings on over from the trees and who starts talking to this Rick, this narrator of our booklet. They talk of man and other business, monkey and nun-monkey . Yes there are easy inferences here – man, monkey, Darwin, conquering nations, civilization (know your history), and all of humanity’s limitless assholerly. The monkey isn’t having any of it, but he’s listened, he's observed. A cleverly tooled piece of mouthharpery has helped him to speak it.

So what is this torrent of words that left a critic moore established than I periplexed? It’s violence and beauty and corruption, it’s Joyce’s riverwake with a hangover and a puked-on shirt and a broken toe from kicking at the bricks and pricks.

The ending is powerful, and in the end this small book will stay with you and hopefully send you off to read a little more Harschly. It’s messy and moving, that overdue bowel movement we as a species haven’t yet crapped out. What a joke we are, but read this.

[John Dickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a review in two voices.

Hey, Wow! I’ve just read The Periplus of Spur Tank Road and it really blew me away. Absolutely brilliant.
I would have loved to have spent more time in the company of Rick and Pagan. The narrative drive of this book - you just want to keep on reading - keep on reading.
There is a lot I have to look into because there is stuff here in this novel, history, I don’t know. For example, the importance within this tale of the book “The Honourable Company” by John Keay. A book barely twenty years old that gives a nationalist and popularist history of the British Empire's colonial influence upon the peoples and nation of India. A nightmare story the world has yet to awake from.
For more balance, particularly from the Indian point of view, I have been advised to ignore the Keay and read the historian William Dalrymple. This would explain why the Keay book is forcefully rammed into the mud and beshitten earth, a scene within this novel.

Now readers of GR, let me cool down from my current enthusiasms and try to give shape to what I meant by Wow, etc.

Of the schools of philosophy, of which classrooms are of the multiple,you can count amongst these, three offered examples, one Ole Blue Eyes himself, Mr Frank Sinatra.
To wit
(I) to be is to do
(ii) to do is to be
(III) do be do be do (a verbal reaction to the sounds in music)

Now, to draw inference from commonly held ideas of thought, there is yet a fourth within the multiplicity of held views, (and the sign of genius, is I am informed, the amount of opposing ideas one can hold within their mind at the same time) that ‘thought’ is a misconception, for where can one extract thoughts from and lay bare for all to study?

This all leads to the hero of the new novel by Rick Harsch, published by Corona/Samizdat and named, “The Periplus of Spur Tank Road”.
We are introduced to a place in India and the hero, a talking, philsophising bonnet macaque who names himself Pagan and his conversations with a writer, Rick, who the monkey has been awaiting the return to his village for a number of years.

This monkey speaks (all is competently explained) and learns as he goes, developing his knowledge of the English language (the language of the monkey’s correspondee, Rick the writer) as conversations develop their own to and fro, call and response, with a deftness that belies thought and thinking but gives truth to the notion of non-thought and reaction, learned reaction within the tools of a vocabulary learned on the hoof.
Or claw, or monkey paw.

Language developed through verbal stimulus.
Can you keep up? Pagan seems to.
This is just one of the remarkable feats Harsch displays within this short and very good novel.

A quick note. The closing paragraph is a piece of genius and that is my thought on a first reading.
I loved it.
Well done Harsch!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a periplus, the book falls short because the author gets no further than describing one spot along Spur Tank Road—well, less a description of a spot—i.e., the bar at the Hotel Ganesh—than a recording of a conversation the narrator has with a bonnet macaque monkey that has taught itself speech and the ability to read. They meet as strangers. But the macaque is affable enough to introduce himself. Once the narrator, Rick, confirms the macaque’s abilities, he suddenly realizes that “now people are looking at me, looking at me talking to a monkey.” To which Pagan deadpans, “I don’t think they can see me.”

And yet, there he is, keeping up his side of the wide-ranging conversation, which eventually settles around Vasco da Gama and series of atrocities he initiated against India’s citizens, from which a consensus between the two forms that humans are no damn good. In addition to that agreement are good amounts of puns and other word play, anecdotes, and observations, making for good-natured banter and rapier repartee.

Here is one of Pagan’s anecdotes:

“My tail got set on fire once. Completely disaster. We were down by that river you call the Cauvery, a narrow, generally shallow expanse with an island in the middle. Lightning struck a tree I was in growing out from near the bank, a fire sprouted, I tried to slap it out with my tail, but it was dry season, so my tuft caught and I feared the hot ass, panicked, jumped, missed the river, and in said panic and accompanying hoppery I set fire to all the trees on the island, one female burned to death. She was a favorite of the older males. Had they been humans I would have been in trouble. As it was, I was nursed back to health, had irregular hair for a long time, other than that the only lasting effect was one less lovely bonnet macaque in the jungle.”

It’s kind of thing you’ll like if you like this kind of thing, as I do.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Ansgar Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Palomar once stared at a gorilla (and said nothing in the presence of its muteness), Bataille was much struck by the arse of an ape, and now, Rick Harsch, or someone called Rick, has found the time to converse with a monkey. In Rick’s hands, ‘the enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat’ which transposed Bataille into another realm (Bataille, The Jesuve), could become a sign for humanity itself, and all refined philosophical notions, including Bataille’s debasements, would achieve the status of a lethargic joke. Only, Rick’s monkey is closer in kind to the Jolly Chimp with a synthetic butt, a fully mechanical wind-up designed to chat your ear off. Not shrinking at all from the awfulness of things (and the inadequacy of words, including the awfulness of the word awful—it really is repugnant), The Periplus of Spur Tank Road (for this is the name of the book), leans in its achievement in the direction of Kurt Vonnegut who is mentioned in the Typesetter’s Note. That is to say, the book invites laughter, or rides along, side-saddling its mirth in the context of human idiocy and abjection. Pure abject negativity is not at all the object as the Typesetter indicates in writing: ‘Life gets bleak really quickly when we put on our mammal glasses. That’s a thought that can destroy us or evolve us’. A Harschian proposition worth pondering… It invites the objection that this proposition itself is too optimistic still (or is its opposite, depending on your thinking), for it may well be that ‘thought’ cannot even destroy us. And besides, evolution has always been a dirty game. Yet thought, for Rick, or Ricky, or Ricky’s conversational partner, the bonnet macaque, is not in its usual domain. Laughter, in this context, does what seriousness cannot manage, it provides access to a different mode of thinking, or a manner of seeing, or perceiving, which ordinary thinking is constituted to discount as a lesser form (if indeed laughter is allowed to constitute a species of thinking at all). Rick’s monkey does of course claim not to think, as if its words were mere studied likelihoods of speech, conversational exchanges learnt from observing humans at their best, and worst. But this claim on behalf of the monkey to be incapable of thinking could be read as an aversion to what human beings usually elevate as thought, which is also, in part, their self-image. If Rodin’s thinker was wheeled into the Chennai establishment where Rick and the monkey sit, all talk would be rendered in kind as the neighbourhood monkeys (all the mute ones) would line up and shit upon its head. Rick’s Jolly Chimp might be content to watch, and perhaps Rick’s Jolly Chimp will have never said a word to start with. But this would make for a very short book. The macaques, being of matriarchal society, might be invited instead to line up and shit on each and every patriarch, imperialist, and leader of human atrocity (and what goes by the name of human order) that human society has recently spawned (and I’m sure Rick would suggest a good list), and so bid the lot farewell in a swill ceremony. And some of them, why not, might be confined to this farewell gesture in perpetuity, their purgatory, only, there would be two good objections: even this expenditure of shit would be too generous (for them), or should the shit be gainful, this freefall gift, and this general enlightenment (by enmirement) shown upon the heads of all leaders and their lackeys, would only be the inaugural work at the baptismal faucet. We might need to turn on some bigger taps. I should put it to Rick’s macaque.

[review originally posted on: https://www.erratumpress.com/the-joll...]

[Vultural · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harsch, Rick - The Periphus Of Spur Tank Road

Hotel Ganesh, India, evening, sultry outside, bordering on stifling.
Character Rick relaxes on the terrace, trying to enjoy, appreciate, think.
When a monkey, a Bonnet Macaque to be precise, hisses, “Hey Mac.”
Rick, being a creative sort, doesn’t find a talking monkey so unusual, and the two begin a conversation.
From here, gentle reader, drop any preconceptions. Just switch off the damn TV and hang on.
Exchanges range from lurid history, to volleys against the preening indecency of humanity.
Yes, yes, I know, we mean well. Yet, when we do what we do – oops, sorry.
Vasco da Gama may get singled out, but he is merely a stand-in for the horde.
Our monkey, soon calling itself Pagan, speaks a fractured English.
For the best, as our author has not included dialogue markers (he said, Pagan replied)
We navigate a jungle of words, often confused or meandering.
Very enjoyable, if you have a taste for this, although I often suspected the author was on a bender, free-styling impressions while his hallucinations were fresh.

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick communicates with a Simian (macaque monkey) who learned how to speak. The monkey shares his insights on humans, like it’s a sociological study. They discuss colonialism in India, specifically with Vasco De Gama (and his many massacres). I won’t spoil the book, but the symbolism of “earth” and primate/humans in this book is remarkable, and striking. Seems it’s in our DNA or darwinist nature to massacre/kill off others (as a genus), definitely makes your stomach churn thinking about it!

That’s what i thought about it anyway. Light read, highly recommend.

[draxtor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn Rick! So good. Rereading IMMEDIATLY!

[Alexander Asay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Periplus of Spur Tank Road is a compact yet ambitious work that reimagines the tavern confession novel and transplants it to a single night in Chennai, India. Published in 2022 by Corona/Samizdat, this short novel clocks in at under 200 pages but carries the weight of expansive ideas, tackling the legacy of colonialism with a blend of satire, philosophical musing, and linguistic bravado. It’s a book that demands attention, not just to its narrative, but to the way it subverts expectations and toys with language.

The story centers on a writer named Rick, who arrives in Chennai intent on penning a venomous magnum opus: a sprawling fictional indictment of colonialism in India, which he believes surpasses all other human atrocities in its scope and impact. Yet, this grand plan is derailed by an unexpected encounter with Pagan, a bonnet macaque monkey who has inexplicably taught itself to speak and read English. What unfolds is a one-night dialogue in the bar of the Hotel Ganesh along Spur Tank Road, a conversation that condenses the writer’s epic intentions into a singular, intense exchange.

Harsch’s premise is audacious: a talking monkey as interlocutor could easily veer into absurdity, but the novel sidesteps gimmickry by grounding Pagan’s development in a kind of organic linguistic evolution. The monkey learns and refines its command of English through the back-and-forth with Rick. This interplay becomes a vehicle for exploring deeper questions about perception, history, and humanity’s moral evolution (or lack thereof).

The title invokes a “periplus,” traditionally a navigational log or journey around a coast, but here it feels ironic, Rick’s journey doesn’t extend beyond the barstool. This static setting allows Harsch to focus on the internal voyage, using the dialogue to dissect colonialism’s brutality not just against humans, but against nature itself, with animals and flora as the ultimate colonized subjects. Harsch’s satire, while sharp, doesn’t soften the devastating impact of its target; instead, it mocks human hubris through the lens of a monkey who sees more clearly than his human counterpart.

The prose is dense and superheated, with sentences that demand unpacking, yet this complexity is part of the novel’s charm. It’s not a book for the casual reader; it rewards those willing to wrestle with its ideas and wordplay. Harsch delivers a work that’s intellectually provocative, linguistically daring, and surprisingly affecting. It’s a testament to his ability to pack grand themes into a small, strange package. For those who enjoy fiction that challenges as much as it entertains, this is a journey worth taking, even if it never leaves the bar.