Head in Flames

by Lance Olsen

Head in Flames is an astonishing collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, and quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font and aesthetic / political / existential space. The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890. The second to Theo van Gogh (Vincent’s brother’s great grandson) on the day he was assassinated in Amsterdam in November 2004. The third to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo’s murderer, outraged by the filmmaker’s collaboration with controversial politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a 10-minute experimental short critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women. The a restless, haunting exploration of art’s purpose, religion’s increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and passion, the complexities of foreignness and assimilation, and the limits of tolerance.

Genres: Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2009

About the author

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.

He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.

Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Auvers-sur-Oise: 1890… Amsterdam: 2004… Head in Flames… Three alternating streams of consciousness…

Look: I am standing inside the color yellow.
Look: something wells up at the corner of Theo van Gogh’s vision as he bikes to work one morning one hundred and fourteen years later.
Look: the short fat filthy pig peddling among the herd of short fat filthy pigs in his faggot blue T-shirt faggot striped suspenders faggot gray jacket faggot tattered jeans.

1. Vincent van Gogh in his last fatal day… 2. His brother’s great grandson bicycling headlong to his doom… 3. Theo van Gogh’s fanatical Muslim assassin Mohammed Bouyeri lurking…
They’re moving… They contemplate their lives and their worlds… The disastrous moment is inevitably drawing near… 

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it, John Adams once commenting.

In every religion God demands to destroy those who don’t believe in Him.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'To paint outside in the dark, Monsieur Vincent has rigged a hat rimmed with candles. His burning crown, he calls it.'

The flames of absinthe, madness, damnation, immolation, fervent faith, creativity, even sunflower petals, all congregating into a conflagration. The structure of Lance Olsen’s collage novel Head in Flames (Chiasmus Press, 2009) could almost be envisioned as the helix of DNA, with two narrative threads spiraling on a single day in 2003 when the boisterous critic of Islam Theo Van Gogh is murdered by the Muslim terrorist Mohammed Bouyeri. Connecting the coils are the ladder base pairs of a single day in 1890 when Vincent van Gogh committed suicide. Visually, with each “narraticule” set in a different font, it reads as a triturated triptych ticking down to tragedy with an almost Grecian flavor but more accurately Dark Age for its brutality ignited by Oedipal-blind belief in the religious fundamentals of Islam."

Read my full review here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/05/0...

I interviewed Lance Olsen here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/05/0...

[Stacia]

The cover art is amazing. The title is clever, contextually to the book.

The Goodreads reviewer (John) who recommends this one for "readers w/ a spine, a sense of history, & an openness to discovery that comes via great fear" -- yes. Just yes.

Wow, artistically, it's an amazing conceptual piece.

And, I'm horrified. I can't even explain how I felt reading this book. I wanted to read it. I wanted to stop reading it. But I didn't. I couldn't really. The power of this piece made my chest hurt, my heart hurt, my head hurt. I was physically in pain while reading this; even after reading this. I think this is the most visceral, most stressful reading I have ever experienced. I don't even know what to say now that I'm finished.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. 3 simultaneous narratives , Vincent van Gogh in late 19th century, his descendant Theo van Gogh in 21st century Amsterdam and Theo's assassin Mohammed Bouyeri.
Each character gets one or maybe 2 sentences in turn.
Powerful stuff as it builds to Theo's killing and Vincent's own death

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hasn’t old Europe grown weary & stale? Don’t the husks of Renaissance & Enlightenment need “slashes of verve” & “aesthetic savageries,” these days? Such questions loom razorlike, in Lance Olsen’s exciting new novel. A chapterless, relentless narrative, HEAD IN FLAMES unfolds in three alternating typefaces that actually look like razor slashes, no entry longer than a few lines. Each typeface streams a different consciousness. Two are men intent on spilling blood, & the third trundles oblivious towards his murder. Such a text offers next to nothing by way of scene setting, and while there’s character development, it can be tricky, given the narrators’ self-delusions. Besides, these are characters reined in by the facts. The call for “slash” & “savagery” comes from the most famous of the three, Vincent Van Gogh. The great Impressionist has a turbulent turn of mind, on the day we visit: that July afternoon in 1890 when he shot himself in a cornfield. Yet the other two narrators on are on track for worse. One is Van Gogh’s film-maker descendent, Theo, riding his bike through Amsterdam on the November morning in 2004 when the third interior monologist, Mohammed Bouyeri, waits with a gun & a long serrated blade. The murder & beheading at the end of Theo’s commute, combined with Vincent’s eventual passing, deliver a shattering climax-in-counterpoint. I’ve rarely experienced so deep a chill, in reading that sets such a formal challenge. The scariest HEAD here, to be sure, is that of Mohammed Bouyeri. From the first he’s in a place where “words don’t count,” & yet in Bouyeri’s recollection of how he became a holy warrior, Olsen’s claw-marks glimmer w/ poignant detail. We witness, for instance, a new version of that lose-lose conflict, the strapped immigrant father vs. a son born to the promise of a new land. Yet while Bouyeri’s reflections generate sympathy, they don’t softpedal his viciousness — in particular, his faith-based misogyny. What prompts the murder is a Theo Van Gogh film against the brutalization of Muslim women. Indeed, one such woman (via Theo V.G.’s recollection) provides the most horrifying stuff in the text, worse than the murder, when she describes how she “made pure,” as a six-year-old, by fundamentalist aunts & a butcher with scissors. Olsen has marvelous style, a way w/ verbs in particular, but it’s his hard-hitting material that most distinguishes this rare accomplishment. HEAD IN FLAMES succeeds not just as a horrifying reminder of how European tolerance has invited in a “Trojan Horse” of “De-Enlightenment.” More deeply, Olsen’s tripartite vision exposes, first, how the late-19th-C. painter was driven to self-slaughter by the “experiment” of living w/out God (Vincent Van Gogh, after all, trained as a minister), & then how that artist’s yearning links to that of the murderer — who hopes that his act will bring God back into his own lost & degraded soul.

[Stephanie Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book amazed me. I’m usually not one for experimental writing styles, but this worked for me. The three voices in different fonts was sometimes hard to follow - there was some page flipping back and forth to see what was the last thing that person said. Overall an interesting account of Vincent van Gogh’s and Theo’s last days and Theo’s murderer’s day of reckoning.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review to follow

[Chris Elder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A trident to the heart

This novel interweaves three narratives/minds/characters at almost the same time (though one, Vincent Van Gogh, is removed from the others by more than a century). They are close first-person thoughts, actions, or impressions, delineated from one another by different fonts, delivered mostly in turn: 1-2-3-1-2-3-1-2-3 through the whole book. The effect on the reader is to braid the three streams into a larger harmonious flow. Though it’s been around for 100 years, the collage form (and this is in such small pieces I would rather call it a mosaic form) is exciting and fresh, if done right. Lance Olsen is a very skilled practitioner. I can’t say more without giving away essential suspense elements, but there are a couple of intensely emotional events, and this threefold style diffuses, yet heightens, the reader’s experience.

[Andrew]

I'm a big advocate for the pointillist style in fiction. So I'm a natural partisan. As I continued, however, doubts arose. Why was Vincent Van Gogh in there at all? And as the trialogue progressed, I cared less and less, as absolutely gobsmacked as I was early on (once I settled into the style of Head in Flames, at least). Maybe it's because this is 2022, and this is well-worn territory – brilliantly covered by Ian Buruma in Murder in Amsterdam – so it felt a bit unnecessary. Still, my dude has writing chops for days, and I sincerely appreciate literary ambition and experiment, so I'm stoked to check out more of Olsen's work.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything's coming back to Van Gogh today. Did you know Van Gogh once nursed a miner back from near-death for several months? I did not before today--read it in Gauguin's journals. Then this book arrived in the mail, with its various Van Goghs, its intergenerational transhistorical sprawl, its triple-Dutch form, its negations and negotiations...wow so far.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel spins "-like a trio of ancient philosophers plugged into their iPods."



- Indiscretion perhaps being one function of art.

One Vincent Van Gogh in July 1890 after shooting himself in the chest, dying. One Theo Van Gogh (Vincent's great grandnephew) on the day he was shot/assassinated in Amsterdam. One Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo Van Gogh's murderer. The book spins these three narrators together. Two contemporary (1994) and one from the other side of the 20th Century.



- Children don't grow up--our bodies get bigger and our minds get torn up.

Using a variation of Burrough's Cut-Up method. Tweets of memory, quotes, lyrics, family spinning together to tell a fragmented, color-filled, story of assimilation, loneliness, passion, art, family, love and hate. In many ways it feels like a story that links past, with present, and future.



- Because in the end words don't count.

I was expecting the book to be clever and postmodern. I've read Lance Olsens books before, but I forgot that the genius with Lance is not found in his technique, his boldness, or his clever approach to prose, but in the fact that he turns burning lyrics into tears; a magician who holds your heart in his hand as you are still trying to figure out his last trick.

[Karen Larson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books, though it is not for faint of heart nor is it necessarily easy to follow. I would recommend reading in one or two sittings, as it can take a bit to get into the narration. The story is told sentence-by-sentence, rotating through three timelines and characters, which are distinguished by different font faces. This is an incredibly thoughtful and powerful book, though, and I do highly recommend it.

One of my favorite lines I've ever read comes from this book: "We must learn to mature more quietly."

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKMHD...

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text was required reading for my Advanced Seminar in American Studies at the University of Utah (where the author is also a professor).

I debated between three and four stars for this book. The craft and content certainly warrant four (maybe even five) stars, but, overall, it just didn't resonate with me as other texts in this course have.

Even visually, this text is thought-provoking. The text is delivered in three distinct, alternating fonts - each font embodying one of the three main characters - each character presented in a different narrative point of view (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person). The result is a disjointed stream of consciousness which explores the problems of art, identity and individual purpose, but which - for me - ultimately affirms that language, behaviors, and passion are transcendent across time and people.

We are bound by life and we are bound by death. "This second is everywhere." "Someday they will write about these things." Although they (we?) already have.

[Samantha]

mildly obsessed with this book 40 pages in.

[Jonathan Wichmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great! We watch three different streams of consciousness inch forward on fateful courses, which can give one a headache but is really rewarding. Beautiful and poignant and brave.