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The Rat Veda
This novel is about an absence. Rat is in love with a dancer he has never seen.
He tries to forget her. He hears her feet dancing overhead. She is all he cares about.
He finds many reasons why he should not love her. But he loves her.
He desiccates his heart through work, he grinds his heart to powder with absurdly difficult tasks. But he still loves her.
He turns all the love in him love over to ideas, to abstractions, to darkness. He tries to occupy his whole heart with the desperate unrequited worship of a subway train. But he still loves this dancer.
For years he tries to kill his emotion in every possible way. And every minute of every single day he thinks about her, this absent love, this possibility, and constantly hears her dancing footsteps over his head.
In order to meet her, in order to love her, he is going to have to change.
He tries to forget her. He hears her feet dancing overhead. She is all he cares about.
He finds many reasons why he should not love her. But he loves her.
He desiccates his heart through work, he grinds his heart to powder with absurdly difficult tasks. But he still loves her.
He turns all the love in him love over to ideas, to abstractions, to darkness. He tries to occupy his whole heart with the desperate unrequited worship of a subway train. But he still loves this dancer.
For years he tries to kill his emotion in every possible way. And every minute of every single day he thinks about her, this absent love, this possibility, and constantly hears her dancing footsteps over his head.
In order to meet her, in order to love her, he is going to have to change.
- GenresFictionLiterature
118 pages, Paperback
First published May 13, 2010
68 people want to read
About the author
James Chapman
60 books38 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 2, 2010
So much gorgeous longing.
July 17, 2014
Poetic prose, symbolic descriptions, spiritual hedonism... for anyone who enjoys beautiful contradictions with no definitive direction than the overall sensation of examining human emotion, this is the book for you.
Rat may be just a rat; he may be a man; he may be nothing at all except for longing. He longs for the dancer, idolizes her, regrets her, reaches for her while hiding from her. There is the sensation that he has been with her but then lost her, the feeling that he is atoning for some sin against her - perhaps even the sin of being unworthy of her love. Perhaps by the end he will understand how to love her, to be with her, to be worthy of her. Perhaps by the end he will fade to nothingness, never having known her love. Perhaps none of it ever happened at all.
I have never read a book like this, but Chapman's command of language and the way each word is chosen as carefully as though it were part of the shortest and most profound poem, make this work a true piece of art. The series of images that follow each other in the reader's imagination are both extremely sorrowful and stunningly evocative as rat's sensations, memories, hopes, and fears unfold both intensely and soothingly from the first word to the very last phrase.
It would be impossible to describe this story in anything than contradictions, as that's how the whole story feels: not as a bang or as a whimper, but as a silent call into the ether.
Rat may be just a rat; he may be a man; he may be nothing at all except for longing. He longs for the dancer, idolizes her, regrets her, reaches for her while hiding from her. There is the sensation that he has been with her but then lost her, the feeling that he is atoning for some sin against her - perhaps even the sin of being unworthy of her love. Perhaps by the end he will understand how to love her, to be with her, to be worthy of her. Perhaps by the end he will fade to nothingness, never having known her love. Perhaps none of it ever happened at all.
I have never read a book like this, but Chapman's command of language and the way each word is chosen as carefully as though it were part of the shortest and most profound poem, make this work a true piece of art. The series of images that follow each other in the reader's imagination are both extremely sorrowful and stunningly evocative as rat's sensations, memories, hopes, and fears unfold both intensely and soothingly from the first word to the very last phrase.
It would be impossible to describe this story in anything than contradictions, as that's how the whole story feels: not as a bang or as a whimper, but as a silent call into the ether.
February 24, 2010
Miracle.
January 4, 2020
This book isn't poetry, but James Chapman is a poet. Every line of The Rat Veda is individually beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews