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The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin and Nan
Fan-favorite novelist Eckhard Gerdes is back, and this time with both barrels loaded! These two novels tackle modern life's complexities as only the twelve-gauge pen of Eckhard Gerdes can. The Unwelcome Guest is the story of one man's flight from paranoia, and Nin & Nan features a gender-ambiguous couple who take on the entire federal government. Both novels are richly humorous, but at the core of each is the pressing concern that modern concerns are pressing on us too much. Twice a top-ten finisher in the Preditors and Editors annual readers' poll of the best novels of the year, Gerdes is certain to delight his legion of loyal literati with his legendary legerdemain in this new double offering . Sit down, relax, and take off your socks-you'd laugh them off anyway as you read The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan.
- GenresLiterature
170 pages, Paperback
First published April 25, 2010
3 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
About the author
Eckhard Gerdes
45 books65 followersEckhard Gerdes is an American-born novelist & editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He's author of fifteen published books of fiction:
Projections ['86 Depth Charge] a novella
Ring in a River ['92 Depth Charge] a novel
Truly Fine Citizen ['89 Highlander] a novel
Cistern Tawdry ['02 Fugue State] a novel
Przewalski's Horse ['06 Red Hen] a novel
The Million-Year Centipede, or, Liquid Structures ['07 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
Nin & Nan ['08 Bizarro] a novella
My Landlady the Lobotomist ['08 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan ['10 Enigmatic Ink] two novellas
Hugh Moore ['10 Civil Coping Mechanisms, '15 Heroinum] a novel
Three Psychedelic Novellas ['12 Enigmatic Ink] three novellas
The Sylvia Plath Cookbook: A Satire ['12 Sugar Glider] a long short story
White Bungalows ['15 Dirt Heart Pharmacy ] a novel
Marco & Iarlaith ['18 Black Scat] a novel in flash fiction
The Pissers'Theatre ['21 Black Scat] a novel
two volumes of poetry:
23 Skidoo! 23 Form-Fitting Poems ['13 Finishing Line]
Blues for Youse ['15 ATTOHO]
a play:
'S A Bird ['13 Black Scat]
a work of creative nonfiction
How to Read ['14 Guide Dog]
His work reflects experimental technique, sometimes ignoring time, space, or causality in the service of stories of individuals struggling to transcend fear & limitation. His recent work has been associated with the Bizarro Fiction movement, of which he is one of the leading proponents.
Reviews of his work have appeared in Rain Taxi, Notre Dame Review, Dream People, Review of Contemporary Fiction & elsewhere.
Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, issues of which are usually Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He has also written on modern & post-modern literature for Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books & other magazines.
Gerdes has been awarded an &NOW Award for Innovative Fiction and has twice been the recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award for excerpts from Przewalski's Horse. The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the annual Preditors & Editors Readers Poll. He has also been a finalist for both the Starcherone & the Blatt fiction prizes for his unpublished manuscript White Bungalows. For Cistern Tawdry Gerdes was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the Fiction Category. He lives near Chicago. He has three children and five grandchildren.
He's author of fifteen published books of fiction:
Projections ['86 Depth Charge] a novella
Ring in a River ['92 Depth Charge] a novel
Truly Fine Citizen ['89 Highlander] a novel
Cistern Tawdry ['02 Fugue State] a novel
Przewalski's Horse ['06 Red Hen] a novel
The Million-Year Centipede, or, Liquid Structures ['07 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
Nin & Nan ['08 Bizarro] a novella
My Landlady the Lobotomist ['08 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan ['10 Enigmatic Ink] two novellas
Hugh Moore ['10 Civil Coping Mechanisms, '15 Heroinum] a novel
Three Psychedelic Novellas ['12 Enigmatic Ink] three novellas
The Sylvia Plath Cookbook: A Satire ['12 Sugar Glider] a long short story
White Bungalows ['15 Dirt Heart Pharmacy ] a novel
Marco & Iarlaith ['18 Black Scat] a novel in flash fiction
The Pissers'Theatre ['21 Black Scat] a novel
two volumes of poetry:
23 Skidoo! 23 Form-Fitting Poems ['13 Finishing Line]
Blues for Youse ['15 ATTOHO]
a play:
'S A Bird ['13 Black Scat]
a work of creative nonfiction
How to Read ['14 Guide Dog]
His work reflects experimental technique, sometimes ignoring time, space, or causality in the service of stories of individuals struggling to transcend fear & limitation. His recent work has been associated with the Bizarro Fiction movement, of which he is one of the leading proponents.
Reviews of his work have appeared in Rain Taxi, Notre Dame Review, Dream People, Review of Contemporary Fiction & elsewhere.
Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, issues of which are usually Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He has also written on modern & post-modern literature for Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books & other magazines.
Gerdes has been awarded an &NOW Award for Innovative Fiction and has twice been the recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award for excerpts from Przewalski's Horse. The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the annual Preditors & Editors Readers Poll. He has also been a finalist for both the Starcherone & the Blatt fiction prizes for his unpublished manuscript White Bungalows. For Cistern Tawdry Gerdes was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the Fiction Category. He lives near Chicago. He has three children and five grandchildren.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 1, 2011
At their core, the two works that make up Eckhard Gerdes’ The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin and Nan (2010, Enigmatic Ink.) are both about paranoia and its role in modern life. The Unwelcome Guest follows the seemingly haphazard events in the life of a man at the mercy of Greater Forces (Life, Culture, Society, Work, Love), while Nin and Nan is about a couple pushing back against those Forces, whether they be the constant buzz of cars on the road near their home or the powerful yet moronic Emperor who controls the land with the iron fist of a fascist (and who is lovingly named Pinocchibush because… well, if you don’t know why then I can’t help you there). Plot and Narrative not being particularly important to these works, that’s perhaps even more of a synopsis than the adventurous reader should require. We’re talking about following a writer’s thoughts and digressions and playful shaping of words more than we’re talking Story or Character. Indeed, the two title characters in Nin and Nan are never described, and remain androgynous throughout the work… always Nin and Nan, never she or he.
In reading these stories I was swept from sentence to sentence, scene to scene, feeling many of the images without really understanding them… letting them take me away on drifts of rhythm and flow. Like closing your eyes and listening to a free-form piece of music and not expecting it to take you anywhere… certainly nowhere close to such things as verses and choruses. Gerdes’ prose here (particularly in The Unwelcome Guest) certainly feels like a run of stream of consciousness, and it’s possible to let it affect you that way, but there is also a distinct sense of deliberate thought. And yet, deliberate thought or no, Gerdes’ work remains alive, organic, a writhing and coiling critter moving in and out of narrative lines. Serpentine, shall we say, like a snake exploring new surroundings.
In The Unwelcome Guest his prose moves fluidly from scene to scene, often within the same sentence, taking the reader from setting to setting and thought to thought without pause or segue. It’s dizzying, but in a good way. Intoxicating may be a better word. Reading Gerdes feels much like getting a pleasant buzz from a charming bottle of wine.
There is humor here, too. Copious amounts of humor, shot all through these two stories.
Example A): “I wasn’t going to be accused of mishandling the warehouse materials. The penalty for that would be a semester of only freshman composition classes….” (The narrator of The Unwelcome Guest is a Professor of English).
Example B): “I can’t wait to see the swimmers submerged in Greece.”
Example C): “And so they talked about her role in an elaborate play designed to humiliate and disgrace Pinocchibush, forcing him at the least to abdicate his throne as had his father, Pinocchiclinton, whose nose grew out of his pants.” (From Nin and Nan).
But there is insight and wisdom, as well. My personal favorite: “[m]ost activists are hedge trimmers. Most real writers are root-killers.”
Indeed. Or this, also in regards to writing and the state of modern American culture: “We’re not writing for baubles or trinkets, are we? Respectability means something. No? We’re not a carny sideshow of solipsists on ice. And we’re not all heathens.”
Eckhard Gerdes may indeed be no heathen, but he most certainly is a real writer. One of those root-killers. Not (despite his aforementioned humor and playfulness) a carny sideshow freak or chicken-eating geek or fire-breathing tightrope-walking tattooed jokester. Nin and Nan is a particularly strong-willed work, attacking (via satire and absurdity) the fascist ways of the Bush administration and its abuse of Executive power to fight the amorphous (the dangerously amorphous) “war on terror.” Despite it’s playfulness and engaging sense of the absurd, it is a serious attack on that era and its main players… a salvo meant to do harm to such ways of thinking, or at the very least to pester them like a gadfly.
One of the most striking aspects to these works is the control Gerdes has over his writing. Never once does it feel like he’s losing control, despite the random, dizzyingly serpentine changes to mood and scene he allows his prose to pursue. Lesser-writers who attempt forays into avant-garde literature find their words slipping out from underneath them, and any semblance of control going out the window. Simply put, those writers don’t know where they’re going or any idea why they were headed in that general direction in the first place. Gerdes has complete control over his material and his medium, which allows him to engage the reader in ways much avant-garde works do not.
Such control also allows Gerdes to play off of what has gone before him: among various meta-fictional touches (like naming a narrator Gerdes, or slipping from third-person to first in Nin and Nan), I thought I even detected a Walter Abish-inspired alphabet game at the end of one of The Unwelcome Guest’s chapters. Which may have come effortlessly to Gerdes, flying out of his brain and onto whatever he writes with without any forethought whatsoever… but retaining control over spontaneous events and actions is part of how a confident artist handles the random and the unexpected. One must be quick to adapt to whatever comes up, and expert enough in their chosen art form to react with images of meaning and power.
And now:
Eckard Gerdes humor Example D): “I kept myself busy by reading avant-garde fiction—you really should read it if you haven’t.”
Oh wait, that’s not humor, that’s wisdom. And really, that’s also all that needs to be said about The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin and Nan by Eckhard Gerdes:
You really should read it if you haven’t.
In reading these stories I was swept from sentence to sentence, scene to scene, feeling many of the images without really understanding them… letting them take me away on drifts of rhythm and flow. Like closing your eyes and listening to a free-form piece of music and not expecting it to take you anywhere… certainly nowhere close to such things as verses and choruses. Gerdes’ prose here (particularly in The Unwelcome Guest) certainly feels like a run of stream of consciousness, and it’s possible to let it affect you that way, but there is also a distinct sense of deliberate thought. And yet, deliberate thought or no, Gerdes’ work remains alive, organic, a writhing and coiling critter moving in and out of narrative lines. Serpentine, shall we say, like a snake exploring new surroundings.
In The Unwelcome Guest his prose moves fluidly from scene to scene, often within the same sentence, taking the reader from setting to setting and thought to thought without pause or segue. It’s dizzying, but in a good way. Intoxicating may be a better word. Reading Gerdes feels much like getting a pleasant buzz from a charming bottle of wine.
There is humor here, too. Copious amounts of humor, shot all through these two stories.
Example A): “I wasn’t going to be accused of mishandling the warehouse materials. The penalty for that would be a semester of only freshman composition classes….” (The narrator of The Unwelcome Guest is a Professor of English).
Example B): “I can’t wait to see the swimmers submerged in Greece.”
Example C): “And so they talked about her role in an elaborate play designed to humiliate and disgrace Pinocchibush, forcing him at the least to abdicate his throne as had his father, Pinocchiclinton, whose nose grew out of his pants.” (From Nin and Nan).
But there is insight and wisdom, as well. My personal favorite: “[m]ost activists are hedge trimmers. Most real writers are root-killers.”
Indeed. Or this, also in regards to writing and the state of modern American culture: “We’re not writing for baubles or trinkets, are we? Respectability means something. No? We’re not a carny sideshow of solipsists on ice. And we’re not all heathens.”
Eckhard Gerdes may indeed be no heathen, but he most certainly is a real writer. One of those root-killers. Not (despite his aforementioned humor and playfulness) a carny sideshow freak or chicken-eating geek or fire-breathing tightrope-walking tattooed jokester. Nin and Nan is a particularly strong-willed work, attacking (via satire and absurdity) the fascist ways of the Bush administration and its abuse of Executive power to fight the amorphous (the dangerously amorphous) “war on terror.” Despite it’s playfulness and engaging sense of the absurd, it is a serious attack on that era and its main players… a salvo meant to do harm to such ways of thinking, or at the very least to pester them like a gadfly.
One of the most striking aspects to these works is the control Gerdes has over his writing. Never once does it feel like he’s losing control, despite the random, dizzyingly serpentine changes to mood and scene he allows his prose to pursue. Lesser-writers who attempt forays into avant-garde literature find their words slipping out from underneath them, and any semblance of control going out the window. Simply put, those writers don’t know where they’re going or any idea why they were headed in that general direction in the first place. Gerdes has complete control over his material and his medium, which allows him to engage the reader in ways much avant-garde works do not.
Such control also allows Gerdes to play off of what has gone before him: among various meta-fictional touches (like naming a narrator Gerdes, or slipping from third-person to first in Nin and Nan), I thought I even detected a Walter Abish-inspired alphabet game at the end of one of The Unwelcome Guest’s chapters. Which may have come effortlessly to Gerdes, flying out of his brain and onto whatever he writes with without any forethought whatsoever… but retaining control over spontaneous events and actions is part of how a confident artist handles the random and the unexpected. One must be quick to adapt to whatever comes up, and expert enough in their chosen art form to react with images of meaning and power.
And now:
Eckard Gerdes humor Example D): “I kept myself busy by reading avant-garde fiction—you really should read it if you haven’t.”
Oh wait, that’s not humor, that’s wisdom. And really, that’s also all that needs to be said about The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin and Nan by Eckhard Gerdes:
You really should read it if you haven’t.
February 15, 2012
review of
Eckhard Gerdes' The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin & Nan
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 14, 2012
"'Needless to say'", despite my having heard about "bizarro" writing, if that's a potentially correct term, for quite some time now & despite its being a genre that I'd somewhat naturally find interesting, I've only recently started reading w/in it. Perhaps the 1st such thing I read was Bradley Sands' My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76... ). I certainly enjoyed Bradley's bk & I've certainly enjoyed Gerdes'.
"'In today's society'", I reckon that the obvious lineage of bizarro writing stems from absurdism: Alfred Jarry to Eugène Ionesco to Edward Albee to Monty Python's Flying Circus to "Blaster" Al Ackerman. This is a lineage I can whole-heartedly identify w/. Astute social observation coupled w/ subversive nonsense.
"'In conclusion'", Gerde's writing is full of literary references. I even suspect that details such as place names may be references. EG: "The first time I'd heard of him was in Dubuque." Any chance that Dubuque was chosen b/c of Albee's play "The Lady from Dubuque"?
The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin & Nan might be appropriately called novellas. Both are full of surprising changes but w/ different styles. I think The Unwelcome Guest is dream-like & Nin & Nan relies more on puns & plot. In The Unwelcome Guest the protagonist's profession changes in wildly diverse ways. Fairly early on he stops at a hardware store w/ his 2 youngest sons & then starts to walk home, having forgotten that he drove. Perhaps he's senile. Not too long after, we're informed that he was a trucker:
"I remember one time I was driving my rig - 1 full 18-wheeler. I had to tank up at this gas station I knew of at the intersection of two alleys in the warehouse district. I'd been drinking, so I wasn't at my best, and I pulled up short at the pump - the nozzle reached to a foot away from my gas cap. I had to get back in the cab and pull forward some more, which was a little embarrassing. I pushed past a couple of smoking busybodies by the pump. Right as I was about to reach for the cap to open it again, the rig started moving. Oh, shit, I thought. I'd forgotten to apply the brake. The rig rolled ahead and then made a sharp turn, barely missing the building across the alley. It swung around and then barreled into one of the warehouses. I heard an explosion and figured I was in serious trouble."
A comedy of errors.
Gerde references people that many of us might not've heard of - probably to both promote them & pay homage to them. EG:
"I see Jim Chapman coming back the other way.
"'How're the woods?' I ask.
"'Freaky. I just wrote about them.'
"'Oh.' Better find some new ground.
"This time make sure it hasn't already been taken.
"Gerdes and Chapman, in a land grab for material, race neck and neck."
Who's Jim Chapman? I'd never heard of him but the mention here made me deduce, obviously, that he's a writer so I looked him up online & found that he is AND that he's one of Gerdes' publishers. Worked for me - now I want to read something by him. Other slightly more well-known writers are mentioned such as Raymond Federman, William Gass, Kenneth Patchen, & William S. Burroughs. Arno Schmidt is mentioned at least twice. Now I'm extremely interested in reading something by him.
The writing flows in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style but is liberally dosed w/ whatever possibilities seem to titillate the author. Despite this being true of both novellas, they're significantly different from each other. Here's a sample passage from The Unwelcome Guest:
"On board will be provisions for my feelings as well as my hunger and thirst. Stowaways might tell me I'm a good captain - my first mate apparently finds doing so demeaning. However, I still trust my first mate and will not find in the stowaways a replacement. As I said, I am loyal, even if no one else is. I'll stay here and work crosswords. I'm safe in my cabin.
"A knock.
"I ignore it.
"Another.
"I ignore it, too. I have work to do. I'm not looking for love again. It becomes hate. I don't understand the rules of trinkets, phone calls, ex-husbands, or whatever is in that jewelry box. I can announce a tornado by accident - I savvy the weather. I know when to duck. It's duck season. I have my waders on. I crouch. Low-flying projectiles are heading at me. I'm being told again that I'm the sorriest human who has ever lived. It's okay - I've been hated before. I don't think it's permanent."
Some gender-critical language makes it in here such as the pronoun "hir".
I initially liked The Unwelcome Guest a bit more than Nin & Nan but that eventually evened out somewhat. The drawings, handwriting, & juvenile comics inserted in The Unwelcome Guest helped liven it up - shades of Patchen, perhaps.
Some of you may've noticed what might seemed to've been irrelevant beginning phrases to the 1st 3 paragraphs of this review. Allow me to explain by quoting:
"But instead of giving up, like a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer, they give me their "in today's society" and their "needless to say" and their lame "in conclusion" and stupefy me - they bash in my brains with their misplaced modifiers, random punctuation, and ignorant disagreements."
Gerdes' "Or: reject the unwelcome guest who comes to occupy your head" reminds me of the Street Rat(bag) slogan: "Evict the ruling class from the real estate of yr mind."
Nin & Nan has a more straightforward plot than The Unwelcome Guest despite its extreme fluidity. Nin & Nan are 2 characters of uncertain human form who continuously resist the Empire in its many forms. References to modern-day problems, filled w/ word-play, abound:
"Unfortunately a refried-bean-colored Pinto was already in that stall and exploded when the Barracuda slammed into its infamous and exposed rear-mounted gas tank. refried-bean-colored crap blew all over the place."
The infamy of the Pinto's deliberate & fatal misdesign gives the author a chance to make a joke off of pinto beans. Another example of this: "The crap tables stank."
I cd particularly identify w/ the rebelliousness of Nan as expressed here: "Well, maybe not Nan, who instinctively suspected any synchronized activity."
Having the Emperor be named "Pinocchibush" was the touch that made this the most topically obvious as political satire. (Now, fortunately, ex-) President Bush's notoriously ill-formed speeches are parodied thusly:
"'And now! Live from the Empire City. His Highness!' Canned applause.
"'Good evening, My Subjects. I have been told by my advisors that some of you have tried and failed and have deconstrued incorrectly what my earlier states meant, er, statements, er, meant. If you have assumed I have leveled a permanent ban on resorts and terriers, you have misapprehended me incorrectly. Though we need to guard against terriers' activities in our resorts, I of course am not suggesting we close our hostilitality industries. But let me not allay your fears one more second - every dog has his day."
"Chapter Nine: The Makil Health Care Center" was esp endearing to me as a critique of modern medicine. "'It's designed as a huge cross, each wing dedicated to one specialty: hysterectomy, tonsillectomy, circumcision, and cosmetic surgery.'" &, yes, it 'may kill'.
I love puns - & Gerdes may even be a bigger homonymphonemiac than I am: "Nin was thinking they'd take a long walk down a short beer."
"'I had a wallet made of foreskins. Whenever I rubbed it, it turned into a briefcase,' said Sam.
"'That joke is as old as the heels,' said Nin.
"'So's that metaphor,' said Nin."
Was having Nin refute himself rather than having Sam do it a mistake or deliberate? "'In conclusion'", "'in today's society'" it's "'needless to say'" that:
"Will you all just shut up? My house has just been invaded by ladybugs and box elder bugs - there go those elders chasing the young ladies again - and I can barely walk without crunching something. Even the harmless can be annoying. Unless annoyance is their harm.
"They attack the paper I am writing on. They distract me from the table. Now I have nothing to Chase Manhattans down with the fascist regime! What am I hunting for, again? meaning? Or just the next word? Or do I want the last word? Omega. Which ends in an alpha, which begins the whole stinkin' process all over again."
Eckhard Gerdes' The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin & Nan
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 14, 2012
"'Needless to say'", despite my having heard about "bizarro" writing, if that's a potentially correct term, for quite some time now & despite its being a genre that I'd somewhat naturally find interesting, I've only recently started reading w/in it. Perhaps the 1st such thing I read was Bradley Sands' My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76... ). I certainly enjoyed Bradley's bk & I've certainly enjoyed Gerdes'.
"'In today's society'", I reckon that the obvious lineage of bizarro writing stems from absurdism: Alfred Jarry to Eugène Ionesco to Edward Albee to Monty Python's Flying Circus to "Blaster" Al Ackerman. This is a lineage I can whole-heartedly identify w/. Astute social observation coupled w/ subversive nonsense.
"'In conclusion'", Gerde's writing is full of literary references. I even suspect that details such as place names may be references. EG: "The first time I'd heard of him was in Dubuque." Any chance that Dubuque was chosen b/c of Albee's play "The Lady from Dubuque"?
The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin & Nan might be appropriately called novellas. Both are full of surprising changes but w/ different styles. I think The Unwelcome Guest is dream-like & Nin & Nan relies more on puns & plot. In The Unwelcome Guest the protagonist's profession changes in wildly diverse ways. Fairly early on he stops at a hardware store w/ his 2 youngest sons & then starts to walk home, having forgotten that he drove. Perhaps he's senile. Not too long after, we're informed that he was a trucker:
"I remember one time I was driving my rig - 1 full 18-wheeler. I had to tank up at this gas station I knew of at the intersection of two alleys in the warehouse district. I'd been drinking, so I wasn't at my best, and I pulled up short at the pump - the nozzle reached to a foot away from my gas cap. I had to get back in the cab and pull forward some more, which was a little embarrassing. I pushed past a couple of smoking busybodies by the pump. Right as I was about to reach for the cap to open it again, the rig started moving. Oh, shit, I thought. I'd forgotten to apply the brake. The rig rolled ahead and then made a sharp turn, barely missing the building across the alley. It swung around and then barreled into one of the warehouses. I heard an explosion and figured I was in serious trouble."
A comedy of errors.
Gerde references people that many of us might not've heard of - probably to both promote them & pay homage to them. EG:
"I see Jim Chapman coming back the other way.
"'How're the woods?' I ask.
"'Freaky. I just wrote about them.'
"'Oh.' Better find some new ground.
"This time make sure it hasn't already been taken.
"Gerdes and Chapman, in a land grab for material, race neck and neck."
Who's Jim Chapman? I'd never heard of him but the mention here made me deduce, obviously, that he's a writer so I looked him up online & found that he is AND that he's one of Gerdes' publishers. Worked for me - now I want to read something by him. Other slightly more well-known writers are mentioned such as Raymond Federman, William Gass, Kenneth Patchen, & William S. Burroughs. Arno Schmidt is mentioned at least twice. Now I'm extremely interested in reading something by him.
The writing flows in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style but is liberally dosed w/ whatever possibilities seem to titillate the author. Despite this being true of both novellas, they're significantly different from each other. Here's a sample passage from The Unwelcome Guest:
"On board will be provisions for my feelings as well as my hunger and thirst. Stowaways might tell me I'm a good captain - my first mate apparently finds doing so demeaning. However, I still trust my first mate and will not find in the stowaways a replacement. As I said, I am loyal, even if no one else is. I'll stay here and work crosswords. I'm safe in my cabin.
"A knock.
"I ignore it.
"Another.
"I ignore it, too. I have work to do. I'm not looking for love again. It becomes hate. I don't understand the rules of trinkets, phone calls, ex-husbands, or whatever is in that jewelry box. I can announce a tornado by accident - I savvy the weather. I know when to duck. It's duck season. I have my waders on. I crouch. Low-flying projectiles are heading at me. I'm being told again that I'm the sorriest human who has ever lived. It's okay - I've been hated before. I don't think it's permanent."
Some gender-critical language makes it in here such as the pronoun "hir".
I initially liked The Unwelcome Guest a bit more than Nin & Nan but that eventually evened out somewhat. The drawings, handwriting, & juvenile comics inserted in The Unwelcome Guest helped liven it up - shades of Patchen, perhaps.
Some of you may've noticed what might seemed to've been irrelevant beginning phrases to the 1st 3 paragraphs of this review. Allow me to explain by quoting:
"But instead of giving up, like a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer, they give me their "in today's society" and their "needless to say" and their lame "in conclusion" and stupefy me - they bash in my brains with their misplaced modifiers, random punctuation, and ignorant disagreements."
Gerdes' "Or: reject the unwelcome guest who comes to occupy your head" reminds me of the Street Rat(bag) slogan: "Evict the ruling class from the real estate of yr mind."
Nin & Nan has a more straightforward plot than The Unwelcome Guest despite its extreme fluidity. Nin & Nan are 2 characters of uncertain human form who continuously resist the Empire in its many forms. References to modern-day problems, filled w/ word-play, abound:
"Unfortunately a refried-bean-colored Pinto was already in that stall and exploded when the Barracuda slammed into its infamous and exposed rear-mounted gas tank. refried-bean-colored crap blew all over the place."
The infamy of the Pinto's deliberate & fatal misdesign gives the author a chance to make a joke off of pinto beans. Another example of this: "The crap tables stank."
I cd particularly identify w/ the rebelliousness of Nan as expressed here: "Well, maybe not Nan, who instinctively suspected any synchronized activity."
Having the Emperor be named "Pinocchibush" was the touch that made this the most topically obvious as political satire. (Now, fortunately, ex-) President Bush's notoriously ill-formed speeches are parodied thusly:
"'And now! Live from the Empire City. His Highness!' Canned applause.
"'Good evening, My Subjects. I have been told by my advisors that some of you have tried and failed and have deconstrued incorrectly what my earlier states meant, er, statements, er, meant. If you have assumed I have leveled a permanent ban on resorts and terriers, you have misapprehended me incorrectly. Though we need to guard against terriers' activities in our resorts, I of course am not suggesting we close our hostilitality industries. But let me not allay your fears one more second - every dog has his day."
"Chapter Nine: The Makil Health Care Center" was esp endearing to me as a critique of modern medicine. "'It's designed as a huge cross, each wing dedicated to one specialty: hysterectomy, tonsillectomy, circumcision, and cosmetic surgery.'" &, yes, it 'may kill'.
I love puns - & Gerdes may even be a bigger homonymphonemiac than I am: "Nin was thinking they'd take a long walk down a short beer."
"'I had a wallet made of foreskins. Whenever I rubbed it, it turned into a briefcase,' said Sam.
"'That joke is as old as the heels,' said Nin.
"'So's that metaphor,' said Nin."
Was having Nin refute himself rather than having Sam do it a mistake or deliberate? "'In conclusion'", "'in today's society'" it's "'needless to say'" that:
"Will you all just shut up? My house has just been invaded by ladybugs and box elder bugs - there go those elders chasing the young ladies again - and I can barely walk without crunching something. Even the harmless can be annoying. Unless annoyance is their harm.
"They attack the paper I am writing on. They distract me from the table. Now I have nothing to Chase Manhattans down with the fascist regime! What am I hunting for, again? meaning? Or just the next word? Or do I want the last word? Omega. Which ends in an alpha, which begins the whole stinkin' process all over again."
July 23, 2012
I 'get' it, but Gerdes' style is just not for me.
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