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Verbatim: A Novel
Verbatim is a blackly humorous exposé of parliamentary practice in an unnamed Atlantic province. The dirty tricks, vicious insults, and inept parliamentary procedures of the politicians are recorded by a motley crew of Hansard employees. But when the Hansard bureaucrats begin to emulate their political masters, the parliamentary system’s supposed dignity is further stripped away. Jeff Bursey reveals in both high and low humour how chaotic and mean-spirited the rules behind the game of politics are, and how political ‘virtue’ corrupts everyone.
297 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2010
227 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Bursey
13 books197 followersJeff Bursey is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright and literary critic.
His books: Verbatim: A Novel (hardcover, October 2010; paperback, February 2018); Mirrors on which dust has fallen (June 2015); Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews (July 2016); Unidentified man at left of photo (September 2020); an impalpable certain rest (June 2021); Assume A Position: Considerations and Interviews (July 2022).
His webpage is:
www.jeffbursey.ca
His books: Verbatim: A Novel (hardcover, October 2010; paperback, February 2018); Mirrors on which dust has fallen (June 2015); Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews (July 2016); Unidentified man at left of photo (September 2020); an impalpable certain rest (June 2021); Assume A Position: Considerations and Interviews (July 2022).
His webpage is:
www.jeffbursey.ca
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March 23, 2015I’ve found myself reading some Gaddis criticism over the weekend. Which reminds me, if you go for that kind of Oral Realism which only Gaddis can do like Gaddis, and but you want to read a Canadian who can give Gaddis a serious run for that Title, then please, allow me to reiterate my High Five Recommendation of Bursey’s Verbatim. Seriously, don’t miss this one.
_______________
Finally found my way back into that kind of thing. I’ve read some nice novels in recent months, some important stuff, some heavy stuff. Stuff like V. and 2666 and Underworld and The Last Samurai and things of this nature. But nothing kicked me like I needed kicking. Nothing tickled that funnyfunny Rabelaisian funny=bone. Until now again finally!! Bursey’s Verbatim had me LOL’ing like a frickin’ idiot. The stupidest little jokes and wordplay that only work in that kind of deadpan manner and there’s no better way to create that deadpan kind of situation than to put a bunch of politicians in a room (ie, in parliament) and let them take themselves seriously and let them make their all=too easy verbal jabs at their opponents--at every every opportunity--and then the always inevitability of someone finding themself with their foot in their mouth.
Oh! Oh!
At any rate. This ‘Review’ is so totally compromised re: integrity, that there’s not even any use in you reading it. I’m shilling the novel, but you can pass on the ‘Review’. See, I had this novel on my schopping list back in my pre-gr daze. I don’t recall why or how. Either it was a title dropped by Mr. Moore (whom Bursey interviewed HERE) somewhere randomly or maybe it was one of those couple of amazon rec’s I took seriously (I recall I first got 2666 there and fortunately I skip’d their rec of 1Q84 or whatever it’s called). But you know what? Maybe I got it from Bursey’s own review of Moore’s first Novel book, which can be found HERE. At any rate, it was on my list and no bookshops wanted to carry it (off course!) But then Bursey pops onto gr. So I Friend’d him, bought his book ; it sat on my shelf. Too long it sat on my shelf. I read it. I laughed. I loved. I wept. (well, not wept). But I did say, “Yes!”
Hear! Hear!
In other words, if you like what Moore likes, and one thing Moore likes a lot is Gaddis (Moore’s revised Gaddis book is being pub’d this month), then -- You. Will. Need. To. Read. Verbatim. Period.
And there’s more!! Bursey’s got another work in the works. And there’s an In=Progress selection HERE. Bottom of that page is a video of a reading=performance by the author himself. Which is mesmerizing. Please. Do. Not. Miss. It.
Hear! Hear!
Okay so I’ve said little about the book. It’s a book written like a novel should be written. Which is to say it is, maybe?, an Ultra=Realism.* Mimetic to no end. A documentary novel, a novel in documents. No author in sight! Nothing but reality. A world which exists in no-wise but in text-wise. Like Richardson’s First Novels In The English Language. Returns to Canada by way of a parliamentary record and record of those who create that record, ie, those hacking away at the mamblings of the rambling mambers of parliament, the transcribers and editors of Hansard. Pretty friggin’ neat!
Also, there’s this critique of verisimilitude in fiction contained in this novel. And it’s a critique which is intimately tied up with the question of a style book, specifically Hansard’s style book, but it goes too to the much larger question of The Style Book Of The English Language Überhaupt, which is frequently called “Grammar.” So if you’re the type that gets irk’d by people like me writing stuff like “The Style Book Of The English Language Überhaupt” or “Pretty friggin’ neat!” or shifting easily between “you’re” and “you are”, then you should be reading this thing here.
So right. I didn’t really want to say anything about the book really. Just that, hey, if you’re not looking at reading this here, you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. True, it is rather Canada=heavy, but I can’t believe anyone would say that it’s hermetically Canadian. It sure is a nice change from all the US=centric fiction so many of you (and me! and me!) read. Because, ladies and gentlemen, Canada is America. But Canada is not the USofA (that’s you=sofa to all you lexics). And I say that as a confessing (but not freely confessing) United Statesian. Or is that Statesite? In other words, if you are looking for the future of Canadian fiction, but are not looking in the direction of Bursey, then you are looking in the wrong direction.
You need more. Well, our self-serving self-promoting author (who has done ZERO self-promoting on gr--(okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea)), there’s a Bursey website with blurbs galore HERE.
And since no nr=Review is complete without some Zappa, here’s Canadian Customs from the Guitar album.
*Check it out. Another gr=reviewer said something very similar (and I totally made up my word all by myself!) :: “....must surely qualify as one of the most ueber-realistic postmodern satires yet penned”. Yet penned!!! (bold, mine). Another gr=reviewer says “hyper-realism”. You know what we’re talking about!!!
_______________
Finally found my way back into that kind of thing. I’ve read some nice novels in recent months, some important stuff, some heavy stuff. Stuff like V. and 2666 and Underworld and The Last Samurai and things of this nature. But nothing kicked me like I needed kicking. Nothing tickled that funnyfunny Rabelaisian funny=bone. Until now again finally!! Bursey’s Verbatim had me LOL’ing like a frickin’ idiot. The stupidest little jokes and wordplay that only work in that kind of deadpan manner and there’s no better way to create that deadpan kind of situation than to put a bunch of politicians in a room (ie, in parliament) and let them take themselves seriously and let them make their all=too easy verbal jabs at their opponents--at every every opportunity--and then the always inevitability of someone finding themself with their foot in their mouth.
Oh! Oh!
At any rate. This ‘Review’ is so totally compromised re: integrity, that there’s not even any use in you reading it. I’m shilling the novel, but you can pass on the ‘Review’. See, I had this novel on my schopping list back in my pre-gr daze. I don’t recall why or how. Either it was a title dropped by Mr. Moore (whom Bursey interviewed HERE) somewhere randomly or maybe it was one of those couple of amazon rec’s I took seriously (I recall I first got 2666 there and fortunately I skip’d their rec of 1Q84 or whatever it’s called). But you know what? Maybe I got it from Bursey’s own review of Moore’s first Novel book, which can be found HERE. At any rate, it was on my list and no bookshops wanted to carry it (off course!) But then Bursey pops onto gr. So I Friend’d him, bought his book ; it sat on my shelf. Too long it sat on my shelf. I read it. I laughed. I loved. I wept. (well, not wept). But I did say, “Yes!”
Hear! Hear!
In other words, if you like what Moore likes, and one thing Moore likes a lot is Gaddis (Moore’s revised Gaddis book is being pub’d this month), then -- You. Will. Need. To. Read. Verbatim. Period.
And there’s more!! Bursey’s got another work in the works. And there’s an In=Progress selection HERE. Bottom of that page is a video of a reading=performance by the author himself. Which is mesmerizing. Please. Do. Not. Miss. It.
Hear! Hear!
Okay so I’ve said little about the book. It’s a book written like a novel should be written. Which is to say it is, maybe?, an Ultra=Realism.* Mimetic to no end. A documentary novel, a novel in documents. No author in sight! Nothing but reality. A world which exists in no-wise but in text-wise. Like Richardson’s First Novels In The English Language. Returns to Canada by way of a parliamentary record and record of those who create that record, ie, those hacking away at the mamblings of the rambling mambers of parliament, the transcribers and editors of Hansard. Pretty friggin’ neat!
Also, there’s this critique of verisimilitude in fiction contained in this novel. And it’s a critique which is intimately tied up with the question of a style book, specifically Hansard’s style book, but it goes too to the much larger question of The Style Book Of The English Language Überhaupt, which is frequently called “Grammar.” So if you’re the type that gets irk’d by people like me writing stuff like “The Style Book Of The English Language Überhaupt” or “Pretty friggin’ neat!” or shifting easily between “you’re” and “you are”, then you should be reading this thing here.
So right. I didn’t really want to say anything about the book really. Just that, hey, if you’re not looking at reading this here, you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. True, it is rather Canada=heavy, but I can’t believe anyone would say that it’s hermetically Canadian. It sure is a nice change from all the US=centric fiction so many of you (and me! and me!) read. Because, ladies and gentlemen, Canada is America. But Canada is not the USofA (that’s you=sofa to all you lexics). And I say that as a confessing (but not freely confessing) United Statesian. Or is that Statesite? In other words, if you are looking for the future of Canadian fiction, but are not looking in the direction of Bursey, then you are looking in the wrong direction.
You need more. Well, our self-serving self-promoting author (who has done ZERO self-promoting on gr--(okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea)), there’s a Bursey website with blurbs galore HERE.
And since no nr=Review is complete without some Zappa, here’s Canadian Customs from the Guitar album.
*Check it out. Another gr=reviewer said something very similar (and I totally made up my word all by myself!) :: “....must surely qualify as one of the most ueber-realistic postmodern satires yet penned”. Yet penned!!! (bold, mine). Another gr=reviewer says “hyper-realism”. You know what we’re talking about!!!
January 6, 2015
aN iRksome GADfly IS made me do it!
This is the most abject, banal, caustic, deceitful, elegant, frustrating, grim, heinous, insouciant, jaded, kleptomanic, levitous, maddening, noxious, operatic, pedantic, querulous, rigorous, satirical, tantalising, underhanded, vicious, wrathful, xenagoguic, yex-inducing, zealous book-that-is-not-a-book-that-is-a-book that you will likely read. Ever.
This is the most abject, banal, caustic, deceitful, elegant, frustrating, grim, heinous, insouciant, jaded, kleptomanic, levitous, maddening, noxious, operatic, pedantic, querulous, rigorous, satirical, tantalising, underhanded, vicious, wrathful, xenagoguic, yex-inducing, zealous book-that-is-not-a-book-that-is-a-book that you will likely read. Ever.
October 26, 2023
Verbatim: A Novel makes for, among its other virtues, a thorough disemboweling of the parliamentary system—and thereby of this reader, who had had high hopes of, erm, "representing" Erehwon Centre for the Paleoliberal Pale People's Party until encountering Mr. Bursey's documentary, which acted upon yours truly the way that certain films and medications modified Alex's (of A Clockwork Orange fame) dreams of an uninterrupted, unprecedentedly unrestrained spree of the ol' ultraviolence.
Cos even a casual reading of V: AN (O my brothers) displays the wanton ultraviolence being perpetrated upon we, the subjects of the Crown, natives to these our great parliamentary democracies (and, by analogy [& more on analogies later], upon les citoyens of the free world's imperiled republics) —the evil of banality of politics at its absolute (and perfectly normal) nadir; the incompetent philistinism of those whom we freely(?) elect; the grade-school-level bickerthon and mendacity-a-looza that passes for "debate"; the soul-destroying small-mindedness of both the torturous (I'm calling out you and your rules of Ordnung, Roger!) lobotomies and psychectomies that pass for "parliamentary procedures"... I could go on here, but it would be ice to the Inuit, coals to Newcastle, preaching to the choir (hey, ain't I starting to sound..."parliamentarian" [i.e. cliché, at the very, very least] in my "rhetoric"?), wouldn't it?
Oh, I have a hardback 1st ed. of this novel that is worth nearly $2,000, dontcha know, but did I even crack the spine to have a peek inside? No sir! Cos this baby has just been re-issued in a second edition (with an excellent [but "edited" rather than "verbatim", hehe] transcript of a colloquium on the novel from a university in Munich serving as a foreward, and a well-written afterword as well), so I marked up my copy of this with a heavy pen, cos Bursey sure tested my patience by forcing me to wade through hours and hours of sometimes-stultifying inanity that passes for—heck, just see above. Then see this, below:
That's the novel's epigraph, and therein lies the rub: whether to take arms against a sea of shit, or to hold the mirror up to nature (as't were), show scorn her image—and by juxtaposing, end it?
This is satire-as-found-poem, then, except it's all artfully contrived at the same time. But if so, why does Bursey need to contrive so to have us step so far into a provincial (in both senses of that word) political bloodbath? So that we might feel that returning were as tedious as go o'er? I think that the tedium is there to not only make the satire take root, but flower and bear fruit: only via a full immersion in the mer of merde of politics, he very modus operandi of our own locus standi, our Polis!, can we reader/voters possibly locate the gumption to try to change things—not that the novel takes a stand of any sort on that matter, of course. It forces us to do all of that work ourselves, like any good (post-?) modernist work.
So I performed that labour, chased down allusions, translated bits of Latin and tried my best to find a path through this unweeded garden (this parliament of foules) of forking paths, but the undistinguished, indistinguishable "Honourable" Government and Opposition stymied me at every turn, I'm afraid. They rule, in turns, over an unnamed, unsung Atlantic province somewhere in 20C Canada, and argue over ever-diminishing economic and social prospects: the global recession is never-ending, it seems, and as Canada is largely about resource extraction by multinationals and little else (we are "hewers of wood and drawers of water", someone once said—I think: I'm tired of looking stuff up now), no one seems to want to buy what we have to sell:
So, despite valiant efforts to sell us down the river (and to invent new terms for our owners), unemployment is up and revenues are down, and the government decides to cut spending and raise taxes on the l'il folks, all while playing footsie with the corporations who have driven the province from one environmental crisis to the next (not only are coal mines on fire underneath whole towns, but Mr. Bursey seems to have anticipated some of the worst features of climate change, as a storm has utterly destroyed another town, and the government has abandoned it to outlaws a la Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (minus the distractions of Tina Turner).
Minus almost any distractions at all, this friggin' novel! Almost. Cos I came to L-O-V-E the para-texts that are sprinkled reasonably liberally (somewhat conservatively, that is, as a Republicrat or Demublican might) amongst the many transcriptions of "Provincial Legislature Proceedings" (including, but not limited to: "Statements by Ministers and Members", "Notices of Bills and Motions", "Orders of the Day", "Question Period" and [get this] "Recess"—which I could use a little of just now myself). These para-texts take the form of emails between civil servants serving the House, principally between the Clerk or chief administrator and the newly-appointed Director of Hansard, the body responsible for transcribing and editing the utterances of our betters, I mean elected officials, on the floor of the House. The Director has just inherited an institution which is just as dysfunctional in its own small way (i.e. in every way imaginable, and it's all smalltime, all the time, i.e. TinPot Teapot Tempests, lemme tellya) as the Big House itself. For the transcribers are trapped in a prison house of unparliamentary and unintelligible language, and it is their job to make the pols posteriors look good for posterity: they clean up the grammar, prettify the rhetoric (such as it is, and such as they can), and substitute euphemism whenever necessary (read: alot <-- that's "a lot" to you, chump—ed.) for outright vulgarity (Pop quiz: quick, if you can translate "Hear, Hear!", "Oh! Oh!" and "(Inaudible)", you're hired!) all over the place.
Like I said, these emails really kept me going, cos they betrayed traces of humanity exorcised elsewhere in the novel by the traditions of Hansard, and by the (erm, dare we call it "traditional"?!) de facto manner of comporting oneself in the House of Commons. Exchanged back & forth by some somewhat well-meaning Babbits, they provide indirect hints (as with everything else in this novel that forces you to interpolate simply everything) as to what working life is like for the invisible Gregor Samsas of the bureacracy—for people like myself, of course! And what happens to them is what you would expect to happen in a recession (i.e., no real spoiler, amirite?): layoffs and cutbacks amid the non-functional HVAC and antiquated CRT screens.
Now, until reading this, I knew almost zero about parliament, but I came to love it when the main parties (and later, after a close election, the smattering of little ones as well), kept the lone Independent Member (sent from Coventry!) from speaking, by not granting her "leave" to take the floor. This showed their pettiness and childishness in extremis, and I think it is meant as an analogy for their contempt of us other little people as a whole:
It just keeps on keepin on, for her like that, O my brothers! World without end.
Which brings me to how this whole book might be read as a kind of analogy for the entire Weberian nightmare in which we live and toil—and upon which I will wrap up here. One of my other favourite gestures is the repeated use of scheduled "Petititions" sessions, in which the following phrase keeps being repeated—because, I presume, that is how grateful law-abiding subjects of the Crown ask for "more soup, please sir":
To...you know. To please listen to us. For once.
Is V:AN (kinda catchy, no?) thus a petition to the parliament of readers? I don't think so. I think it is a shot across our bows (ok, it's late here, and the cliches are coming fast), to get us to wake up and smell the bitter coffee grounds, to challenge us to come up with something better than this (and by "this" I do not mean this novel, of course (which is truly one-of-a-kind), but this (inaudible) thing called representative democracy. Oh! Oh?
No: Hear, hear, Mr. Bursey!
Cos even a casual reading of V: AN (O my brothers) displays the wanton ultraviolence being perpetrated upon we, the subjects of the Crown, natives to these our great parliamentary democracies (and, by analogy [& more on analogies later], upon les citoyens of the free world's imperiled republics) —the evil of banality of politics at its absolute (and perfectly normal) nadir; the incompetent philistinism of those whom we freely(?) elect; the grade-school-level bickerthon and mendacity-a-looza that passes for "debate"; the soul-destroying small-mindedness of both the torturous (I'm calling out you and your rules of Ordnung, Roger!) lobotomies and psychectomies that pass for "parliamentary procedures"... I could go on here, but it would be ice to the Inuit, coals to Newcastle, preaching to the choir (hey, ain't I starting to sound..."parliamentarian" [i.e. cliché, at the very, very least] in my "rhetoric"?), wouldn't it?
Oh, I have a hardback 1st ed. of this novel that is worth nearly $2,000, dontcha know, but did I even crack the spine to have a peek inside? No sir! Cos this baby has just been re-issued in a second edition (with an excellent [but "edited" rather than "verbatim", hehe] transcript of a colloquium on the novel from a university in Munich serving as a foreward, and a well-written afterword as well), so I marked up my copy of this with a heavy pen, cos Bursey sure tested my patience by forcing me to wade through hours and hours of sometimes-stultifying inanity that passes for—heck, just see above. Then see this, below:
Should we describe it as Satire
(merely because it does not refine the truth)
or should we call it realism? —Wyndham Lewis
That's the novel's epigraph, and therein lies the rub: whether to take arms against a sea of shit, or to hold the mirror up to nature (as't were), show scorn her image—and by juxtaposing, end it?
This is satire-as-found-poem, then, except it's all artfully contrived at the same time. But if so, why does Bursey need to contrive so to have us step so far into a provincial (in both senses of that word) political bloodbath? So that we might feel that returning were as tedious as go o'er? I think that the tedium is there to not only make the satire take root, but flower and bear fruit: only via a full immersion in the mer of merde of politics, he very modus operandi of our own locus standi, our Polis!, can we reader/voters possibly locate the gumption to try to change things—not that the novel takes a stand of any sort on that matter, of course. It forces us to do all of that work ourselves, like any good (post-?) modernist work.
So I performed that labour, chased down allusions, translated bits of Latin and tried my best to find a path through this unweeded garden (this parliament of foules) of forking paths, but the undistinguished, indistinguishable "Honourable" Government and Opposition stymied me at every turn, I'm afraid. They rule, in turns, over an unnamed, unsung Atlantic province somewhere in 20C Canada, and argue over ever-diminishing economic and social prospects: the global recession is never-ending, it seems, and as Canada is largely about resource extraction by multinationals and little else (we are "hewers of wood and drawers of water", someone once said—I think: I'm tired of looking stuff up now), no one seems to want to buy what we have to sell:
Mr. Gascoigne: The Hon. gentleman has not recovered from his of four years ago, and is very bitter.
Mr. Tucker: I am being deflected, Speaker. To get back to my remarks. This Province has enormous resources, in a weak world market, and has great potential for tourism and as a retirement spot for United Statesers who come here –
An Hon. Member: The what? Who?
Mr. Tucker: – from violent parts of Canada who want to come to a place where crime is low, the air is clean, and services are good.
To the Member, that’s what I call people from the U.S., and I think it’ll catch on. United Statesers. Why are not the Ministers out selling this Province to foreign investors?
So, despite valiant efforts to sell us down the river (and to invent new terms for our owners), unemployment is up and revenues are down, and the government decides to cut spending and raise taxes on the l'il folks, all while playing footsie with the corporations who have driven the province from one environmental crisis to the next (not only are coal mines on fire underneath whole towns, but Mr. Bursey seems to have anticipated some of the worst features of climate change, as a storm has utterly destroyed another town, and the government has abandoned it to outlaws a la Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (minus the distractions of Tina Turner).
Minus almost any distractions at all, this friggin' novel! Almost. Cos I came to L-O-V-E the para-texts that are sprinkled reasonably liberally (somewhat conservatively, that is, as a Republicrat or Demublican might) amongst the many transcriptions of "Provincial Legislature Proceedings" (including, but not limited to: "Statements by Ministers and Members", "Notices of Bills and Motions", "Orders of the Day", "Question Period" and [get this] "Recess"—which I could use a little of just now myself). These para-texts take the form of emails between civil servants serving the House, principally between the Clerk or chief administrator and the newly-appointed Director of Hansard, the body responsible for transcribing and editing the utterances of our betters, I mean elected officials, on the floor of the House. The Director has just inherited an institution which is just as dysfunctional in its own small way (i.e. in every way imaginable, and it's all smalltime, all the time, i.e. TinPot Teapot Tempests, lemme tellya) as the Big House itself. For the transcribers are trapped in a prison house of unparliamentary and unintelligible language, and it is their job to make the pols posteriors look good for posterity: they clean up the grammar, prettify the rhetoric (such as it is, and such as they can), and substitute euphemism whenever necessary (read: alot <-- that's "a lot" to you, chump—ed.) for outright vulgarity (Pop quiz: quick, if you can translate "Hear, Hear!", "Oh! Oh!" and "(Inaudible)", you're hired!) all over the place.
Like I said, these emails really kept me going, cos they betrayed traces of humanity exorcised elsewhere in the novel by the traditions of Hansard, and by the (erm, dare we call it "traditional"?!) de facto manner of comporting oneself in the House of Commons. Exchanged back & forth by some somewhat well-meaning Babbits, they provide indirect hints (as with everything else in this novel that forces you to interpolate simply everything) as to what working life is like for the invisible Gregor Samsas of the bureacracy—for people like myself, of course! And what happens to them is what you would expect to happen in a recession (i.e., no real spoiler, amirite?): layoffs and cutbacks amid the non-functional HVAC and antiquated CRT screens.
Now, until reading this, I knew almost zero about parliament, but I came to love it when the main parties (and later, after a close election, the smattering of little ones as well), kept the lone Independent Member (sent from Coventry!) from speaking, by not granting her "leave" to take the floor. This showed their pettiness and childishness in extremis, and I think it is meant as an analogy for their contempt of us other little people as a whole:
Speaker: Does the Hon. Member for Coventry have leave?
Some Hon. Members: No leave!
Speaker: No leave.
It just keeps on keepin on, for her like that, O my brothers! World without end.
Which brings me to how this whole book might be read as a kind of analogy for the entire Weberian nightmare in which we live and toil—and upon which I will wrap up here. One of my other favourite gestures is the repeated use of scheduled "Petititions" sessions, in which the following phrase keeps being repeated—because, I presume, that is how grateful law-abiding subjects of the Crown ask for "more soup, please sir":
We, the undersigned, humble and obedient citizens of this Province, who uphold and respect the democratic laws of this land, do hereby petition the government to....(my italics)
To...you know. To please listen to us. For once.
Is V:AN (kinda catchy, no?) thus a petition to the parliament of readers? I don't think so. I think it is a shot across our bows (ok, it's late here, and the cliches are coming fast), to get us to wake up and smell the bitter coffee grounds, to challenge us to come up with something better than this (and by "this" I do not mean this novel, of course (which is truly one-of-a-kind), but this (inaudible) thing called representative democracy. Oh! Oh?
No: Hear, hear, Mr. Bursey!
February 12, 2015
I’ve been lamenting the lack of writers who can rely on more than just imagination about the real world of business, commerce, and politics. Then Jeff Bursey comes along to prove me wrong.
Verbatim uses the format of Hansard, the transcript record of Parliamentary debates, to make some trenchant comments on politics, both on the national stage and in the office. It tackles what is one of the most compelling, at least to me, questions of our antediluvian age: How do you get people to act in the interest of the common weal? How do you get people to change? Mr Bursey’s answer is sadly, that you can’t.
Still, for all the pessimism of that answer, this novel was a rollicking read and all too reflective of the real world (having just spent three days on a corporate retreat, I can testify to the accuracy of his account of the backbiting, back stabbing, and just plain dirty dealing of the world of office politics). The viciousness of the mudslinging among the politicians, the refusal to concern themselves with anything other than their own self-interest, is reflected (all too sadly) in the goings-on of the Hansard office. I had to laugh in rueful recognition at the Editors’ constant refrain of, “This is how we’ve always done things,” as a way to resist changes in house style being imposed upon them by the beleaguered new Director of Hansard.
I don’t know if this was his intent—and I’d love for him to respond to this—but I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of the worlds of politics and the office because it showed up all too well how our private lives mirror public lives. As much as we all like to claim that politicians are a breed apart, the truth is that they come from the same culture and society that we do. If they behave badly, then all too often, this behaviour only holds up a mirror to our own tendencies to pursue our own self-interest even if this means hurting the common good. In a culture where we have all embraced me-first consumerist greed, can it be any surprise that our leaders, both business and political, behave the way they do?
Verbatim uses the format of Hansard, the transcript record of Parliamentary debates, to make some trenchant comments on politics, both on the national stage and in the office. It tackles what is one of the most compelling, at least to me, questions of our antediluvian age: How do you get people to act in the interest of the common weal? How do you get people to change? Mr Bursey’s answer is sadly, that you can’t.
Still, for all the pessimism of that answer, this novel was a rollicking read and all too reflective of the real world (having just spent three days on a corporate retreat, I can testify to the accuracy of his account of the backbiting, back stabbing, and just plain dirty dealing of the world of office politics). The viciousness of the mudslinging among the politicians, the refusal to concern themselves with anything other than their own self-interest, is reflected (all too sadly) in the goings-on of the Hansard office. I had to laugh in rueful recognition at the Editors’ constant refrain of, “This is how we’ve always done things,” as a way to resist changes in house style being imposed upon them by the beleaguered new Director of Hansard.
I don’t know if this was his intent—and I’d love for him to respond to this—but I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of the worlds of politics and the office because it showed up all too well how our private lives mirror public lives. As much as we all like to claim that politicians are a breed apart, the truth is that they come from the same culture and society that we do. If they behave badly, then all too often, this behaviour only holds up a mirror to our own tendencies to pursue our own self-interest even if this means hurting the common good. In a culture where we have all embraced me-first consumerist greed, can it be any surprise that our leaders, both business and political, behave the way they do?
May 10, 2017
[Requisite Disclaimer: Yes, I am friends with the author, Jeff Bursey, on Goodreads. Yes, he initially seduced me with his pulsating braincenter before reading Verbatim in the form of an escalating and frankly erotic virtual epistolary. And yes, fine, Jeff and I may indeed be living off the grid in a yurt in the northernmost wilds of Manitoba with our illegitimate albino lovechild, Randy Jung-un. What of it? Judge not lest…However—No, I did not receive a copy of this book free for review. No, I was given nary an ARC to entice sponsorship; I plunked down my own cash on the Amazonian barrelhead. Finally, no form of reward, compensation, incentive, or remuneration informs the following review. Unless you count butterfly kisses. Sweet, sweet butterfly kisses.]
I don’t look to books for laughter. For that, I usually just head to the nearest soup kitchen and hand out photocopies of my latest ATM receipt showing my current balance. Man! do those guys get all ruffled-up. Talk about flying feathers! The look on some of their faces, or or—(I’m wheezing just thinking about it)—or the crippled ones that try to hit me with the various ambulatata—crutches, canes, walkers—that they use to hobble-hobble-hobble down the street. I mean, c’mon—I’m a buck in the bosoms of Mmes. Health & Wealth, guys. Keep your prosthetic arms. It seems I’ve gotten off track, but you gotta love capitalism.
As I was saying: I don’t look to books for laughter. But Bursey’s had me in stitches in all the right places. I’m not going to give you any plot summary, or try to lay down for you the disarmingly-original framework he creates. Nor am I going to elaborate as to why I think that he has the best claim to the Gaddis throne of anyone working. Not a peep from me about the hilarity of parliamentary dialogue betraying the juvenile mental deficiencies of elected officials and their propensity for insulting oppositional members in forms as novel as they are varied. Nor am I even going to MENTION the story-within-a-story of Hansard, told entirely through the varyingly obsequious and uncorrupted intraoffice memoranda that is the true heart of the story. Nope, forget it. Lips sealed.
What I will say—and shilling or stumping or whatever be damned—is buy this book. It is a work of g-e-n-i-u-s. It is challenging in all the right ways, experimental enough to scratch that maximalist itch that we all fill our brains with and empty our wallets for (paraphrasing Steven Moore: maximalism ain’t got shit to do with page count). This is one of the freshest breaths of air from a heretofore unread author I have had the pleasure of in quite some time. Which brings up my last point.
If any members of the Academy or whatever the Canadian-equivalent is these days (are Canuck movies still people dancing behind a backlit white sheet in a wooded clearing?), I appeal to you genuinely: call Christopher Guest and make Verbatim: The Movie happen. Now. The pairing of Bursey and Guest’s sensibilities would be so delightful that I, miserable crank, would actually venture out of the yurt to see it. So, if you need a filmic reference point, there ya go: Waiting for Guffman starring Bill Gaddis. Waiting for Gaddis.
While we wait for production to start, I implore you, yet again, to get your mitts on a copy of Verbatim: A Novel and move it to the tip-top of your reading pile and fast. Do it for Art. Do it for your brain. But more than anything, do it for Randy Jong-un—he needs new mukluks and them bastards ain’t cheap.
I don’t look to books for laughter. For that, I usually just head to the nearest soup kitchen and hand out photocopies of my latest ATM receipt showing my current balance. Man! do those guys get all ruffled-up. Talk about flying feathers! The look on some of their faces, or or—(I’m wheezing just thinking about it)—or the crippled ones that try to hit me with the various ambulatata—crutches, canes, walkers—that they use to hobble-hobble-hobble down the street. I mean, c’mon—I’m a buck in the bosoms of Mmes. Health & Wealth, guys. Keep your prosthetic arms. It seems I’ve gotten off track, but you gotta love capitalism.
As I was saying: I don’t look to books for laughter. But Bursey’s had me in stitches in all the right places. I’m not going to give you any plot summary, or try to lay down for you the disarmingly-original framework he creates. Nor am I going to elaborate as to why I think that he has the best claim to the Gaddis throne of anyone working. Not a peep from me about the hilarity of parliamentary dialogue betraying the juvenile mental deficiencies of elected officials and their propensity for insulting oppositional members in forms as novel as they are varied. Nor am I even going to MENTION the story-within-a-story of Hansard, told entirely through the varyingly obsequious and uncorrupted intraoffice memoranda that is the true heart of the story. Nope, forget it. Lips sealed.
What I will say—and shilling or stumping or whatever be damned—is buy this book. It is a work of g-e-n-i-u-s. It is challenging in all the right ways, experimental enough to scratch that maximalist itch that we all fill our brains with and empty our wallets for (paraphrasing Steven Moore: maximalism ain’t got shit to do with page count). This is one of the freshest breaths of air from a heretofore unread author I have had the pleasure of in quite some time. Which brings up my last point.
If any members of the Academy or whatever the Canadian-equivalent is these days (are Canuck movies still people dancing behind a backlit white sheet in a wooded clearing?), I appeal to you genuinely: call Christopher Guest and make Verbatim: The Movie happen. Now. The pairing of Bursey and Guest’s sensibilities would be so delightful that I, miserable crank, would actually venture out of the yurt to see it. So, if you need a filmic reference point, there ya go: Waiting for Guffman starring Bill Gaddis. Waiting for Gaddis.
While we wait for production to start, I implore you, yet again, to get your mitts on a copy of Verbatim: A Novel and move it to the tip-top of your reading pile and fast. Do it for Art. Do it for your brain. But more than anything, do it for Randy Jong-un—he needs new mukluks and them bastards ain’t cheap.
November 3, 2015
Inventive in form and brimful of subtle political satire, Verbatim is a novel of Swiftian dimensions and napalms the hypocrisies and idiocies of politicians, the bureaucratic process, and the world of Hansard transcription. I suffered fatigue completing the novel, perhaps due to decades of saturation in British political satire, which this resembles in style (knowing nowt about Canadian political satire), and thought perhaps a shorter work might have delivered a more satisfying blast. Quibbles aside, this is an original and hilarious novel that ought to be required reading on school or college poli-sci syllabi. In case you were unaware, Bursey’s second novel Mirrors on which dust has fallen has been released by Verbivoracious Press. Now you know.
May 16, 2020
Of course I like it.
But others do too, as you can read here. Just out (November 2011) is this great review from The Review of Contemporary Fiction:
+ + + +
Jeff Bursey. Verbatim: A Novel. Enfield & Wizenty, 2010. 294 pp. Cloth: $29.95.
Conventional wisdom holds that political satire should be like an acupuncturist's needle—therapeutic, carefully directed, finely honed, and, most importantly, short. After all, who would endure an acupuncture spear? Of course, unconventional political satirists—Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo come to mind—understand that politics itself is excess and cannot be lampooned modestly. Canadian Jeff Bursey's ambitious first novel is modest only in its premise—reproduce with startling hyperrealism the transcript of the inane parliamentary debates in a remote fictitious Canadian province circa 1990. The novel evolved over more than a decade—Bursey worked during that time as one of the editors for Hansard, the official record of the Canadian national parliament. That experience tells—the pages capture with scathing indictment the overblown rhetoric, the cloying tedium, the self-serving pomposity of small-minded career politicos whose floor debates center on securing funding for pork-barrel projects and insinuations about the private lives of political adversaries, while pressing issues—an imploding economy, environmental mismanagement, a floundering healthcare policy—go unaddressed. All the while, in a delightful contrapuntal narrative, we follow an exchange of office memos from the Hansard staff itself caught up in its own crisis: how to render verbatim these floor proceedings without making the politicians sound like the idiots that their every mannered utterance confirms they are? Now, exposing politicians as small is a staple of political satire. But there is a uncompromising daring to Bursey’s experimental narrative—no characters, no narrative line, no authorial direction, just the transcripts of the sessions and the in-office correspondence about those sessions. And that done with a luscious indulgent excess—close to 300 pages, most of them double-columned and in tiny print. It is a tour de force of verbal dexterity that wields irony so deftly that the book, despite its intimidating scale, both challenges and delights. [Joseph Dewey]
And, from Mark Sampson, author of Off Book, at his blog FreeRangeReading:
"What impresses about this book is how much it can convey through this very tight narrative constraint. We have a sense of the characters, their motives and their feuds. We have a sense of the province itself... it is also suffering through a lengthy and brutal recession with no relief in sight. There is a whole world created here, one with its own history and its own angst."
Read the entire review at:
http://freerangereading.blogspot.com/...
April 2014 update:
Novelist Marek Waldorf has written this on on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RBLCSDIP...
By Marek Waldorf
As exhaustive an inventory of political pettifoggery as anybody in his or her right mind could hope for, Jeff Bursey’s Verbatim perches on my shelf between ingenious literary feat & obsessive-compulsive art object. The book is lovingly produced by Enfield & Wizenty, a scrupulously faked record of legislative proceedings in an unnamed Atlantic province. With nothing but transcripts & email exchanges, Bursey builds his book from the sentence up, applying the Gaddis ear for speech-as-broken to a project whose modesty seems inextricable from the insane rigors of its ambitions—closer in spirit to the work of, say, Raymond Materson than to a GANist. There is no plot to speak of, no messages. No heroism, certainly. The inaptitudes & excoriations of the hard-to-distinguish Social Progressive (government) and Alliance (opposition) parties are conveyed with a meticulous slyness befitting a fakebook whose humor has to appear inadvertent (boobishness predominates) when not the product of labored aggression & lol insult. Bursey’s got a light touch. Dada-worthy malaprops benefit from being so conservatively sprinkled throughout:
“However, while the impossible may happen, the improbable can’t occur.”
Verbatim’s very funny even if, after a time, the sense of vacuum presses in—the only “documented” force in the universe outside these unleavened parliamentary chambers being the emendations and oversights of the equally bickersome Hansard transcription service—& starts to unsettle. In the rarefied catalog of fictionalized documentaries/transcriptions, it stands apart for its stubborn provincialism, and the strangeness of its achievement, which, like its tongue-tied representatives, lies in the refusal to mean anything more than what is being so expertly, relentlessly faked.
It also reminds me somehow of “The Battle of the Books.”
Marek Waldorf
But others do too, as you can read here. Just out (November 2011) is this great review from The Review of Contemporary Fiction:
+ + + +
Jeff Bursey. Verbatim: A Novel. Enfield & Wizenty, 2010. 294 pp. Cloth: $29.95.
Conventional wisdom holds that political satire should be like an acupuncturist's needle—therapeutic, carefully directed, finely honed, and, most importantly, short. After all, who would endure an acupuncture spear? Of course, unconventional political satirists—Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo come to mind—understand that politics itself is excess and cannot be lampooned modestly. Canadian Jeff Bursey's ambitious first novel is modest only in its premise—reproduce with startling hyperrealism the transcript of the inane parliamentary debates in a remote fictitious Canadian province circa 1990. The novel evolved over more than a decade—Bursey worked during that time as one of the editors for Hansard, the official record of the Canadian national parliament. That experience tells—the pages capture with scathing indictment the overblown rhetoric, the cloying tedium, the self-serving pomposity of small-minded career politicos whose floor debates center on securing funding for pork-barrel projects and insinuations about the private lives of political adversaries, while pressing issues—an imploding economy, environmental mismanagement, a floundering healthcare policy—go unaddressed. All the while, in a delightful contrapuntal narrative, we follow an exchange of office memos from the Hansard staff itself caught up in its own crisis: how to render verbatim these floor proceedings without making the politicians sound like the idiots that their every mannered utterance confirms they are? Now, exposing politicians as small is a staple of political satire. But there is a uncompromising daring to Bursey’s experimental narrative—no characters, no narrative line, no authorial direction, just the transcripts of the sessions and the in-office correspondence about those sessions. And that done with a luscious indulgent excess—close to 300 pages, most of them double-columned and in tiny print. It is a tour de force of verbal dexterity that wields irony so deftly that the book, despite its intimidating scale, both challenges and delights. [Joseph Dewey]
And, from Mark Sampson, author of Off Book, at his blog FreeRangeReading:
"What impresses about this book is how much it can convey through this very tight narrative constraint. We have a sense of the characters, their motives and their feuds. We have a sense of the province itself... it is also suffering through a lengthy and brutal recession with no relief in sight. There is a whole world created here, one with its own history and its own angst."
Read the entire review at:
http://freerangereading.blogspot.com/...
April 2014 update:
Novelist Marek Waldorf has written this on on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RBLCSDIP...
By Marek Waldorf
As exhaustive an inventory of political pettifoggery as anybody in his or her right mind could hope for, Jeff Bursey’s Verbatim perches on my shelf between ingenious literary feat & obsessive-compulsive art object. The book is lovingly produced by Enfield & Wizenty, a scrupulously faked record of legislative proceedings in an unnamed Atlantic province. With nothing but transcripts & email exchanges, Bursey builds his book from the sentence up, applying the Gaddis ear for speech-as-broken to a project whose modesty seems inextricable from the insane rigors of its ambitions—closer in spirit to the work of, say, Raymond Materson than to a GANist. There is no plot to speak of, no messages. No heroism, certainly. The inaptitudes & excoriations of the hard-to-distinguish Social Progressive (government) and Alliance (opposition) parties are conveyed with a meticulous slyness befitting a fakebook whose humor has to appear inadvertent (boobishness predominates) when not the product of labored aggression & lol insult. Bursey’s got a light touch. Dada-worthy malaprops benefit from being so conservatively sprinkled throughout:
“However, while the impossible may happen, the improbable can’t occur.”
Verbatim’s very funny even if, after a time, the sense of vacuum presses in—the only “documented” force in the universe outside these unleavened parliamentary chambers being the emendations and oversights of the equally bickersome Hansard transcription service—& starts to unsettle. In the rarefied catalog of fictionalized documentaries/transcriptions, it stands apart for its stubborn provincialism, and the strangeness of its achievement, which, like its tongue-tied representatives, lies in the refusal to mean anything more than what is being so expertly, relentlessly faked.
It also reminds me somehow of “The Battle of the Books.”
Marek Waldorf
December 26, 2019
I'm unprepared for this, as I meant to make final comments in the in-the-process of reading segment.
But I can't do worse than the members of parliament I just read, who are the characters in Bursey's book, and who are, as characters also not characters, for the realism of the novel is verbatim. Verbatim. They are Hansard held, recorded not depicted; if on occasion they break free, attempt to break free, Bursey flings the rules of Hansard at them, and they are back in the real world of the precise manuscript of the Hansard.
To the reader, this means that we are asked to read a series of parliamentary sessions, which are inevitably boring, though if we are human, we take interest in seeing matters resolved, such as whether the miners will be put to work or not. But then the entertainment the reader requests comes in the form of the parliamentarians insulting each other, speaking absurdly, poorly, oddly, pettily, incompetently, repetetively, and editedly (though we are not at all sure, Bursey lets us know, when and where, as an example of an edited passage is provided), which we would enjoy for the real human comedy of people in power behaving like idiots except that we have now moved over to the side of the miners and we would like that they are seen to. They will not be. That is not a spoiler, as I am discussing a realistic novel. So we readers have accepted Bursey's novel, his methodology, only to be undermined by Bursey's novel, his methodology.
J'accuse! This novel gave me a beating. A very modern beating. I expected satire arranged by Bursey, and what I got was satire arranged by reality. If these pages were handed to me and I was told that these were genuine pages from Canadian provincial parliament, I would have believed it. Hence the five stars. And hence my lack of complaint over my own suffering. Imagine the suffering of a novelist who entered the world of Hansard, of provincial parliament, so deeply that he was able to reproduce it convincingly. Over the course of the year or so during which the book takes place, several deaths occur, but that happens in fiction. My concern is Bursey. Did he survive this? Can he write an ordinary, say, e-mail, after becoming a Hansardian proseman? Don't table that--I don't actually want to know. If ever a novelist deserved to disappear into his own novel it is Bursey.
Why did he do this? What was he after? I've intimated a certain sadistic quality. Let that remain an intimation. The book is interspersed with the attempts by the newly hired director of Hansard to bring about reform, and his travails--the worst or most painful to read about in my own opinion were his efforts to get his working environment a proper temperature. I would spoil if I went on about the director, and of course if I gave my favorable opinion of the way the book comes to parliamentarian end. All I will say is that during the last session, did the author luck into an acceleration of sarcasm, a condensation of absurdity? Because nothing about it was unreal.
I think I should also remark that if I was indeed abused by Mr. Bursey, I come out of the book far better off than several of those he allowed reality to toy with in his novel.
Certainly there will be those who would call this book plotless. Maybe that's fair, but it is not clueless, and it has a hoek, like movies and novels are supposed to have, in this case a Windhoek, which has the most subtle of payoffs. But more than is the case with most novels, in this one the reader must spend a great deal of time outside the novel allowing its pummelings to sink in. My favorite joke is extra-textual in the sense that if concerns the process of the Hansardesque? movement of prose to book. The book is not just filled with poor writing and editing, it is about poor writing and editing. So, did Bursey edit the book? If you run into him--there's a ghost town in the province, which is my guess as to where he now spends his crepusculars--go ahead and ask, but don't trust the answer.
Addumbdumb: Who should read this book? A sort of review of the book, an afterword, finally begins the last paragraph with "VERBATIM will likely not appeal to all readers." Sure, I get it, and so no offense. But of what book can we not say the same? Am I glad I read the book? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Not in the way I normally enjoy a novel. It brutalized me. Would I recommend the book? Yes. To whom? To readers. All readers? Damn right.
(This is already, perhaps an hour after I have finished reading the novel, asserting itself as one of those novels that remains forever in the mind, and though I forgot to mention that I often laughed, queitly and for long, or out loud and for varying periods [sometimes the frustration felt at the discussion of legislation to alleviate human problems cheated me of laughs--there are a wealth of timely and funny insults, not paliamentarian, but...], I am not prepared to move on to the next book. The brain needs to freely toss this one about for a while. I won't say tour d' force, and not just because of my spelling concerns, but I need to think of something I like better, and better than hyperreal, which would ordinarily suffice.)
But I can't do worse than the members of parliament I just read, who are the characters in Bursey's book, and who are, as characters also not characters, for the realism of the novel is verbatim. Verbatim. They are Hansard held, recorded not depicted; if on occasion they break free, attempt to break free, Bursey flings the rules of Hansard at them, and they are back in the real world of the precise manuscript of the Hansard.
To the reader, this means that we are asked to read a series of parliamentary sessions, which are inevitably boring, though if we are human, we take interest in seeing matters resolved, such as whether the miners will be put to work or not. But then the entertainment the reader requests comes in the form of the parliamentarians insulting each other, speaking absurdly, poorly, oddly, pettily, incompetently, repetetively, and editedly (though we are not at all sure, Bursey lets us know, when and where, as an example of an edited passage is provided), which we would enjoy for the real human comedy of people in power behaving like idiots except that we have now moved over to the side of the miners and we would like that they are seen to. They will not be. That is not a spoiler, as I am discussing a realistic novel. So we readers have accepted Bursey's novel, his methodology, only to be undermined by Bursey's novel, his methodology.
J'accuse! This novel gave me a beating. A very modern beating. I expected satire arranged by Bursey, and what I got was satire arranged by reality. If these pages were handed to me and I was told that these were genuine pages from Canadian provincial parliament, I would have believed it. Hence the five stars. And hence my lack of complaint over my own suffering. Imagine the suffering of a novelist who entered the world of Hansard, of provincial parliament, so deeply that he was able to reproduce it convincingly. Over the course of the year or so during which the book takes place, several deaths occur, but that happens in fiction. My concern is Bursey. Did he survive this? Can he write an ordinary, say, e-mail, after becoming a Hansardian proseman? Don't table that--I don't actually want to know. If ever a novelist deserved to disappear into his own novel it is Bursey.
Why did he do this? What was he after? I've intimated a certain sadistic quality. Let that remain an intimation. The book is interspersed with the attempts by the newly hired director of Hansard to bring about reform, and his travails--the worst or most painful to read about in my own opinion were his efforts to get his working environment a proper temperature. I would spoil if I went on about the director, and of course if I gave my favorable opinion of the way the book comes to parliamentarian end. All I will say is that during the last session, did the author luck into an acceleration of sarcasm, a condensation of absurdity? Because nothing about it was unreal.
I think I should also remark that if I was indeed abused by Mr. Bursey, I come out of the book far better off than several of those he allowed reality to toy with in his novel.
Certainly there will be those who would call this book plotless. Maybe that's fair, but it is not clueless, and it has a hoek, like movies and novels are supposed to have, in this case a Windhoek, which has the most subtle of payoffs. But more than is the case with most novels, in this one the reader must spend a great deal of time outside the novel allowing its pummelings to sink in. My favorite joke is extra-textual in the sense that if concerns the process of the Hansardesque? movement of prose to book. The book is not just filled with poor writing and editing, it is about poor writing and editing. So, did Bursey edit the book? If you run into him--there's a ghost town in the province, which is my guess as to where he now spends his crepusculars--go ahead and ask, but don't trust the answer.
Addumbdumb: Who should read this book? A sort of review of the book, an afterword, finally begins the last paragraph with "VERBATIM will likely not appeal to all readers." Sure, I get it, and so no offense. But of what book can we not say the same? Am I glad I read the book? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Not in the way I normally enjoy a novel. It brutalized me. Would I recommend the book? Yes. To whom? To readers. All readers? Damn right.
(This is already, perhaps an hour after I have finished reading the novel, asserting itself as one of those novels that remains forever in the mind, and though I forgot to mention that I often laughed, queitly and for long, or out loud and for varying periods [sometimes the frustration felt at the discussion of legislation to alleviate human problems cheated me of laughs--there are a wealth of timely and funny insults, not paliamentarian, but...], I am not prepared to move on to the next book. The brain needs to freely toss this one about for a while. I won't say tour d' force, and not just because of my spelling concerns, but I need to think of something I like better, and better than hyperreal, which would ordinarily suffice.)
Want to read
March 25, 2018OVERVIEW:
(Oh, editor, where art thou?) Intermittently lyrical. The quality of the creativity and innovation regularly falls beneath the author's aspirations. Better might be possible...if not necessarily by the same author's hand. The stuff of coterie publishers. It's no Venus de Milo.
(WELL-NIGH) VERBATIM PROMOTION OF CANADIAN INNOVATION [Apologies to Hansard]:
The Deputy Speaker:
There are about four minutes remaining in the time provided for private members' business.
Ms. Linda LaPointe (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, Lib):
Canada is a country of innovators. From pacemakers to peanut butter, walkie-talkies, the Canadarm, and life jackets, [from drama to verse, and literary criticism to novels,] in ways grand and small, we Canadians have made the world around us better through our ingenuity. We have always understood that better is possible. Let me say it again: better is always possible. Time after time, we have used curiosity, courage, creativity, and collaboration to create positive change for ourselves and the world. However, progress does not happen without commitment and effort.
Finally, in a knowledge-based economy, a government must work to protect the ideas of Canadian innovators and entrepreneurs. Ensuring Canadian intellectual property rules are up to date and reflect the world we live in is fundamental to creating and retaining wealth generated from Canada's research, development, talent, and training.
Canadians are known for their innovative spirit, and this spirit has been instrumental in the creation of the industries and jobs responsible for building and growing Canada's middle class. Today, this same innovative drive is responsible for new jobs and good export opportunities in growing industries, all the while helping to transform jobs in existing industries.
Our government is taking the next steps to transform Canada's innovation programs, rules, and regulations, making them easier to access and to use. This is expanding support for Canadian companies that want to scale up and take their innovations to the international marketplace.
The innovations of today will create new and exciting job opportunities for the workers of today and will create better job opportunities for our children and grandchildren. I am certain that this [book] will generate many economic spinoffs in my riding today and in the years to come.
HAIKU:
The Idiot Wind of Post-Modernism
You think you're a god?
You have not proven yourself.
You're all piss and wind.
Charcoterie
Gross, ugly, sprawling.
Rip it off or rip it up,
And you call it art?
Heroic Labours
Heroic labours
Of the maximalust scribe
Don't count for nothing.
SOUNDTRACK:
Television - "Venus [De Milo]"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4f3d5Zd...
(Oh, editor, where art thou?) Intermittently lyrical. The quality of the creativity and innovation regularly falls beneath the author's aspirations. Better might be possible...if not necessarily by the same author's hand. The stuff of coterie publishers. It's no Venus de Milo.
(WELL-NIGH) VERBATIM PROMOTION OF CANADIAN INNOVATION [Apologies to Hansard]:
The Deputy Speaker:
There are about four minutes remaining in the time provided for private members' business.
Ms. Linda LaPointe (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, Lib):
Canada is a country of innovators. From pacemakers to peanut butter, walkie-talkies, the Canadarm, and life jackets, [from drama to verse, and literary criticism to novels,] in ways grand and small, we Canadians have made the world around us better through our ingenuity. We have always understood that better is possible. Let me say it again: better is always possible. Time after time, we have used curiosity, courage, creativity, and collaboration to create positive change for ourselves and the world. However, progress does not happen without commitment and effort.
Finally, in a knowledge-based economy, a government must work to protect the ideas of Canadian innovators and entrepreneurs. Ensuring Canadian intellectual property rules are up to date and reflect the world we live in is fundamental to creating and retaining wealth generated from Canada's research, development, talent, and training.
Canadians are known for their innovative spirit, and this spirit has been instrumental in the creation of the industries and jobs responsible for building and growing Canada's middle class. Today, this same innovative drive is responsible for new jobs and good export opportunities in growing industries, all the while helping to transform jobs in existing industries.
Our government is taking the next steps to transform Canada's innovation programs, rules, and regulations, making them easier to access and to use. This is expanding support for Canadian companies that want to scale up and take their innovations to the international marketplace.
The innovations of today will create new and exciting job opportunities for the workers of today and will create better job opportunities for our children and grandchildren. I am certain that this [book] will generate many economic spinoffs in my riding today and in the years to come.
HAIKU:
The Idiot Wind of Post-Modernism
You think you're a god?
You have not proven yourself.
You're all piss and wind.
Charcoterie
Gross, ugly, sprawling.
Rip it off or rip it up,
And you call it art?
Heroic Labours
Heroic labours
Of the maximalust scribe
Don't count for nothing.
SOUNDTRACK:
Television - "Venus [De Milo]"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4f3d5Zd...
November 16, 2018
This ‘United Stateser’ (it’s in the novel) just finished fellow Goodreads author Jeff Bursey’s first novel “Verbatim: A Novel” and now it’s time to dish, re-view, or more generally riff on what return to reading investment is likely for ya’ll other samplers. Is it a novel? Yes, of course it is, however unconventional, experimental or morphological in format bending. It reads like a technical transcript of collaged memos and parliamentary proceedings over the course of a year from some fictitious “Nuk” province’s recorded “doings” of government means & ways. As such it’s dry to the palate until one gets embedded within the confines of people’s engagement with democracy and governance as it really is, a test of human nature against itself with the goal of progress towards ends of betterment. It’s a messy mishmash that will reign as long as we do. Government by, for and of the people is always uneven even at its best; utopia a pipedream. Bursey captures this unevenness quite well, has command of parliamentary flows and stoppages, its sundry qualmishness and few beacons of light signaling mankind's dance with nature and organizing elements to subdue his animal nature, hers of course too. The book succeeds, it is a record of records, but also manages to suss out characters’ peaks and valleys, foibles and firmament, and throughout all our march upon heaven on earth. Forget that it is unobtainable and keep in step; it’s all we have.
January 21, 2022
Verbatim is a real masterpiece of imaginative writing and a unique reading experience. The book is about something called a "hansard". A "hansard" is the official transcript of a parliamentary proceeding (the US equivalent would be something like the Congressional Record). Verbatim contains two things - one, "hansards," and second, e-mails related to hansards and the process of creating them and the struggles of those who create them. The book is also a Gaddis-like satire on government as well (as the government record is primarily a record of voices, it feels very Gaddis-like). So it operates on several levels.
But the brilliance, the real genius of the novel for me lies in the meta-textual concepts and their relationship to each other. On the one hand you have the hansard "text," the official "text" - which is related to its own "ur-text" - the actual content of the parliamentary debate. Then you have the commentary on and changes made to the hansard text (in the e-mail exchanges, for example, the form of the hansard is changed by the new hansard director). Then of course you have the text of the novel as written by the author (perhaps with his own unconscious ur-text). This creates all kind of incredible things that someone who loves imaginative fiction can't get enough of. It creates a "floating" text - kind of like an untrustworthy narrator but here the text-in-itself is untrustworthy. And what is really truly unique about Verbatim is that the hansard is supposed to be an "official" text - it's supposed to be the "real text". And yet because of the limitations of the hansard it cannot be "real".
An example, early on "Ms Morrison" apologizes for remarks, but the remarks are not in the text (they have been deleted by the hansard editors) - maybe - when you look back you see "An Hon. Member: (Inaudible) weasel (inaudible) lying!" Is this Ms Morrison? It's unclear and ambiguous. But as hansard (official text) it is not permitted to reflect the ur-text. It's great. The untrustworthy text is forced upon you as a necessary feature of the text.
I should add just came across a discussion within the hansard text of permitted discussion within the ur-text - the parliament members are not supposed to use the personal names of the other members. So you have within the hansard text reflections of the ur-text also limiting itself.
Another example which takes the book to new levels of "meta" is in the "ur-text" an insult is shouted. Then for purposes of the hansard text (within the "ur-world") - they retire to listen to the tape, where the content of the insult is clear but not who said it. So the text can consult the "ur-text" but that might result in complete clarity. You have an untrustworthy text _and_ ur-text. The effect of this ambiguity and complexity is enormously enjoyable (to me anyway).
The hansard e-mail discussions are fascinating as a reflection on the hansard process but also in how they change the text. The new hansard director for example requires them to change contractions to the contraction - "cannot" to "can't", even though for many decades the hansard tradition has not included that. So the text admits that it has been false to the ur-text. And then in changing the capitalization content the text changes itself as text - not just in relation to the ur-text.
The debates themselves within the hansards are fascinating, but I found most of the interest related to the above relationships. The "story lines" which related to more personal items with respect to the parliament members have more of the confusion and redaction described above. Some of it is a puzzle - you can't figure out what is going on, because of the limitations of the hansard text.
There are too many examples to give, and providing them would be kind of a spoiler, but the novel is incredibly interesting along these lines, and the entertainment value of the text itself enormous even without considering it along these lines. There's a tremendous sense of humor throughout the book, very much high satire, although as the parliament of is a Canadian province, I suspect some of it went over my head. But the concerns of the parliament are those traditionally those of government - so it seems familiar enough. They argue over building hospitals and roads, and making their parks more popular.
But this level of textual complexity is rare - and the idea of "text-in-itself" being untrustworthy as a theme I've only seen in a couple of other places - this work should have a lot of value to those interested in the topic (I could see Derrida writing a whole book on Verbatim). I don't mean this to scare anyone off - once the "trick" of the book is figured out the book is very easy to read and enjoyable in a traditional sense. It's very fun. It would make a phenomenal play (in my view) - not as much a movie (although a movie version could be done by a very creative director).
So very strongly recommended to all, especially my friends and followers who are interested in imaginative writing (my "Wolfe-Lafferty" friends). For the rest, I can assure you this will be the most "interesting" and "fun" book you read in 2022 (the fun-factor is very high here with dozens of moments of spontaneous laughter), and one of the most enjoyable.
But the brilliance, the real genius of the novel for me lies in the meta-textual concepts and their relationship to each other. On the one hand you have the hansard "text," the official "text" - which is related to its own "ur-text" - the actual content of the parliamentary debate. Then you have the commentary on and changes made to the hansard text (in the e-mail exchanges, for example, the form of the hansard is changed by the new hansard director). Then of course you have the text of the novel as written by the author (perhaps with his own unconscious ur-text). This creates all kind of incredible things that someone who loves imaginative fiction can't get enough of. It creates a "floating" text - kind of like an untrustworthy narrator but here the text-in-itself is untrustworthy. And what is really truly unique about Verbatim is that the hansard is supposed to be an "official" text - it's supposed to be the "real text". And yet because of the limitations of the hansard it cannot be "real".
An example, early on "Ms Morrison" apologizes for remarks, but the remarks are not in the text (they have been deleted by the hansard editors) - maybe - when you look back you see "An Hon. Member: (Inaudible) weasel (inaudible) lying!" Is this Ms Morrison? It's unclear and ambiguous. But as hansard (official text) it is not permitted to reflect the ur-text. It's great. The untrustworthy text is forced upon you as a necessary feature of the text.
I should add just came across a discussion within the hansard text of permitted discussion within the ur-text - the parliament members are not supposed to use the personal names of the other members. So you have within the hansard text reflections of the ur-text also limiting itself.
Another example which takes the book to new levels of "meta" is in the "ur-text" an insult is shouted. Then for purposes of the hansard text (within the "ur-world") - they retire to listen to the tape, where the content of the insult is clear but not who said it. So the text can consult the "ur-text" but that might result in complete clarity. You have an untrustworthy text _and_ ur-text. The effect of this ambiguity and complexity is enormously enjoyable (to me anyway).
The hansard e-mail discussions are fascinating as a reflection on the hansard process but also in how they change the text. The new hansard director for example requires them to change contractions to the contraction - "cannot" to "can't", even though for many decades the hansard tradition has not included that. So the text admits that it has been false to the ur-text. And then in changing the capitalization content the text changes itself as text - not just in relation to the ur-text.
The debates themselves within the hansards are fascinating, but I found most of the interest related to the above relationships. The "story lines" which related to more personal items with respect to the parliament members have more of the confusion and redaction described above. Some of it is a puzzle - you can't figure out what is going on, because of the limitations of the hansard text.
There are too many examples to give, and providing them would be kind of a spoiler, but the novel is incredibly interesting along these lines, and the entertainment value of the text itself enormous even without considering it along these lines. There's a tremendous sense of humor throughout the book, very much high satire, although as the parliament of is a Canadian province, I suspect some of it went over my head. But the concerns of the parliament are those traditionally those of government - so it seems familiar enough. They argue over building hospitals and roads, and making their parks more popular.
But this level of textual complexity is rare - and the idea of "text-in-itself" being untrustworthy as a theme I've only seen in a couple of other places - this work should have a lot of value to those interested in the topic (I could see Derrida writing a whole book on Verbatim). I don't mean this to scare anyone off - once the "trick" of the book is figured out the book is very easy to read and enjoyable in a traditional sense. It's very fun. It would make a phenomenal play (in my view) - not as much a movie (although a movie version could be done by a very creative director).
So very strongly recommended to all, especially my friends and followers who are interested in imaginative writing (my "Wolfe-Lafferty" friends). For the rest, I can assure you this will be the most "interesting" and "fun" book you read in 2022 (the fun-factor is very high here with dozens of moments of spontaneous laughter), and one of the most enjoyable.
June 5, 2011
Perhaps the first novel told through parliamentary debates, Verbatim is presented as a Hansard document (the organisation that transcribes the debates), and is interspersed by office memos and letters between the new Hansard director and various staffers and parliamentary officials– which surprisingly creates tension as the novel develops. Instead of over-the-top situations which many other writers may have chosen, Bursey chooses subtle satire here, and yet there's no shortage of humour, a wealth of insight, a terrific ear for dialogue, and a book that's a grammarian's delight (e.g. the internal discussions on editorial style and the changes that are reflected on the page). For me this was a timely book, as I was reading it during the Canadian federal election, thinking that there are parallels here, with one's engagement in the book being not dissimilar to one's engagement in politics. Kudos to both author and publisher for taking chances. Hear, hear!
November 17, 2022
A novel that makes language and form the main character, consisting entirely of transcripts, letters and emails among members of a fictional Canadian province’s parliament. This was very funny, I had a great time with it. Despite its experimental style, it was very readable and managed to establish its characters well, not that characters particularly matter here. Not only is it good political satire, it’s a comment on the frustrations of bureaucracy and the absurdity that results from hierarchical systems of organization. If the rest of Bursey’s work is as good as this, consider me a fan.
June 22, 2022
Why is Verbatim: a novel not available in every bookstore in the world? Why is not on every syllabus in every college in the world? Why are all of you not reading this Jeff Bursey masterpiece? I very rarely write a review or synopsis and say something is a masterpiece. Nor do I write that a book is unique in many ways. I can never know for sure if a book is “one of a kind.” I do know that Verbatim: a novel is unlike anything you have read before and I’m positive it’s a masterpiece. I’m sure most of you have read tons of novels that take place in the parliament of Canada with conversations told in a multitude of ways that are so smart and spot-on its only comparison is William Gaddis’ J R.
I’m sure you said to yourself, another Hansard metafiction novel whose many crazy fonts made up in weird emails. Another one of these???
Sorry for the comedy, I was joking of course. No, there’s isn’t anything else like this (J R is similar in its satirical and laugh out loud dialogue). This is and was a one of a kind reading experience and Jeff Bursey is brilliant.
A thought provoking and erudite novel written by a damn good writer who created something that you rarely see in current fiction. That good enough of a blurb for you? Please seek this out. You’ll be better for it.
I’m sure you said to yourself, another Hansard metafiction novel whose many crazy fonts made up in weird emails. Another one of these???
Sorry for the comedy, I was joking of course. No, there’s isn’t anything else like this (J R is similar in its satirical and laugh out loud dialogue). This is and was a one of a kind reading experience and Jeff Bursey is brilliant.
A thought provoking and erudite novel written by a damn good writer who created something that you rarely see in current fiction. That good enough of a blurb for you? Please seek this out. You’ll be better for it.
July 13, 2020
Hear, hear!
This gave me nightmares. I work in government, so it led me to dream of odd politically generated work scenarios.
Written in Hansard transcript, the style of which changes ever so subtly according to infighting amongst the editors, was incredibly inventive. This book was so hyper real. The dry humour and parliamentary barbs amongst the elected members seemed so probable - from what I’ve read in Hansard over the years.
It’s a true original, for sure.
This gave me nightmares. I work in government, so it led me to dream of odd politically generated work scenarios.
Written in Hansard transcript, the style of which changes ever so subtly according to infighting amongst the editors, was incredibly inventive. This book was so hyper real. The dry humour and parliamentary barbs amongst the elected members seemed so probable - from what I’ve read in Hansard over the years.
It’s a true original, for sure.
Read
May 2, 2020One for the politicos, the Gaddis readers and fans of interpersonal backstabbing and trickery.
A pairing of language that captures the essence of the house immaculately and creates a living breathing province with MPs at the ready to take the piss out of each other in the most (and sometimes not at all) parliamentary fashion, combined with the interpersonal conspiracies of Gaddis (as opposed to the bizarre big corporation conspiracies of Pynchon), make this well worth the read.
Verbatim eases you into its governmental ecosystem with the string of opening events, all is well and good in politics, and then it clicks: releasing the breaks for a hilarious roller coaster ride where you get your usual dose of betrayal expected from government and people are as stupid as they sound, but they sure don’t know it themselves.
I think this one will grow on me more as time goes on. A reminder to respect those you rely on in work, try not to piss anyone off. We all need that reminder every now and then, and this is a reminder of the highest calibre.
I thoroughly look forward to reading Mirrors on which dust has fallen.
A pairing of language that captures the essence of the house immaculately and creates a living breathing province with MPs at the ready to take the piss out of each other in the most (and sometimes not at all) parliamentary fashion, combined with the interpersonal conspiracies of Gaddis (as opposed to the bizarre big corporation conspiracies of Pynchon), make this well worth the read.
Verbatim eases you into its governmental ecosystem with the string of opening events, all is well and good in politics, and then it clicks: releasing the breaks for a hilarious roller coaster ride where you get your usual dose of betrayal expected from government and people are as stupid as they sound, but they sure don’t know it themselves.
I think this one will grow on me more as time goes on. A reminder to respect those you rely on in work, try not to piss anyone off. We all need that reminder every now and then, and this is a reminder of the highest calibre.
I thoroughly look forward to reading Mirrors on which dust has fallen.
Read
April 27, 2017 A challenging, difficult, and rewarding novel. Partisan politics is clearly displayed in its own words to be a bankrupt system, and the need for some kind of replacement is brilliantly articulated in the course of the work. It is a novel without a narrative voice composed entirely of transcripts, the Hansard record of an imaginary Canadian province, interspersed with administrative memos, all of which demonstrate the tremendous amount of backroom intrigue that characterizes, one suspects, the dealings of so many administrative bodies and our current age.
July 6, 2011
Garry Trudeau, who writes and draws _Doonesbury_, comments that a satire is totally unfair -- to the target. Trudeau the satirist feels no pangs of guilt and enjoys his job as satirist with relish, even glee.
With Bursey's _Verbatim: A Novel_, it gets hard to say where the hyper-realism of memos, notes and transcriptions ends and the satire begins. I expect this delicious ambiguity is deliberate, like so much else in the novel, deliberate and thematically relevant. Of the many human flaws, selfishness is perhaps most on display here, selfishness that leads to individuals taking themselves, and only themselves, terribly seriously. This does not mean they take their work as elected representatives and civil servants very seriously. Decay in thought leads to decay in language, which then leads to further decay in talk. Bursey's presents, and I swear it feels like he's recorded, for your consideration, the ins and outs of Hansard in a fictional Canadian province. The satire of human behaviour, with its levels of deception and meaning, gets robust and startlingly effective support from the novel's structure. What's really happening in a provincial legislature? How does Canadian democracy 'really' work? You can check the public records, of course. But for a better understanding, read _Verbatim: A Novel_.
With Bursey's _Verbatim: A Novel_, it gets hard to say where the hyper-realism of memos, notes and transcriptions ends and the satire begins. I expect this delicious ambiguity is deliberate, like so much else in the novel, deliberate and thematically relevant. Of the many human flaws, selfishness is perhaps most on display here, selfishness that leads to individuals taking themselves, and only themselves, terribly seriously. This does not mean they take their work as elected representatives and civil servants very seriously. Decay in thought leads to decay in language, which then leads to further decay in talk. Bursey's presents, and I swear it feels like he's recorded, for your consideration, the ins and outs of Hansard in a fictional Canadian province. The satire of human behaviour, with its levels of deception and meaning, gets robust and startlingly effective support from the novel's structure. What's really happening in a provincial legislature? How does Canadian democracy 'really' work? You can check the public records, of course. But for a better understanding, read _Verbatim: A Novel_.
May 9, 2015
As exhaustive an inventory of political pettifoggery as anybody in his or her right mind could hope for, Jeff Bursey’s Verbatim perches on my shelf between ingenious literary feat & obsessive-compulsive art object. The book is lovingly produced by Enfield & Wizenty, a scrupulously faked record of legislative proceedings in an unnamed Atlantic province. With nothing but transcripts & email exchanges, Bursey builds his book from the sentence up, applying the Gaddis ear for speech-as-broken to a project whose modesty seems inextricable from the insane rigors of its ambitions—closer in spirit to the work of, say, Raymond Materson than to a GANist. There is no plot to speak of, no messages. No heroism, certainly. The inaptitudes & excoriations of the hard-to-distinguish Social Progressive (government) and Alliance (opposition) parties are conveyed with a meticulous slyness befitting a fakebook whose humor has to appear inadvertent (boobishness predominates) when not the product of labored aggression & lol insult. Bursey’s got a light touch. Dada-worthy malaprops benefit from being so conservatively sprinkled throughout:
“However, while the impossible may happen, the improbable can’t occur.”
Verbatim’s very funny even if, after a time, the sense of vacuum presses in—the only “documented” force in the universe outside these unleavened parliamentary chambers being the emendations and oversights of the equally bickersome Hansard transcription service—& starts to unsettle. In the rarefied catalog of fictionalized documentaries/transcriptions, it stands apart for its stubborn provincialism, and the strangeness of its achievement, which, like its tongue-tied representatives, lies in the refusal to mean anything more than what is being so expertly, relentlessly faked.
It also reminds me somehow of “The Battle of the Books.”
(Same review on Amazon)
“However, while the impossible may happen, the improbable can’t occur.”
Verbatim’s very funny even if, after a time, the sense of vacuum presses in—the only “documented” force in the universe outside these unleavened parliamentary chambers being the emendations and oversights of the equally bickersome Hansard transcription service—& starts to unsettle. In the rarefied catalog of fictionalized documentaries/transcriptions, it stands apart for its stubborn provincialism, and the strangeness of its achievement, which, like its tongue-tied representatives, lies in the refusal to mean anything more than what is being so expertly, relentlessly faked.
It also reminds me somehow of “The Battle of the Books.”
(Same review on Amazon)
Read
January 29, 2022I have read this novel before. Indeed--full disclosure--my initial detailed review is re-published at the end of this new paperback edition. Jeff Bursey has c slow-boiling humour in this novreated a novel that is almost entirely differenr from anything else out there by using the parliamentary transcripts of a provincial Hansard, with accompanying memos, e-mails, and similar documents, to present roughly a year in the life of a Canadian province in the 1990s as seen from within the wheels of government. The "from within" idea is very important because one of Bursey's huge accomplishments in this novel is not completely seen until his next novel, Mirrors on which dust has fallen, which shows the same province over much the same time, but from the perspective of the population instead. Despite the insistence of politicians on page after page of Verbatim that they are ever-engaged in attending to the pressing needs of the people, apart from a few minor overlaps in the news, one might read Mirrors... without thinking of the government at all. In addition to showing over an extended range just how irrelevant most of the efforts of politicians of all stripes can be, Bursey also manages a slow-boiling humour in Verbatim that gets increasingly funny over time. Sadly, brilliantly, still relevant.
January 30, 2011
Bursey's reproduction of speech patterns and over-the-top hyperbole of Canadian parliament filtered through the arcane editorial processes of Hansard is note-perfect (I particularly love that, as in real life Hansard transcripts, bits of random hubbub by members are reported as "Some Hon. Members: Oh! Oh!" and "Some Hon. Members: Resign! Resign!"). As the members of each party repeatedly attack and mock the other, the statements prove that Parliament is, like most institutions, hardly a step above an elementary school in pettiness, vindictiveness, wilful blindness, purposeful obtuseness, and one-upmanship. As Bursey writes it, there are big, important issues out there, but when Parliament is in session, he who shouts the loudest and longest wins. This is hardly a new idea, but Bursey's inventiveness and integrity to the style and cause of his satire breathes new life into a stale theme. The epigraph by Wyndham Lewis is instructive: "Should we describe it as Satire (merely because it does not refine the truth?) or should we call it realism?" Bursey's satire is well-nigh indistinguishable from the real thing.
Read the rest of the review here.
Read the rest of the review here.
June 18, 2011
Verbatim: A Novel, lacks the structure, plot, character development and slow-building tension that typically define the genre. It is a series of chronological fake Hansard transcripts perfectly replicating the real thing in style and content, interspersed with occasional bureaucratic memos. What makes it more readable than actual parliamentary transcripts is the biting satire, its awareness of its own absurdity. Elected officials in a fictional Maritime province engage in high-culture trash talk and meaningless points of order as ruthless policies are passed with little recourse. Lip service is paid to the poor for the sake of political points in the next election, but until marginalized parties enter the fray it’s difficult to discern left from right. It’s a beautiful parody and an educational expose, though plot and character development would have reduced the slog factor in 294 pages of transcript. Still, Verbatim’s well worth the effort for political junkies and open-minded readers.
Read
December 22, 2010I have absolutely no idea how to rate this novel. One of the things I do for a living is far too close to the subject matter for me to have a clue how other people will find it. So I'll say I found parts of it funny, and many events in it cringe-inducing and entirely plausible, but no star rating from me.
March 12, 2016
A brilliant novel. Innovative form - told in Hansard debates, letters, and lists of legislative members. Experimental. Satisfying. Tragic. Darkly hilarious at times. Very imaginative. Politics and human nature are the broad themes, but the book goes deep into the meaning of language, truth, and justice. Low and high. Loved it.
February 21, 2013
I enjoyed this book, but it was difficult to get through, I must admit.
It is packed with humor and I laughed out loud a few times - quite a few times. But, the denseness of the content was a bit daunting, and I had trouble with where the story was going.
It is packed with humor and I laughed out loud a few times - quite a few times. But, the denseness of the content was a bit daunting, and I had trouble with where the story was going.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews