Robert Lopez, Kamby Bolongo Mean River (Dzanc Books, 2009)"In his second novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez once again taps a deeply comedic voice to record a character’s gradual estrangement and withdrawal from the world in which he’s ensnared. Whereas in Lopez’s first novel, Part of the World, the protagonist’s struggle takes place in the world at large, in Kamby Bolongo Mean River our protagonist is confined in an observation cell containing only a bed and a telephone. Behind the two-way glass, white coated doctors observe the incarcerated narrator as he chooses to answer or not answer incoming calls. The sudden ringing of the phone occasionally terrorizes the man whose frequent masturbation spells may or may not be a subject of interest to whoever these observational authorities are.
In the opening pages of the novel, the narrator describes the method he has developed for communicating with the wrong numbers and probable impersonators calling on his phone. Implicit in his method is a primer for the reader on how to read this book:
The trouble is when I listen I don’t listen for the words. I listen for what is between the words and behind them. The way you do this is to listen to how the voice sounds. If you concentrate on the words you lose the voice and the voice is always too important to lose. How the voice pronounces each word is probably the most important thing.
This opening establishes the novel’s ongoing textual conflict while introducing the story to be told: a voice sheds itself of all the words that have been perpetrated upon it. Words, our narrator tells us, are double-coded and not reliable at face value, and though he seems to have no particular grievance with this reality, he’s aware that this precondition always impinges on him: 'What you have to do is understand how people use words and go from there.'
From there we accompany our narrator’s glibly droll voice through a long “conversation with himself” in which he traces back through his remembered life even as he describes the peculiar and perverse routine of his incarceration. It seems he entered into the custody of his observers sometime during adolescence, although he has no idea how long ago that was, perhaps years. He remembers growing up in Injury, Alaska, where he lived with his mother and his older brother, Charlie. The narrator and Charlie were constant companions, boxing partners, actors, mischievous youths. They were underprivileged, and their mother lost job after job for refusing the sexual advances of her bosses:
She said she had a long day at work fending off her cruel and unusual boss who was a pervert. She said he showed her his situation right there in the middle of the office. She said he said what do you think about that and Mother said I think I’m fired again.
Even as the narrator recounts his past, the double-coding of language is always at the heart of this novel, and it’s a source of its constant humor:
How we knew mother was thinking about her day is I asked her once. I said what are you doing Mother and this is when she said I am thinking about my day. The way she said it was please stop talking and play your stupid fucking tac-tac-toe game.
When the narrator and Charlie misbehave, their mother punishes them by making them read the dictionary. When they are expelled from school, their mother sits them in front of an educational video about an African slave who runs away from his captors, is caught, and has his foot caught off. What they are supposed to learn from this video and how they should identify with it is not explained to them, but the mother is doing to her best to reconcile to the boys to the “cruel and unusual” concept of worldly authority, the order of which she seems to find in language. Consequently, our narrator identifies with security guards and military policemen, affecting their language when answering the incoming calls in his observation cell.
Lopez’ ability to create an authentic, consistent voice from the narrator’s cobbled lexicon of euphemisms and clichés (often set within the parroting of various authority figures) is remarkable. Lopez combs together exhausted and meaningless phrases to create a comic tapestry of cliché that reads completely new and true. It is a deceptively simple voice that beguiles the reader with its awkward usages, and it quickly engenders sympathy with the narrator for having such a limited descriptor set. Often this language feels wholly out of the narrator’s control, as in the sentence 'I had curly hair when I played baseball but now I am bald like a baby’s bottom like an eagle'; the double simile at the end reads like an automatic reflex, as if the language is preset and self-articulating.
As the novel progresses, the narrator takes a distanced and precocious stance to the language of his situation. More and more he focuses on the voices of his interlocutors, choosing to disregard the literal operation of language. 'How the voice pronounces each word is probably the most important thing.' Language is reduced to a medium not composed of words with specific meanings but of phonetic moments. It’s as if he has chosen to ignore the grammatical and focus solely on the phonological, like a foreigner inferring meaning completely off the tone and pitch of a conversation that is otherwise incomprehensible.
At the same time, the narrator is aware of his linguistic limitations and understands that they are part and parcel with language itself. This awareness means that our narrator isn’t a complete victim: he is driven to find his own place within this prison of language, and with time he grows increasingly rebellious and indignant in the face of his interlocutors. We see the shift from his identification with guards and military police to his identification with the runaway slave, and as that happens a grammatical shift takes root. In the title sentence, 'Kamby Bolongo mean river,' a reversion occurs: the language of the slave predicates meaning over the master’s language. Within his cell our narrator begins to recount the stories of his life in chalk drawings on the walls and floor. A narrative within the narrative takes shape, a prelinguistic one reminiscent of prehistoric cave paintings. He is tracing back toward the origin of his voice. He has a plan, and as the brilliant pacing and rhythm of the narrative drive toward its conclusion, this excellent novel forces a reconsideration of the very concept of a native language." - M. T. Fallon
"The narrator of Kamby Bolongo Mean River has trouble with words. Some words trigger a lifetime of associations, memories saturated with emotion, very much alive in the narrator’s present moment. Other words stand alone for him like solid objects, necessitating rigorous inspection.
“The trouble is some people use words one way but other people use those same words a different way altogether. My problem is I think about one word for too long. A caller will say a word like injury and I will think about the word for a minute or two and not hear the other words. I won’t know who has the injury or why it matters. This always happens to me and this is why should the phone ring I might let it keep ringing until the machine answers.
“A word like injury can split your head open.”
The narrator’s head is always splitting open. The novel itself is basically the speaker’s head broken open so that we can see inside—split like a cantaloupe or a geode. What you’ll find in there is fascinating, revolting, and heartbreaking.
The book is birthed by a simple phrase—“Should the phone ring...”—the response to which reveals the entire insides of the narrator. He doesn’t like it when the phone rings. It’s an intrusion so frightening that he falls over sometimes. He loves answering machines.
Other things we know about him: He’s being monitored in a hospital. Doctors are watching him through a two-way glass. Military Police and security guards are guarding his room. His brother is Charlie and his mother is Mother. People call him; often they are wrong numbers. Sometimes he pretends to be the person they are calling for, especially if they’re calling for Charlie. His phone doesn’t dial out. He’s from Injury, Alaska. He has a headache.
Like Part of the World, it’s hard to know what parts of the narrator’s account are reliable. And like Part of the World, it seems likely that the narrator is suffering some kind of brain injury. It’s important to understand that neither of these things matter.
While a more predictable writer might create a brain-damaged character so distanced from the reader that he exists as an anomaly, Lopez creates a narrator whose internal conversation feels universal, familiar. The narrator’s injury only clarifies the faultiness of all consciousness—the unreliability of memory, the power of association, the present reality of the past.
The resulting effect has some kinship with A.R. Luria’s case studies of brain-injured patients. Both of Lopez’s books lead me back to The Man with a Shattered World—the case study of a Russian soldier who suffered a massive head injury in 1943. The case study is largely a first-person account of what it was like for the patient to wake up with very few mental faculties (it was hard for him to think of words or understand what he was seeing), to gradually recovering memories of the distant past, and continuously struggling to regain his mind.
In the end, Luria’s patient discovers that he is able to write much more easily than he’s able to speak. He begins to journal, and in writing, finds a way to restore some semblance of function.
A correlation could be drawn to the narrator of Kamby. The narrator can’t dial out. He’s often lost in the pull of his own memories. He discovers though that he can draw stick figures, and with the encouragement of his doctors, he fills the floor and walls of his room with stick figured accounts of his life. Akin to cave drawings, they tell the story of Charlie and Mother, his dark childhood, his longing for connection and clarity.
The narrator’s unflinching love for Charlie is like a dog that follows you home and waits outside your door, even though you come outside every hour and beat it with a stick. And where is Charlie? He doesn’t call or visit. And Mother, the second most important person in the speaker’s life is not there either. Whether she’s in prison, dead or just absent—we don’t know. What we know is that the speaker of Kamby Bolongo Mean River is confused, forsaken, alone, and just like us.
Through astonishingly organic and layered language, Robert Lopez has created an inner world so remarkable you might fall over with fright, and then stay on the floor to laugh a while.
“Sometimes if it is a wrong number I pretend I am the person the caller intended to call. In other words, I pretend to be an actor like the hypothetical Charlie Robertson playing summer stock in upstate Alaska somewhere.
“After I answer they will say something like Hey Gracie it’s Maggie calling and I’ll say Hello Maggie how are you. Then I will ask about the kids and work because most people named Maggie have both kids and work. Sometimes they realize I’m not Gracie and when this happens I will ask if they are Gracie themselves. This is when I ask to speak to Gracie. I say Maggie put Gracie on the phone. I say what have you done to Gracie Maggie. This is when they usually hang up if I haven’t done so first.” - Kathryn Regina
"With all of the almost necrophilic releases of famous writers’ unpublished works (the recent posthumous publication of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura comes to mind), you might think, especially because of its affectless prose, its despairing tone, its absurdities and monotonies, that Kamby Bolongo Mean River is the last treasure trove from the Samuel Beckett estate:
I didn’t forget about the you in how are you but when I think too much about one word and then another I sometimes decide I’ve had enough of the words and will listen only to the voice from then on. The words aren’t as important as the voice and when you only listen to the voice you don’t have to think about the words themselves. You can listen to what comes between the words and behind them.
But no, although certainly navigating within similar troubled waters, Robert Lopez’s prose is his own. And it’s written as much with a mind toward revealing a solitary’s disturbed consciousness as it is toward telling an equally disturbing story. Kamby Bolongo Mean River’s estranged narrator is confined in some kind of holding cell with only a bed and a telephone. Through a mirrored window, doctors watch to see whether he chooses to answer incoming calls. The phone’s intermittent ringing—or at least the intimation that it might happen—in the story sets the narrator off into all kinds of circuitous conversations with himself, into self-absorbed reveries on language, or, rather, the failure of words to communicate meaning:
The trouble is when I listen I don’t listen for the words. I listen for what is between the words and behind them. The way you do this is to listen to how the voice sounds. If you concentrate on the words you lose the voice and the voice is always too important to lose. How the voice pronounces each word is probably the most important thing.
It is this mining of the words between the words, the interstitial remains of what is left unsaid, that provides the forward propulsion of Kamby Bolongo Mean River. The narrator’s conversation with himself has been going on, at least by his estimation, for over thirty-two years. He struggles with answering the phone because it will disrupt this presumably schizophrenic state. Though he’s in some kind of institutionalized environment, not much is definitively stated about where he is exactly and why he’s there. Yes, he’s in “a room with four walls and one window and almost nothing else,” and we also learn, through the narrator’s obsessing over it, that there is no television and air conditioner. Why he’s allowed the single convenience of a phone, and why, in whatever strange, debilitated condition he’s in, he’s allowed to have conversations through it, is never explicitly stated either. This is how the novel begins:
Should the phone ring I will answer it. I will say the hello how are you and wait for a response. I will listen to what the person on the other end says. I will listen to the words. Sometimes I don’t listen. Sometimes I wait until the person finished answering the hello how are you so I can say whatever it is I’d been saying to myself before the phone rang.
All this may sound bleak, but the book’s last lines signal to us that there may be some hope for the narrator:
I will say you are who you are and where you are and I am who I am and where I am so let’s stop now with the hello how are you I have a headache and don’t feel like talking so please leave a message because I am fine.
That’s what I’ll say should the phone ever ring again this next time.
I will say I am fine which means please stop talking.
The absence of commas, colons, semicolons—actually all punctuation save the period, hyphen, and apostrophe—in Lopez’s novel makes for an oddball kind of rhythm where thoughts collide and then are abruptly stopped only to start again, like turning on a faucet and then quickly shutting off the valve, only to let it spurt out again. Ordinarily, Lopez’s constraints would result in suffocating prose, but instead, the dispensing of most punctuation, the stripping away of inflection, of any remotely flowery description, results in sentences that precisely limn the narrator’s consciousness, a narrator who would, given a chance, “rewrite the dictionary” because “[t]here are a lot of words in there [he doesn’t] like the definitions for.”
Kamby Bolongo Mean River’s unreliable narrator may sit comfortably next to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and also “Chief” Bromden from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Charlie Gordon in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, although “sitting” may not be the best image, as I picture the narrator fidgeting around his cell, obsessing over trivialities, and almost choking with his crazed, insular, no, airtight, logic, and continuing to draw on the walls, masturbate, and interminably talk to himself.
Robert Lopez’s carefully crafted, insistent prose is matched by his bold exploration of madness, abuse, emotional and psychological trauma, isolation, but also of one man’s self-motivated, if still ill-directed, plan for rehabilitation. Kamby Bolongo Mean River may just tie both your brain and stomach into knots." - John Madera
