AD Jameson - Stories like dreams, leading the reader into an alternate universe, but also back to the author as a mysterious and malignant force

AD Jameson, Amazing Adult Fantasy, Mutable Sound, 2011.

"A D Jameson, quaint and childish, tired ex-wife of a rodeo angel, owner of an antique tortoise-shell comb, nice-mannered, respectable, having been seen crawling quickly across the dinette set, destined to someday become a vice president at the bank, and whom you long ago bought and sold, is nodding off. If you let him, he’ll fall fast asleep on the unread page in your lap. He’s still wearing the camisole that you gave him, the one embroidered with his initials. He still has the cameo that you stuck in his Christmas stocking.
His hands were too clumsy. He’s sorry about how clumsy his hands were, the butter he handled you with for a while. He didn’t know better. He didn’t know otherwise in those days, in the obsolete past, about how his ascot became unfastened, about the way his suspenders snapped, about how his penny loafers were always scuffed and broken. He couldn’t help that his fedora was missing a feather, or that his appearance was rendered old-fashioned by passing years. He’s still amazed that you let him touch you, that you submitted to his caresses. He wasn’t amazed when you finally flinched and said, “OK now, man, that’s enough.” And when you left him without any warning, his feelings weren’t ruffled. His feathers weren’t left out of sorts in a huff.
Since then, he’s tried to become more refined. He’s tried to shape up. He might have become a rodeo dancer, or maybe a college graduate—we’ll never know. To hear the tales, he might have entered a program at Harvard, then finished the program. But we can’t be certain about those tales: when questioned, he tore up his diploma and ducked out the back.
Because he was feeling hungry for Thai food, he moved to Thailand. He stuck the two halves of his degree in a steamer trunk, and he set out at once. He learned where to go to get the freshest coffee in Bangkok, the freshest pad thai. He scouted the neighborhoods there for two years, just asking questions, just riding the buses. Just keeping his mouth shut, taking in heat and humidity. Just learning to keep both his buttery hands to his little old lonesome.
He missed you while living there, missed you terribly. He talked with his neighbors, and swam and rode every bus in Bangkok. He wrote an essay about how it felt to live in Thailand, and live there without you. He knew you were waiting for that essay, that you were checking your mailbox each morning. But he’d forgotten the look of the English language, its punctuation and letters. He got angry about how the characters looked on the page. He tore that essay in half every time he tried to write it, and crumpled those halves, and stuffed those torn and crumpled halves in his steamer trunk.
He tried to forget you. He took the liberty of buying you a coffee; he remembered how much you like coffee, and how you bought a cup every morning. He took the liberty of dropping a red and white peppermint in it; he remembered how much you like red and white, and how they filled your Christmas stocking. He’s kept that peppermint coffee warm for you ever since, inside a Thermos that he bought at a weekend market.
While he was in Thailand, he became friends with a passing gumball for a while. He befriended a passing tortoise, also. He ate the tortoise when it begged him to, when it cried and forced its chewy fins in his mouth. He placed the gumball inside a locket, a scuffed antique with a broken clasp, which he scotch-taped together and wears round his neck to this very day.
Now he lives in Chicago, has been spied living there for four years. He wasn’t corrupted, not very much; he isn’t easily corrupted. He still has the money that you lent him, the shiny new hundred. He’s turned down his many chances to spend it. He’s felt little pressure. He’s found he can get by with very little. He can get by on no more than a tortoise’s winter rations.
Ever since then, he’s been hanging around here, half-asleep, his hair combed, his eye out for your arrival. He’s still in love with you; he loves people just like you—kind souls who can handle his minor corruption. A little corruption might be precisely what you will need—you can’t be so certain.
As soon as he spies you, he’ll smile and wake up and say, “Hello and good morning to you.” The moment he sees your oblong face and remembers your name, he’ll fold his hands and bow and whisper, “Sawasdee krap.” He’ll say, “While sleeping, I wrote a book of short stories for you—accounts of the dreams that I had while I missed you, while living in Thailand. I hope that you like them.”
Until then, feel free to take a closer look at him. You can stare. You can take a long gander. He’s resting his head on that dream-laden book; he’s using its stories as a pillow. He knows that you’re destined to return at any moment; he’s foreseen it. He’s dreaming about you. His lips shape your name. He expects you to be back at any minute." - www.mutablesound.com


"What does it mean to be a writer? Who are writers? What do they do?
- For me, writing’s a form of thinking. It allows me to express ideas that I couldn’t express otherwise, because my memory isn’t good enough. And because writing possesses a logic all its own. It’s a meditative activity and a form of discipline that allows me to clarify some thoughts, and muddle others.
There exist more writers than people suspect, including all those whom “real writers” usually won’t acknowledge. There’s a disturbing tendency among high lit folk to not take seriously other writing, even if they enjoy it: genre fiction, commercial television, comics, children’s books, writing by actual children, zines, journalism. Also excluded: slam poets, performance poets, conceptual artists, and many others. This is elitist, short-sighted and unfair, not to mention a huge mistake. The people who wrote G.I. Joe and Star Trek are very much so writers. They wrote all over me! They wrote me!
Your stories seem a response to the current state of fiction. How would you characterize that current state?
- My central complaint against fiction today is how insincere (and therefore inconsequential) so much of it is: so ironic, so commercially-minded, so abstract. Most of it slides right past me, unmemorable, unaffecting. If writing is thinking, then a lot of the thinking being done by writers today is poor.
For example, I have little patience for what I call “ironic realism,” which some might call hipster writing (but which extends beyond that). Irony has been stripped of its powers, because we live in ironic times. Such fiction may be clever and amusing, even entertaining, but it’s superficial and deeply unsatisfying. All it can offer is entertainment, and reaffirmation of shared, conservative values. It criticizes and complains out of habit, and it has nothing else to offer. As the Where the Wild Things Are movie demonstrated, when the ironic realist is stripped of his irony, he has nothing left save platitudes like “group hug” and “all is love.”
I’m also troubled by how naïve and nostalgic so much of today’s writing is. US culture is disturbingly self-indulgent and infantile. So when I found myself wanting to write about pop culture icons, I initially recoiled. I didn’t want to write ironic G.I. Joe stories!
Who or what are your influences?
- First I’ll give the proper writer answer: AAF was influenced by Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, Guy Davenport, Steve Katz, Carole Maso, and Yuriy Tarnawsky. Katz exerted a particularly strong influence. Anyone who looks at his marvelous collections Creamy and Delicious, Stolen Stories, and Moving Parts will see how much I’ve pilfered.
But I was also influenced by popular culture of the 1980s and early 1990s, when I was a child and young adult. Like lots of geeky, friendless kids, I grew up reading G.I. Joe comics, X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I think the most conventionally “literary” thing I’d read by the time I was twelve was Lord of the Rings. And Michael Crichton.
Meanwhile, I watched Star Wars repeatedly, Star Trek, Indiana Jones — those were my religious texts. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, I wanted nothing more than to be a Jedi, or a ninja. As well as a mutant. I actually wondered what my mutant power would be, when I reached puberty. (Answer: the ability to suffer.)
So when I wrote, of course I imitated those things. I wrote a TMNT/X-Men crossover, and fantasy novels. I had a superhero comic series that I planned out in exhaustive detail. In junior high I drew a 350-page comic book adaptation of Mega Man II; I spent over five years working on it, using Bic pens and colored pencils and blue-lined Mead tablets. My love of awkward language comes as much from mistranslated Nintendo games as it does from Donald Barthelme’s “back-broke” sentences.
Is there something you are trying to work out in your stories?
- All of my writing is rooted in some conflict, some tension that I don’t otherwise know how to resolve. The stories are a way of thinking things through.
I started some of the stories in the collection, the earliest drafts, in the late 1990s, right after I finished college — not too long, really, after I stopped wanting to be a ninja. By then I wanted to be a literary writer instead — a postmodernist, like Barthelme or Acker, my new influences. But all I really knew about was pop culture.
I was also reading a lot of fan-fiction then, so I decided to write “literary fan-fiction.” And my initial impulses were juvenile and ironic: to drag out the Star Trek characters and kick them around, to vandalize them. I can claim now that this was a Situationist impulse, or punk, but it was also hip and ironic. I ended up writing what were basically parodies: “Mario and Luigi’s Super Midlife Crises.” This kind of stuff is everywhere now, online. It’s cute, but it’s also easy and shallow.
It’s mostly impossible to vandalize pop culture, impossible to “take down” Indiana Jones, or TMNT, or Oscar the Grouch. Those things are much stronger than we are, much bigger. And the second you approach them ironically, thinking that gives you an edge, you’re really just capitulating to them. As a college professor of mine, Pat Trimble, wisely put it: whether you watch Friends or Simpsons or Star Trek or Twin Peaks, you’re still watching television; you’re still watching commercials. You’re still sitting on the couch, or behind your computer monitor, eating corn chips.
The moment I realized this (and it was a gradual realization), I realized that although I’d been through college, and had taken writing classes, and had supposedly outgrown those childish loves, I was still, in essence, hunched over my parents’ kitchen table, making a Mega Man II comic book. X-Men vs. Turtles.
The stories are initially very playful, but as the collection progresses that playfulness is increasingly overwhelmed by a larger eeriness. I became both confused and intrigued, facing a world that is neither real nor imaginary.
- Well, what happened was that I put these kinds of stories aside for a while. I tried to focus on proper literary topics: adult relationships, the workplace, buying cars. Grandparents dying, pets dying, kids and spouses dying — the whole dead deal. But when I was honest with myself, I still wanted to write about my childhood. I didn’t know anything about adulthood. I knew only ALF!
And so I decided to acknowledge that desire, that the saddest thing I could think of was ALF dying. But at the same time I wanted to call myself to task, to admit how pathetic that was, how juvenile.
I returned to those pop culture stories, because I realized I needed to write them, to exorcise something. Amazing Adult Fantasy was my long dark night of the soul. Ingmar Bergman tormented himself over religion, and I, I agonized over — Kermit the Frog.
Your stories read like dreams, leading the reader into an alternate universe, but also back to the author as a mysterious and perhaps malignant force. What is the source of this?
- If the stories are malignant, it’s because I tried to recognize how my desires are malignant. And how the pop culture forces are, before that, themselves malignant. Injurious and untrue.
The stories in the first half of the collection, in the “Fiction” section, are all fan-fiction. They’re about Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Oscar the Grouch… They’re about things I loved as a child, and still love, even if my love is conflicted and bittersweet. And they’re fantasy stories: fantastical, unrealistic.
Any fantasy, if it’s good, is also perverse. It asks you to believe in a world that isn’t true, an alternative to our real world. It’s escapist. This isn’t bad, per se — we need fantasies. We enjoy them. We use them for all sorts of useful things. But fantasy is particularly dominant right now in our culture — look at the movies out there, month after month. I can name every single one of the X-Men, summarize hundreds of issues of those comics. I’ve seen the Star Wars movies more times than tongue can tell. Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus are like real persons to me; they’re my childhood friends, as real as my downstairs neighbors (and not as loud). There’s something sad and terrible about this. And yet I can’t stop loving those things.
How does one get out of such a dilemma? Can one?
- Another, more theoretical influence helped me come to some terms with this, to write through this problem: William H. Gass’s formalism, in particular his essay “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” and his 1970s debates with John Gardner. (So Gardner, too, was an influence.) Gass defined characters as linguistic constructs: proper nouns that other words “go to be about.” Gardner, meanwhile, took a more realist or illusionistic approach, arguing that characters are instead apparitions, dreams.
Their debates resonated very strongly with me. I agreed with Gass’s formalist approach, but I also felt great sympathy for Gardner’s view: the very problem I was having with these childhood pop icons was that they were apparitions. They were ghosts, haunting me. Or demons, in a very literal sense: divine beings that provide for us, and that determine our fates and fortunes. Attendant spirits.
After reading those debates and Gass’s essays, I found myself able to approach those dreamlike apparitions more abstractly, more as verbal constructs. Gass writes that the character is not real, but rather just a noun that other words modify. That insight helped me to see through some of the illusion.
So I tried sending other words to be about those characters, which in fact opened up a lot of room. These characters, these demons, are so well known, they’re so strong — that’s their appeal — that I found I had a lot of room to redefine them, and thereby deform them. So I could call Indiana Jones “Indian Jones,” and write that he now lives in Brooklyn, buying vanilla Cokes at the corner shop and squeezing the straws until they crinkle and tear. And at the start of that story he’s a young man, about to set out on his first adventure, about to become Indian(a) Jones. But he can also be an extremely old man, later on in the story, a man who “never found a single priceless artifact; instead he used his butterfly hands to become a sculptor.” Because Indian Jones, Indiana Jones, can be whatever I want him to be.
The first half of the collection is about redefining these characters, giving them new identities. This, too, is ultimately impossible, but I found it a better approach than mere ironic vandalism. The language could become something stranger and more troubling than guarded yet unabashed love letters.
The second half of the collection, “The Solar Stories,” is a rewrite of the first half — a dark mirror. The pop culture references disappear, replaced by a new, self-enclosed mythology. I think of the book as getting “older”: the first half is pre-pubescent, while the second half begins with puberty. The toys of childhood get cast aside, but not before they’ve been absorbed. And what replaces them is a much darker mythology, one more fiercely embraced. This dark reflection goes back to pollute the first half, I hope, and vice versa. The insular teenage fantasies are built on the naïve childhood loves, even if the teenage self won’t dare name them.
Do you follow any particular formal methods when writing, or would you call yourself more intuitive?
- It’s a mixture of form and intuition. It was important to me that the structure played a meaningful role in the collection, organizing and commenting on the stories. And different stories in the collection used different styles and writing methods.
But I never want to sacrifice writing to adhere to form. If something feels right, then I’ll go with it. I want there to be tension, and form permits digression.
To what extent is media a guiding force?
- The stories are mine, but saying that just calls into question what “mine” means. I’m definitely ceding some control in my choice of subject. And even as I wrote away from my sources, deforming those pop icons, I consistently felt a lot of pressure to return to their original concepts. The solution that worked best, I found, was to keep the characters protean. They’re endlessly mutating verbal constructs. So, for example, in “Oscar the Grouch” the title character is at first a radio broadcaster and successful poet, but a few paragraphs later he’s a neurotic young man, and very shy. And a little bit later he’s a lecherous, elderly Beat. But he’s also at the same time a disgusting, mangy creature who lives in a garbage can, like a bum.
Meanwhile, the narrator of that story, the “I” — that “I” is another character, too, another word that can be modified as well. And so the narrator, just like Oscar, also keeps changing: at first she’s a sickly little girl, then a student, then a groupie, then a teacher. She and Oscar continuously mutate around one another, defining and being defined by one another. And I hope that, when you’re reading that story, those transformations are pleasantly confusing, but also critical. Because who are you when you embrace Oscar the Grouch as your personal demon, as your totem animal? And how does that embrace deform you?
Claude Levi-Strauss said that we personify animals because, just like how some animals are “good to eat,” some are “good to think.” These stories look at those pop culture creations and ask how they are “good to think,” but also “bad to think.”
Are you opposed to pop culture?
- No, certainly not. In some ways it’s too big to oppose. Can one ignore it? Condemn it? I don’t watch TV any more, and I read a much wider variety of literature than when I was a kid, and I have a lot of theory under my belt — but those pop stories, those characters, those franchises — they got their hooks into me before anything else. I was seduced at an early age: I can’t remember my life before Star Wars. The very first movie that I saw, when I was four years old, was The Muppet Movie. So I’ll no doubt always love Star Wars, and Kermit the Frog. And I’ve tried to be up front about that: “This before anything else.”
(A friend of mine was teasing me about these stories, arguing that I should just let my childhood go, like she did. She’s a sculptor who makes soft, animal-like fabric pieces. I asked her what kind of toys she’d played with as a child, and she said, “Oh, I had tons and tons of stuffed animals…”)
It’s important to resist one’s love for such things. We need them to some extent, but they were also the products of extremely pervasive capitalism — gimmicks for wresting cash from our parents’ fists (and then our own open hands).
The problem here becomes one of nostalgia, which is a kind of melancholy. Originally nostalgia was considered a disease: in the 1700s and 1800s, Swiss soldiers living abroad deserted in droves, because they couldn’t stand being so far away from the Alps. They were said to become particularly homesick when they heard the “Ranz des Vaches,” a farmer’s song. Their doctors and generals of course considered this a problem (they banned that song).
But today, nostalgia is a condition that we openly embrace. Our culture is very, very happy to sell our childhoods back to us. In my late teenage years, when I found myself at college, I struggled to cast aside the playthings of my youth. I stopped buying X-Men comic books, and action figures, and video games. I chose to stop going to see the new Batman movie, the new Star Trek. I wanted to have done with all of that, to move on. To no longer live like a child.
In some ways the culture helped: the more it insisted that I should care about the X-Men, the easier it made it for me to not care about the X-Men. George Lucas keeps tinkering with Star Wars, making it less and less like the Star Wars I remember — some people are upset because of that, but I’m actually somewhat grateful; I appreciate that alienation from Star Wars. The Batman that kids love today is not the Batman that Tim Burton gave me, the vision that he seduced me with…
…But this also makes nostalgia much more tempting. I actually bought some action figures one year ago: the NECO Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures — because they’re based on the original comics version, you see, not the cartoon… And they just released a second series…
It’s difficult to get away from these things!
I took as my motto, “They will betray you.” They will never stay the same. They promise that they are divine, eternal, but they are the products of many different writers, of different places and times — which is part of their strength, but also part of their callousness, their injurious untruthfulness. They are greater than you; their masters are greater than you — and they do not know you, do not need you (just your paycheck).
This, then, is the tension that fueled the collection: my desire to write about these things, because I love them, and always will love them, but at the same time my very strong need to examine that love critically. And to hold myself accountable for feeling it." - Interview at Mutable Sound


Excerpts:

Rock Albany!

Indian Jones

A Sad Story of Factory Girls” (PDF, page 33)

Korawik Wattanakul

Yuriy Tarnawsky – A nightmare dissolves in time like blood in water: Rilke is murdered by a rose bush, but after donating his left arm to a fetus stew

Yuriy Tarnawsky, Like Blood in Water (Fiction Collective 2, 2007)

«A surrealist account of the creative and descriptive arts.
In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragments—mininovels—that require the reader’s active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs.
A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed.
Tarnawsky’s language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.»

"When I get rich I'll get a pied-a-terre on Yuriy Tarnawsky's planet. It’s very wild on the surface and cool and calm in the interior. The palm fronds don’t decay."— Andrei Codrescu

"Tarnawsky’s are the second opinions we seek, almost recognize, then do, for they are made of the sounds, power sources, bizarre jobs, people coming our way, fitted together both by us and a culture by turns demanding and uncaring if we sleepwalkers notice or not: alarming, intelligent, caught again and again in the grasp of the author's surprise and yearning."— Joseph McElroy

«In this, his first work of fiction since 1993’s fantastically peculiar Three Blondes and Death, Yuriy Tarnawsky presents five “mini-novels” which he describes as prose works of short story length that engender the scope and complexity of novels. Each piece indeed achieves an expansive effect, largely due to extreme ellipses that fragment the stories. Tarnawsky leaves the reader with the task of filling in the missing episodes, imagining exposition and causalities as well as the significance of numerous bizarre scenes. The reader is firmly guided by Tarnawsky’s startling prose and exhilarating sense of play. As in Sorrentino or Barthelme, the text brims with the excitement that anything can happen.
The unifying thread is that of nightmare. Rilke is murdered by a rose bush, but not before donating his left arm to a fetus stew. A tailor named Pavarotti is hired to play Agamemnon in an Italian film, then ends up awaiting a presumably real death onstage, in the role of Marat. A doctor chases his patient across a skating rink, mowing down rows of giant flowers before plunging his ice skate’s blade into the man’s chest. Another man’s electrocution causes massive flowers to erupt out of the earth.
Tarnawsky’s stories recall the monumental terror of childhood, beautiful nightmares that resonate poetically and honestly. The fragments of these mini-novels swirl, daring meanings and tantalizing the reader with dreamlike connections—like blood in water, indeed, but like nothing so much as life itself.» - A. D. Jameson

“Nelson Fitipaldo stands at the window of his kitchen-apartment and looks outside. An unhealthy reddish color tinges the world like blood dissolved in water. - From “Former Pianist Fitipaldo”
Yuriy Tarnawsky, who, according to the back cover of Like Blood in Water, has authored “19 collections of poetry, seven plays, nine books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations,” came as a revelation to this writer, who had never heard of his work before. Tarnawsky’s collection of “five mininovels,” which he dedicates to his parents and terms “memories of my childhood,” is an oneiric, fragmentary journey through one man’s subconscious, and makes him a good candidate for inclusion as a modern-day surrealist; in fact, according to the biography at his website, he is a founding member of the New York Group, “a Ukrainian émigré avant-garde group of literary writers.” His background in electrical engineering, theoretical linguistics (his Ph.D. dissertation dealt with Noam Chomsky’s Extended Standard Theory/semantics), Artificial Intelligence, and Ukrainian literature seems to have left its indelible imprint on his work, as has the fact that he is a poet and playwright whose original language is not English. A rude awakening awaits the reader who comes to this collection with the expectation that s/he is going to encounter linear “stories” with all of the elements of conventional fiction intact (plot, arc, characterization, etc.). Those who are a bit more daring in their literary tastes, however, are likely to find the challenge of deconstructing Tarnawsky’s enigmatic work a welcome one.
From the get-go, one senses that this is not to be a regular collection of tales (as if the cover art, depicting a glass of blood-laden water against a gray and white background, wasn’t already a strong enough indicator.…). The first “mininovel,” which is also the shortest, entitled “Screaming,” is divided into six parts. This peculiar fiction focuses on a character named Rilke Roark (named for the poet, while the surname recalls the protagonist of The Fountainhead), and a one-armed woman, Alba (named for “the duchess of Alba that Goya painted”). The two meet at a sort of cult gathering, replete with yoga mats, where participants scream their brains out in ritualized fashion. Their uncanny dialogue in the second section, as with all of the uncanny dialogues in all of the uncanny fictions, is told in a format suggestive of reading the script of a play; indeed, it appears as though many of these pieces are meant to be read as quasi-plays, as sub-headings such as “the final scene,” “prologue” / “epilogue,” and “a dress rehearsal” (the latter consisting of a bizarre conversation between two parents concerning the colors of their daughter’s costume) would seem to indicate. In the third section of “Screaming,” Roark and Alba’s bizarre dreams are limned, while in the fourth we are presented a matter-of-fact description of their apartment (they have, in the space between sections, gotten married). For example:
'It is one very large room in a former factory building with windows along the entire outside wall. In the middle of it stands a toilet bowl without a seat. An old black quilt lies in a heap next to it. You can cover yourself with it when you use the toilet if you so desire. A large, old-fashioned sink with two basins is attached in the center of the wall opposite to the one with the windows. It is used for washing up as well as for doing dishes'.
The nouveau roman-like description continues in this fashion, to include details of a lithograph of Munch’s “The Scream,” a large, rusty-edged cube inside of which screaming sessions are held, and seven glass jars with fetuses inside of them. In the fifth section, one such screaming session is described in absurdist fashion—Munch’s lithograph literally screams along with the couple, turning back the hands of the grandfather clock in the room and making the fetuses dance and twirl like Olympic athletes—and appears to correspond with section nine of the fourth mininovel, “Pavarotti-Agamemnon,” in which the protagonist sings so loudly and forcefully that he breaks the window, the mirror, and his wife’s collection of glasswear. (Many themes are echoed and reechoed throughout the five mininovels, such as the “primal scream,” the appearance of clocks, rust/decay, the death of loved ones, etc.) Finally, in section six, images of a rushing river containing various large objects (e.g. houses, furniture, vehicles, etc.) coalesce with the final, resonant über-image of a person putting “quarters of light” into the rift between the horizon and the earth, as though it were a “slot in a pinball machine.”
As this all-too-brief overview of the shortest of the five fictions will perhaps indicate, despite the volume’s modest length there is a lot of “stuff” packed into each mininovel to merit, as well as reward, multiple readings. A few of the many highlights from the remainder of the collection include when, in the second mininovel, the protagonist Nelson Fitipaldo, who has enjoyed a humble career as a pianist for some years, loses the cooperation of his right hand during a live performance, as if in a classic Freudian anxiety dream, and gives up the instrument—and his career—with somewhat less regret than one might normally expect. In the fourth mininovel, “Pavarotti-Agamemnon,” mentioned above, a most hilarious dialogue about regional, home-cooked foods between the tailor/actor Pavarotti—who is to play a hirsute Agamemnon—and the producer/director of the film ensues at the former’s apartment; the bizarre conversation reflects a communication breakdown whilst the men try, apparently, to translate between Italian and English. (This sequence literally had me laughing out loud on the light rail—you’ll just have to read it for yourself to confirm its bone-tickling efficacy; see pp. 103-7.) In the third mininovel, “The Joys and Sorrows of R. York,” there is a wonderful scene wherein the dream R. York narrates to his psychiatrist appears to describe the painting to which the segment is apparently an homage. And in the fifth, and perhaps most accomplished, mininovel, “Surgery,” the paraplegic Dr. Kax’s dream of mowing down plants with his skates is one which is sure to remain in memory long after closing the book.
If the reader chooses to give these five mininovels, which should be read and considered as a whole, a fair chance to ferment in the subconscious, focusing on the imagery and language first and leaving logic and forced interpretation behind (are the mininovels autobiographical, as the author suggests in the dedication? are they derived from his own dreams? or are they simply nonsensical pieces, penned to frustrate the Cartesians among us?), there is much to be savored—and indeed learned from—this wonderfully opaque, yet at times surprisingly lucid and tender, collection of lapidary absurdities from Planet Tarnawsky.» - Marc Lowe

«Though Like Blood in Water, Yuriy Tarnawsky’s collection of five “mini novels,” is a somewhat slim 192 pages, the stories themselves often seem as though they are folded, accordion-style, so that they expand and contract with the act of reading. It is this kind of shifting nature that leads me to believe that I could read the collection 10 times and it would mean something different each time. Some elements that seemed of the utmost importance upon my first reading might not even receive a second glance later. And so, after closing Like Blood in Water for the first time, I was struck by the idea that the book in my hands, the actual printed words, was much less important than my experience reading it.
Like Blood in Water is an incredibly complex, beautiful, and frustrating work. It is less about story than craft, a fact that I found alternately exciting and confounding. While Tarnawsky chooses to call his stories mini novels, I think a better term might be collages, or jazz improvisations, or splatter paintings.
The collection starts off relatively easy with the work “Screaming,” the most straightforward of Tarnawsky’s tales. Straightforward is a relative term, though. Like each of the mini novels, “Screaming” is broken into a series of interrelated sections, sometimes using poetry or even scripted dialogue. Piecing the sections together, choosing what to show and what to keep hidden, is what Tarnawsky does so well; by writing only the minimum, we as readers are forced to help him create the story, weaving it together and filling in the blanks.
“Screaming” concerns itself with a man named Rilke Roark and a one-armed woman he meets named Alba, whom we are told get married and, really, are exceptional only in that they scream for transcendental purposes. One need only read a small section of “Screaming,” though, to recognize Tarnawsky’s enormous talent as a writer, and to understand that no basic plot synopsis could do his writing justice: “The sky above is also brown, tinged by the light reflecting from below. It is very low -- so low Roark has to stand with his head bent down. It stretches flat all the way to the horizon where there is only a thin opening left between it and the earth like the slot in a pinball machine. Someone on the other side is feeding shiny new quarters of light into it one by one, over and over again.”
With each successive mini novel, the collection becomes more complex, more enigmatic. Certain themes are constantly popping up: dreaming, identity, loss, doppelgangers, the apocalypse. There are moments of brilliance and moments of frustration and opaque meaning. Towards the end of reading Like Blood in Water, as I thumbed forward through the last story and realized my journey would be over in a few pages, I felt a little like I was finally seeing the end of a long, bloody battle. This was not because the book was not enjoyable, but because it is rare that I have to do so much intellectual work while reading a collection of stories just to get to the end of it.
I feel as though I’ve yet to form any solid opinion on Like Blood in Water. Even after a few close readings, it seems I have barely scratched the surface, barely identified all of the complexities and ambiguities and interconnections that Tarnawsky worked into his collection. And so perhaps all there really is to say about Like Blood in Water is that, if you choose to pick it up, prepare for it to seem heavier than it looks - there is nothing diminutive about these mini novels.» - Andrea Chmielewski

Yuriy Tarnawsky, Three Blondes and Death (Fiction Collective 2, 1993)

«Based on a complex mathematical scheme that the author, a computer scientist and linguist, developed as a substitute for the traditional architecture of a novel, and written in a deliberately sparse and structured syntax that ruthlessly compartmentalizes reality, Three Blondes and Death is an hermetic and hypnotic treatment of the classic themes of love and death. Its strange protagonist, with the literally unspeakable name Hwbrgdtse, searches for meaning in life through the three women with whom he successively falls in love. He finds, however, only life's absurdity, ending in death—a death to which his quest eventually reconciles him.
Three Blondes and Death takes place in an ambiguous time and geography that turn out to be present-day America. The relations between the protagonist and the objects of his love are totally perverse and destructive; the texture of their lives is deceptively simple but implies a dark and undecipherable complexity; and the angst of mortality hangs over every gesture. A lunatic simplicity governs the behavior of Hwbrgdtse, which enables him to face issues of love and death more directly than is usually the case with romantic heroes.
Tarnawsky's third work of fiction is unusually readable, even magnetic, once we are drawn in by its hypnotic repetitions. The logical clarity of its style contrasts with the irrational, often dreamlike content. The action is stark and at the same time mysterious. Whether the strange sensibility that suffuses this story can be traced to the mathematically rigorous mind of its author, or to his Ukrainian roots, or to his multilingual background, Three Blondes and Death is an intriguing and unique work.»
Yuriy Tarnawsky, Meningitis (Fiction Collective 2, 1993)

"The most unusual--and, often, infuriating--novel of this trio, has to be Yuriy Tarnawsky's Meningitis [....] It's [...] almost as if Hemingway had been a methamphetamine addict instead of a boozer. Oddly, though, the prose style is what holds [Meningitis] together and allows it to work as well as it does." - Stephen Phelps

I get Yuriy Tarnawsky's classic Meningitis off the shelf and marvel over it. It's like mathrock on eight-track tape. I love how it says "All of the characters in this book are fictitious" on the copyright page and then the first sentence in the first story says,
Jim Morrison woke up.
Every time the protagonist in the story is cited as subject, it's always Jim Morrison--not Jim, not Morrison, but Jim Morrison. Every time.
And no paragraphs. No quotation marks. It was Raymond Federman, I believe, who said get rid of the fucking quotations marks around the dialogue - they interfere with the reading - they are useless - and besides characters in a novel don't speak quotations - and even if they speak quotations they don't admit that they plagiarized them.
The descriptions of actual doors are also kind of eerie. They read as if they may have been unintentional. The book was printed in 1978 (in English at least) and Morrison passed away in 1971.
Is Yuriy, or was he, a Doors fan? I wonder.
[I have a bootleg of the Seattle '70 show where Jim is playing with feedback for 20 minutes.
I'm an archivalist. That's what it's called.
That's what I call it. Archivalism.]
The Jim Morrison character comes up again in the middle of Meningitis, in "Sister of Snakes." The story "The End" also features Jim Morrison. The Jim Morrison character. It is neatly placed near the end of the book. The protagonist in the other stories is named George.
What inspired Yuriy to make Meningitis? I wonder...

Mike,
How gratifying to read about how someone perceives your work and gets something out of it. Thanks.
I did like the Doors, but above all wanted to tap into the image of Jim Morrison that had permeated the society and to play it off against my imagination. It was the contrast I created that was to be the effect on the reader. I do similar things in the mininovels in Like Blood in Water (Rilke, Pavarotti).
In Meningitis I tried to contrast again my personal experiences resulting from the divorce I had just gone through against purely fictitious, imagined events (present tense vs. past tense; one story in the future tense anticipates what actually happened - my cat).
Developing the syntactic style took years. It was really hard to learn to write (=see the world) like that. It taught me a lot about how not to be verbose and repetitive. With short sentences this stands out like a sore thumb. I created essentially an artificial language with a simple grammar and the reader will pick up the grammar after a few pages and will anticipate the development of the prose the way one anticipates lines in traditional poetry. In Three Blondes and Death I eased off a little on the rigid grammar, not to repeat myself. Each of my books is different although, I think, they all are mine.» - Mick O'Grady

Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural

Eugene Lim, Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008)

"Fog & Car begins as a record of mundane behavior, cataloging the daily schedules and habits of two people now divorced and living in different states. Mr. Fog returns to his childhood hometown in Ohio to become a schoolteacher, while Ms. Car moves to Brooklyn, where she finds work as a freelance copyeditor. Both spend most of their newfound routines reminiscing, reexamining their lives, and reflecting on, if not where things went wrong, then on why things haven't gone right. And for the book's first hundred pages, the protagonists' names are the only signal that anything stranger might occur. In this first half, Lim skillfully captures a sense of the necessary loneliness that ensues following a breakup, demonstrating that he could have written a good but fairly recognizable realist novel. But then, with the introduction of a few more characters, the plot turns weird, and Lim peels relentlessly at his story's realism until it tugs loose, revealing much stranger happenings underneath. At first I held some concern as to whether Lim could pull it all off, but he does so wonderfully, transforming Fog & Car from a potential minimalist navelgazer into a disturbing mystery pitched somewhere between Mulholland Drive and City of Glass. Yet, to Lim's credit, as the novel enters its creepier second half, it never loses its appealing initial tone of aching loneliness, even as its characters and its goings-on grow increasingly supernatural. In another daring move, Lim refuses to answer every question that he raises, but by the final page he achieves a great deal by creating a state of troubled, yet calm, acceptance." - A.D. Jameson

"In this astonishing, assured first novel Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural. His gift for ingenious, startling permutations of language and plot make for a memorable, mesmerizing read. It was hard for me to put Fog and Car down; harder for me to stop thinking about." — Lynn Crawford

"The events of this novel take place in a space contrary to action, illuminating the silences of the page and the nothing that haunts the borders of 'doing something'. A beautifully paced and thoughtful work." — Renee Gladman

"In Fog & Car Eugene Lim scalpels deep into the loneliness of coupledom, into divorce, into obsession and stalking, into casual hookups, into homoerotic shocks. The book slowly heats its duos until they come to a rolling boil, blistering out surprises and unexpected complexities. Mr. Lim is definitely a writer to watch." — Steve Katz

"In Fog & Car, Eugene Lim renders the uncanny convergences of the lives of partners and strangers in a language entirely new. This is a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision—an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut." — Gary Lutz

"In this debut novel documenting the aftermath of a shattered marriage - its disintegration evident in the artifacts of memory and loss strewn across an abandoned landscape - Eugene Lim doesn’t as much collect and catalogue the fragments of lives shared, as artfully piece them into a puzzle reflective of players whose moves were induced by seemingly inconsequent forces.
Partitioned into four sections - “Mirror,” “Marriage,” “Mirage,” and “Merge” - Fog & Car renders, by way of an anticipation that heightens with every shift in point of view and characterization, an existence that has been shorn into unequal parts - each former-partner charged with navigating an unplanned and perhaps unimpressive future in the image of overwhelming bleakness it offers.
“Mirror” finds Mr. Fog and Ms. Car in separate physical and existential locations. Whereas Fog is left splintered by the loss of what their union signified, Car sees her reflection in the bathroom mirror, kitchen window at night, and the spoon she licks after stirring her coffee, as contorted and often narrow in form, but nonetheless blurry enough to preserve the possibility of eventual reshaping and sharpening. In a narrative as analytical as Fog’s is dissonant, Car’s sight is fixed on a future promising reclamation of the restless spirit that led her around the globe; prior, of course, to the idling proffered by a man whose own sense of wanderlust had long involved looking over a shoulder while attempting to reclaim a time-worn path.
Like a blank page of paper mailed from one ex-spouse to the other, the early image of Fog and Car is a reproduction of the severed ties between his ephemeral shaping and her assured lines. Fog back home in Ohio, Car starting over in New York, they find each other again only in the penmanship of characters whose influence on this once-couple’s relationship may seem minimal, if not altogether unidentifiable.
Whereas Mr. Exit’s presence in Fog’s life was once crucial, Car’s memory labels him a fat man, the embodiment of her aversion to laziness and a lack of control. Consequently, his appearance in a life that is now spent in motion between two ends of a swimming pool lap lane - every strike of an elbow into water propelling her body forward -- is debilitating in its ability to moor Car to a present centered on a run-in with an acquaintance much changed. Tackling the novel’s second section with a precision surgical in nature, Lim peels away the fleshy layer of skin from the wound of divorce, manifesting for the reader the visceral inner-workings of effectual relationships and how they may alter an image that takes shape.
Here Fog finds love with Judy, and Car discovers in the random sighting of a transformed Exit the multiplicity of choices a game’s player can be compelled to make. Dipping her head beneath the chlorinated water’s surface Car discovers alcohol: a propensity responsible for her evolution from passive proofreader to active writer of her own plot. Consequently, it is within Car’s personal cast of characters that Mac comes to life; his homeless, ragged form responsible for the inability to hold a pen confidently in fingers left robbed of memory, his smearing of black desperation across Car’s page an appeal for help. In his resolve to discover his identity, Mac takes to trailing Car, who is tracking Frank Exit. Whereas Fog finds himself bound with Judy in their newly purchased, painted, and decorated house, Car’s unraveling possesses implications that extend far beyond the uncanny or unexpected -- as reflected in Lim’s phenomenal ability to nestle revelatory gems in the corners of his muscular text.
Exit’s entrance induces lives to converge; the meticulous pacing and measured magnetism of this intersection no small feat. Giving way to the third division of the novel, “Mirage,” Fog reaches out to his ex-wife: now an often-inebriated stalker who wrestles with power and memory on a scale that extends far beyond unsigned letters, and deteriorates into illusory pages of crumpled ramblings left strewn about after frantic nights passed without sleep. In his communication, written six months prior to his second wedding, Fog hopes for “Ms. Automobile” to be directing a movie “in some place where they speak a language which [her] mouth can’t shape the sounds of.” His admission that he envies her, years after the collapse of their marriage, is offered, finally, by a man who understands that the past gives way to the future much as a paper boat succumbs to the spreading stain of river water that rises as the flimsy vessel sinks.
Arranged with the eye of an experienced puzzle-solver, the third section of Fog & Car suggests a unification of its edges that will materialize in the coda, yet an ultimate protection of its pieces’ borders that occurs when Lim brings Frank Exit, Mac, and Judy into the forefront of Fog and Car’s reflection. Like a series of concentric circles forming in the air when, with a quick scoop, burning coals are pushed inside a tin can that has attached to it a long piece of twine, the “whooping, dancing in and out of the circle [that] is made out of embers” is really the re-shifting of puzzle pieces; the center is identified and rejected over and again, as each time the shape of the image forming around it isn’t complete and shatters the possibility of depicting for the reader an image of intimate connection that is not only recognizable, but sought after in life relationships - those abandoned, or those reclaimed." - Erin McKnight

"Character names are often the most repeated words in fiction, so authors tend to freight them with allegorical meaning as a matter of efficiency. Christian labors toward the Celestial City in A Pilgrim’s Progress; Moby Dick’s Ishmael travels the ocean much like his biblical namesake wandered Levantine deserts; Beckett’s Watt is perplexed, his Krapp is retentive. The title of Fog & Car, Eugene Lim’s impressive debut novel, refers to Jim Fog and Sarah Car, a newly-divorced couple whose parallel stories compose the opening half of the book. Cars and fog, of course, are not complementary, so the likelihood of a reunion for these two seems dim from the start.
Beyond allegory, these names describe respective styles. In the wake of the divorce, Sarah Car pursues a mechanical oblivion consonant with her name. Grief and bewilderment are subsumed in tasks that require neither feeling nor reflection: she moves; she grouts tiles; she copyedits; she swims. The narration of her activities is correspondingly dry, remote, automated, as though a technical writer had been commissioned to record her every move. “She entered the shower and shampooed her hair. While her hair was sudded, she brushed her teeth. She would habitually spit her paste spittle onto her feet and dumbly watch the shower water sink it away. She soaped after this and rinsed.” Passages like this are near parodies of conventional realist fiction, and from time to time the prose’s enactment of the banal is itself banal. But in the end it is precisely the exaggerated pedantry of the style that allows it to transcend what it describes.
Conversely, Jim Fog wallows in a mist of disordered nostalgia and subject-less, object-less thought. The syntax is muddied, eroded, elliptical, tangential—the formal expression of an interior fog. It’s also some of the loveliest writing in the book, amounting to an extended prose-poem that reveals a sensibility of acute ambivalence and muted anxiety. “A hope for an end, or perhaps just a morbid fascination at the structure without foundation, still standing. Each limb cantilevering another and that in turn another, so that it stands on nothing but itself, an intricate flower that defying gravity, he rips apart to find only an empty center.”
Fog & Car alternates between Car and Fog, establishing a contrapuntal rhythm that incrementally resolves into a lucid, supple prose emblematic of their slow recovery from each other. Ironically, over the course of the novel they become more alike. And just as the reader is settling into what appears to be a subtle, penetrating meditation on contemporary relationships, everything is thrown into disarray by the appearance of a deus ex machina in the form of a third major character. There’s no doubting his ex machina nature; his name is Frank Exit. With his arrival, the novel abruptly swerves from its naturalist mode into surreality.
Fog & Car has the shape of a long turnpike that runs into an urban snarl of on and off ramps. Suddenly every incidental thread of the early, gently-paced narrative knots up into a supernatural tangle of a plot—souls are exchanged, coincidences multiply. But as Frank Exit remarks near the end of the book, “I realized that coincidence was just my generation’s name for magic, and that there is a discovery repeated by each generation, that magic is less extraordinary than it is hidden, and that once discovered, it becomes everywhere apparent.” Here, in a nutshell, is the book’s governing principle: The lack of coincidence in the novel’s first half is meant to illustrate the perceptual failure of both Fog and Car. Once discovered under the surface of incident, coincidence is not merely “everywhere apparent”; it’s inescapable.
Introducing dense plotting halfway through an otherwise plotless novel is an intriguing and daring formal gambit. To defy novelistic conventions is easy enough. The difficulty comes in custom-building new forms for a story, and new stories for these new forms. Suiting the action to the word and the word to the action is no easy feat, but it is one that Lim has achieved with his first tragicomic novel." - Oisin Curran

"Last night I sat down to start reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR, the other of the two debut books from Ellipsis Press along with Eugene Marten's WASTE, which I loved and talked about a while back, I hadn't meant to read for very long but found myself unable to stop reading the book. FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing.
The first section uses these calm and almost Lutz-like renditions of the two divorcees, Fog and Car, trying to smooth their lives out into something, Eugene Lim writes about the cleaning of houses, the method of a swimming routine, and all in this meditative, language-conscious but not overtly languaged and extremely absorbing way, the book also continues to evolve by stretching the forms of the way the words are delivered, but again, in calm and nuanced methods.
In grad school Amy Hempel had us read a Mark Richard story, I can't remember the name of it, I think it is the first one in THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Amy, in perhaps her only 'lecture-like moment' of the workshops talked some about how Richard was able to show the passage of time by using fields and dogs rather than talking about time, and how it opened the language and the feel of the words in this surprising way, I think Eugene Lim's descriptions here worked on me in that way, though rather than over the function of time it was over the function of distancing and grief, so much so that I couldn't stop wanting to propel through it, and I was so pleased to find myself reading a book supposedly about relationships about still feeling completely engrossed, as I hate relationships in books usually, for their wheel-spinning, I think people who get excited about Richard Yates would really enjoy the meditative stancing of the early sections especially.
Then there are two more sections in which Lim continues to open the way the story is built into an almost Paul Auster kind of maze, path-inducing manner, there is following and weird rooms and strange phenomenon that continue to be braided together but left open in other strands.
Here is a sentence from the book that maybe exhibits the balance of strange and familiar sense of both situation and language in FOG & CAR: "He forgot his name and became her bellybutton."
Then, in the last third of the book, which begins to develop into a really strange configuration of earlier elements and a linking of space, I hit a page, a strange development involving a man in an empty room and an elevator, and a little later, further linking, which made me stop and touch the book against my chest. I remember not knowing what to do having read it, it was very late by then and I'd stayed up longer than I meant to, and yet I wanted to keep reading, and yet couldn't the page had stopped me in a way that I felt I needed to think about rather than go on with the rest of the book right there, I went to bed. I could not stop thinking about the book in such a way that I stayed awake for several further hours, and when I finally did sleep I had a dream about writing about the book as I am now, and other dreams branching off from the book. When I woke I walked around for a while and then finished reading.
FOG & CAR is new in familiar ways and familiar in new ways, and altogether a thing that turned my mind on in such a mode that I could not turn it off.
Along with WASTE, if you haven't gotten on board already, both are available from Ellipsis as a package deal. I can't imagine an innovative fiction press with a better introductory one-two punch." - Blake Butler

«If divorce is a totaled car, then Eugene Lim’s Fog & Car is a multiple vehicle pile-up. Huge accidents tend to occur in rain or fog – the low-visibility tricking drivers into thinking other cars are further away than they really are. Throwing everything into darkness, Lim’s novel forces its characters, and the reader, to crane forward, to squint their eyes, to try get their bearings, just to keep from crashing. And all of this happens after an off-stage break-up.
Fog & Car’s chapters tick tock between Jim Fog and his ex-wife Sarah Car dusting themselves from the wreck of their marriage, licking their wounds, trying to make sense of their failures as individuals and as a couple, to redefine who they are outside of each other’s arms. Relationships often dissolve in order to escape boredom, chaos, or to avert some imagined disaster, but just like that car in a fog smashing into another car and that car smashing into another, sometimes a break-up leads to even further chaos and disorder. Mr. Fog and Ms. Car’s divorce leads to deep soul-scouring, mystery, chaos, some kind of redemption for one, and, for the other, dissolution, menacing darkness, and an augured, but still uncertain, end. Their surnames should have signaled that their relationship was doomed from the start, but Lim’s novel cannot be reduced to allegory.
Fog & Car is also about another marriage, namely, form and content. Lim has a poet’s eagle eye for resonant detail, an artist’s eye for symbolic representation. Throughout the novel, he plays with the book as an object, artfully “designing” his characters’ consciousnesses, their fragmentation, their confusion, their emptiness, on the page much like a painter would. Sarah Car, adrift and bereft, spends much of the novel’s first half figuring herself out, exploring things she’d forsaken, and ironically finds an anchor by learning to swim.
She swims with pleasure. The moment just previous to her entrance into the water is one of almost sexual anticipation. She thinks it may be a link to this other place, this relative place, one of body perhaps, except the anticipation seems to be not for any act but a void, or perhaps the body remembers something the mind, not being able to state, does not. In any case the actual swimming is also conscious, efforted, a process of learning. It is complex, in the end, and one which she enjoys participating in. The dive
into the water, the random slush and splish of first movement and then that sounds relaxation into a rhythm of arm and water, distance and turn,
turn and distance, forth
and back.
Lim’s use of paragraph breaks captures Sarah’s movement as much as it slows time down, compelling the reader to take in breaths, falling into Sarah’s rhythm. It’s simply breathtaking. Furthermore, a whole study could me made of how Lim employs ellipses, caesuras, sentence fragmentation, and pages of white space.
But Fog & Car is no lifeless formalist exercise. Every word serves greater concerns, that is, attempting to define what love means, what solitude is, how to heal, how to make sense of meaninglessness. Jim, while picking at his scabs, and digging the lint from his navel, takes enlightening philosophical turns. Reflecting on what it means “to live alone,” he decides it had meant “a life directed interiorly, shaved of all other perspective.” He’d set his house to be a “simple machine, a portal made of comfort and minimum decoration, to transport [him] to the nation where [he] had lived, named Mind, peopled by characters called Memory and Dream.” It is Jim’s depletion, forced by the huge energy expenditure of a hermit’s life, which ushers his awareness that he’s failed to realize his ambitions. And he ultimately learns that “self-knowledge was a myth of varying degrees of falsehoods.”
If Lim’s focus remained here, that is, on the contrast between Jim and Sarah’s ways of handling their divorce, Jim wavering between navel-gazing and nostalgia, Sarah allowing everything to fall apart, it would have been enough. But the narrative, in a manner at times astounding and often confounding, takes off in unexpected directions, much like the dream-logic of a David Lynch film. The mysterious twist begins when Sarah discovers a lost friend of Jim’s, named, appropriately enough, Frank Exit. Through a series of serendipitous encounters all threads somehow intertwine. How Lim manages to negotiate the reversals, to maintain believability, to take the reader with him, is only part of his success, for it is, ironically, the story’s lack of resolution that brings satisfaction.
Divided into three sections, “Mirror,” “Marriage,” and “Mirage,” Fog & Car masterfully navigates the subtext beneath dissolved relationships, paradoxically uses silence to create form. It balances, albeit in a detached tone, compassionate depictions of moral dissolution with Murakami-styled fabulist plot departures, dramatic reversals, and coincidental connections. It leaves the reader with a balled up jumble of narrative threads, but in such a sophisticated and befuddling manner as to force Murakami’s own mind into a tailspin. Fog & Car is an extraordinary debut.» - John Madera