Happy Halloween! Guess what? Glenn Danzig has a library and based upon the giggles and sniffles, he seems to have a lot of fun in it.

The mother of a friend of mine waved at me from behind the shady, sun-striped screen of a porch. Against a backboard above a brilliant white garage door a basketball went round and round the orange rim of a basket. It was Sunday afternoon, time of the great boredom. Deep in my chest I felt a yawn begin; it went shuddering through my jaw. On the crosspiece of a sunny telephone pole, a grackle shrieked once and was still. The basketball hung in the white net. Suddenly it came unstruck and dropped with a smack to the driveway, the grackle rose into the air, somewhere I heard a burst of laughter. I nodded in the direction... ...and continued down the street. Tomorrow something was bound to happen.

--from 'Dangerous Laughter'; Steven Millhauser

Millhauser: What I look for in a work of art is something that might be called an expansion of being, a sense of mysterious exhilaration, and this has little to do with the quality of darkness in a work, but rather with the arrangement of elements, the elaboration of a significant design. The darkness is surely there, but it’s in the service of something else, which I think of as celebratory.


Would you care to try and define this mysterious “something else"?


Millhauser: I see you won’t let me get away with anything! I intended nothing mystical or mystifying here. I meant only that art is connected in my mind—in my body—with a sense of enhancement, of radical pleasure, of affirmation, of revelry. Darkness is the element against which this deeper force asserts itself. It may even be that this force deliberately seeks out darkness, in order to assert itself more radically.


Would you care, as an obvious follow‑up, to comment on the reasons for your fascination with the world of adolescence?


Millhauser: What’s fascinating about adolescence is that it’s an in‑between state. It feels a tug in two directions: back toward the completed world of childhood, from which it is permanently banished, and forward toward the unknown realm of adulthood, which it both craves and fears. Because it’s an in‑between state, adolescence is fluid, unformed, unsettled, impermanent—in a sense, it doesn’t exist at all. Fiction conventionally presents adolescence as a time of sexual awakening, but for me it feels like the very image of spirit in all its restless striving. [source]

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists....

[...


...]

two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

--from 'Questions of Travel', Elizabeth Bishop

David Ulin at the LA Times provides one of the more interesting takes I could find on the internet when reading reviews for Dangerous Laughter:

For Millhauser, the key is language, which can bridge the gap between familiar and unfamiliar and draw us in. At the same time, he knows that words can fool us, that language both illuminates and obscures. Nowhere is this made more explicit than in "History of a Disturbance," about a man who stops speaking after realizing that words "harmed the world." As he explains: "My vow of silence sought to renew the world, to make it appear before me in all its fullness. I knew that every element in the world -- a cup, a tree, a day -- was inexhaustible. Only the words that expressed it were vague or limited."

Yet despite the acuity of such a statement, it also highlights what seems an unresolved contradiction the more we read of "Dangerous Laughter." It's not just that books are made of words, although that's part of it; the narrator of "History of a Disturbance" has no choice but to use them to describe his renunciation of language, after all.

More to the point, what's at issue is the balance between words and narrative, between the surfaces of Millhauser's writing and what goes on underneath. When fully developed, his work is among the most thought-provoking I've encountered, deftly layering character, emotion and intellect, beautiful and profound. Such longer efforts as "The Room in the Attic" or "The Wizard of West Orange" are like mini-novels, opening our imaginations, telling a story and commenting on it all at once.

And Bookslut alludes to a similar notion when reading Millhauser:

When I think about the stories of Steven Millhauser I find myself thinking in terms of paintings. A Magritte, maybe, or perhaps De Chirico. Paintings in which the surface reality is carefully and precisely delineated, but the more we look at it the more it seems to distort our notion of what is, what can be real.

['Il Telescopio'; René Magritte]

Steven Millhauser writes stories. In the classic sense. In the style of parables with techniques that date back to the oral tradition of storytelling, where the characters are fairly simplistic, without too much dimension, placing the emphasis instead upon the compilation of events that stem from the paths created by the characters. In Millhauser’s case, these creations leading to obsessions and dreams that eventually subsume the characters. Tied with this are the seductive and pervasive powers of the imagination, where the line between reality and the Quixotic becomes indecipherable, for better or worse.

Dangerous Laughter is Millhauser’s most current publication and it consists of 13 short stories placed into three different sections. But there is one introductory story- a narration for the classic Cat and Mouse cartoon. “The cat and mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s much too late: the big door looms”. That unstoppable momentum to the big door, it’s looming threat, open or shut, a reoccurrence in the rest of the stories. But let's be honest, isn't that exactly when things start to get interesting?

In the first section, "Vanishing Acts", Millhauser explores the fringes of our social relationships. This is followed by "Impossible Architectures", which is the least character driven of all the sections and instead focuses upon the environments in which we live, or can imagine ourselves living in if our visions did not have to account for the laws of physics. Millhauser concludes with "Heretical Histories", where the ways in which we understand our place and time are placed under the microscopic telescope, or the telescopic microscope, or sort of both at the same time.

On a whole this is a solid enough collection. However, there are a few duds. Particularly in "Impossible Architectures", where Millhauser wants to create stories centered around ideas only, without the typical use of characters. While I respect the experiment, what doesn’t change is that obsessions are much more juicy when attributed to characters. Especially when repetition, the choice method for parables, is used to build up the story. With characters, this makes a reader more and more engrossed. When applied to a broader, social level, there is instead distance, which doesn’t equate into compelling reading. Although, it can be interesting.

For the stories that do stand out, I could not put down 'The Room in the Attic', which is about a curious High School student that develops a relationship with a convalescent girl confined to a lightless attic. Another must read being 'A Precursor of the Cinema', where a painter develops the means for his paintings to both extend beyond the canvas and to eventually allow the viewer to enter the paintings. In both these stories Millhauser builds up the writing through character and ideas so that the two can compliment and build off one another. Why Millhauser likes to occasionally remove one of these components, I’m not sure. However, this is easily overlooked enough considering the unique publications which Millhauser consistently offers to the reading public.

LXXXIII

Music will more nimbly move
than quick wit can order word
words can point or speaking prove
but music heard

How with successions it can take
time in change and change in time
and all reorder, all remake
with no recourse to rhyme!

Let us in joy, let us in love,
surrender speech to music, tell
what music so much more can prove
nor talking say so well:

Love with delight may move away
Love with delight may forward come
Or else will hesitate and stay
finger at lip, at home,

But verse can never say these things;
only in music may be heard
the subtle touching of such strings,
never in word.

--from Time in the Rock; Conrad Aiken

[Monkey Before Skeleton; Gabriel Cornelius von Max]

The symphony is a musical epic. We might compare it to a journey leading through the boundless reaches of the external world, on and on, farther and farther. Variations also constitute a journey, but not through the external world. You recall Pascal's pensée about how man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The journey of the variation form leads to that second infinity, the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things.

What Beethoven discovered in his variations was another space and another direction. In that sense they are a challenge to undertake the journey, another invitation au voyage.

The variation form is the form of maximum concentration. It enables the composer to limit himself to the matter at hand, to go straight to the heart of it. The subject matter is a theme, which often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes as deeply into those sixteen measures as if he had gone down a mine to the bowels of the earth.

The journey to the second infinity is no less adventurous than the journey of the epic... Man knows he finds it unbearable to be condemned to lose the second infinity as well, the one so close, so nearly within reach....

--from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Milan Kundera

From a 1980 Phillip Roth interview with Milan Kundera, shortly after the translated version of Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published:

PR: Laughter has always been close to you. Your books provoke laughter through humor or irony. When your characters come to grief it is because they bump against a world that has lost its sense of humor.

MK: I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was 20 then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor.

PR: In your last book, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil.....

MK: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestations--laughter--to express two different metaphysical attitudes. Someone's hat drops on a coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born. Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor, it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being. Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it also denotes a dual apocalypse: the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy. And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime. Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.....

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise--the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith... once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.

[...

....]

MK: Through the last section of the book.... resounds the contrary kind of laugh, the kind heard when things lose their meaning. There is a certain imaginary dividing line beyond which things appear senseless and ridiculous. A person asks himself: Isn't it nonsensical for me to get up in the morning? to go to work? to strive for anything? to belong to a nation just because I was born that way? Man lives in close proximity to this boundary, and can easily find himself on the other side. That boundary exists everywhere, in all areas of human life and even in the deepest, most biological of all: sexuality. And precisely because it is the deepest region of life the question posed to sexuality is the deepest question. This is why my book of variations can end with no variation but this.

PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?

MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out in the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera (b. 1929, Czechoslovakia) opens The Book of Laughter and Forgetting describing a famous photograph which depicts Klement Gottwald, the original leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, standing publically next to Vladimír Clementis, who at first was a strong supporter of the party but later executed for becoming a “deviationist”. Upon his execution, his image was airbrushed from the photograph through the propaganda efforts of the state, making as though he never existed. From this opening, Kundera provides seven different short stories to explore the notion of forgetting– when it might be necessary, when it is a tool for oppression and social control, when it becomes an inevitable, even necessary, aspect of human life.

While all the stories contain political undercurrents, politics is not the focus of the book. As Kundera said himself, “The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel.” A concept I also found when reading the poet Durs Grünbein (of the former East German state); both always finding more to life than what occurs politically. Kundera instead probes deeper into human behavior to reveal the totalitarianism that arises when we envision any utopian state of being, which he accomplishes by paralleling stories of personal relationships with the political-social-historical context of communist Czechoslovakia, the two reflecting off one another equally. In doing so Kundera finds humor in the follies that inevitably result whenever the characters begin striving for a splendid unity of wholeness, hence the “laughter” portion of his title. And what does Kundera then value, while baulking our efforts for perfected relations and communal harmony? Something more authentic, a quality of life that is not so fragile when facing corruption or easily effected by others, “Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality.”

Kundera’s writing tends to freely adopt whatever style and approach he thought appropriate for each individual story, at times focusing specifically upon the internal psychology of his character(s), other times, remaining surface only, without direct comment upon how the characters might be processing the events in which they are embroiled. Kundera’s writing also often extends itself through such tangents as philosophy, the arts, music, or just general offhand humanist musings. Resultingly, it is difficult to ‘pin down’ exactly what Kundera is communicating, and in fact, when I finished the book, I knew I enjoyed it, as all the stories were fascinating and imbedded with nuggets of thought, but I found myself at a loss to capture Kundera’s “artistic vision” to help me determine out exactly where he was ultimately trying to go with the material.

But in retrospect, this is probably all by design, Kundera not wanting the author to be yet another form of totalitarian rule that tells his readers what to make of his books. Subsequently, readers have to provide their own interpretations of the stories, which in turn makes the writing that much more engaging– especially when sex is involved, which reoccurs prevalently in Kundera’s book, even borderline smut at times. But what better topic is there to discern privately the irony within Kundera’s, quite often, morally ambiguous events? And if one views sexuality as an expression of Eros, that human desire for wholeness beyond ourselves? And what is funnier than someone getting caught with their pants down? The dream that is forgotten as quickly as it begins to be replaced.

[Song of the Lark; Jules Breton, 1884]

If I had to choose a movie to recommend to display Sam Shepard’s acting, it would be Days of Heaven, simply because it was written and directed by one of America’s great filmmakers, Terrence Malick. Shepard plays a wealthy landowner just prior to World War I and in this scene-- involving a young couple who have found themselves down on their luck-- the story is laid out pretty clear (I couldn’t find one with Shepard‘s character). And the scene is quintessential Malick, with every camera angle, image, line, facial expression and body movement combining to create ineffable drama. It also displays Malick’s reoccurring effort to depict the harsh, irreconcilable beauty of nature, which humans are equally a part of.

...Misfortune grows, brother men,
more quickly than the machine, than ten machines,
......and it grows
with Rousseau's beast, with our whiskers;
evil grows for reasons we do not know
and it is an inundation with its own liquids,
with its own mud and its own solid cloud!
Suffering inverts positions, performs a function
in which aqueous humor is vertical
to the pavement,
the eye is seeing and this ear hearing,
and this ear strikes nine o'clock on the hour
of the lightning flash, and nine belly laughs
at the hour of wheat, and nine female sounds
at the hour of weeping, and nine canticles
at the hour of the hunger and nine thunderclaps
and nine whips, minus a scream.

...Sorrow seizes us, brother men,
from behind, from the side,
and maddens us in the cinema,
it nails us in gramophones,
unnails us in beds, falls perpendicularly
to our tickets, to our letters;
and it is very grave to suffer, one can pray...
For of the results
of sorrow, there are some
who are born, others grow, others die...

--from Vallejo's 'Nine Monsters', written 11/03/1937
..during the Spanish Civil War

And what if after so many wings of birds,
the stopped bird doesn't survive!
It would be better then, really
if it were swallowed up, and let's end it!

I notice the contemporary English poets and critics want English poetry to be tied to "history", by which they mean linguistic history, the various layers of meaning a given word has taken on, the encrustations an iambic line has taken on by floating face down through the centuries, the curious angles an idea has chipped into it by being misunderstood by dopes in the Elizabethan, in the Tudor...The outcome of this longing is that the word is never fresh, the line has fused vertebrae, and the poem does not convey thinking, but instead contains portraits of ideas, like those "Wanted" posters issued by police departments. But Vallejo's art shows us what it's like not to be about recapturing ideas, but actually how to think. We feel the flow of thought, its power like an underground river finding its way for the first time through some shifted ground-- even he doesn't know where it will come out. [Robert Bly on César Vallejo]

CROWD MEMBER: As an actor, what do you expect from your writers, and as a writer what do you expect from your actors?

SHEPARD: I don’t compartmentalize things like that. I’m not interested in borders so much as I like putting things together. I don’t ever look at things so black and white like that..... I really think that we are not just one person. We are a multiplicity of beings, if you want to call it that. Not to get too philosophical about it, but it’s very easy for me to see character in the shifting, myriad, ever-changing tableau rather than one part. We’re used to looking at character in a traditional sense, of being something we can define by behavior or background. You know what I’m saying? But it may not be like that; it may be much more interesting. For me, anyway. It may not be so interesting to lock down the character with specifics. What I’m interested in is this shifting of the character, you know, not the exactness of definition. [from a 2006 Cherry Lane Theater interview with Sam Shepard]

Is this Paris, Texas,
or Paris, France?
Am I alive
Or am I dead?

Something identifies you with the one who leaves you, and it
is your common power to return: thus your greatest sorrow.

Something separates you from the one who remains with
you, and it is your common slavery to depart: thus your
meagerest rejoicing.

–César Vallejo

Man: Bring the tripod, Honey! Hurry Up!

Honey: Boy, what a monster! I've never seen one so huge. Be careful Dukie. They're deadly poisonous. I read it in one of those desert manuals. They're the only thing to really be afraid of out here.

Man: Don't worry. I didn't spend the best part of my years in the Philippines for nothing you know.

Honey: He's actually kind of beautiful when you look at him close. I was always taught to be afraid of snakes but actually they're no so bad. I mean he's just out here trying to get a suntan or something. There's nothing awful about that. He looks kind of tense but I'll bet he'd loosen up in no time at all if he got the right kind of attention. You know what I mean, Dukie? Little mice and stuff. I'll bet he'd make a nice pet.

Man: Maybe we oughta' aggravate him a little, Honey. He blends right into the background when he's not moving. I don't want to wast any more film than I have to.

Honey: O.K.

(She stomps her foot and hisses at the sidewinder.)

--from 'Operation Sidewinder', Act One; Sam Shepard

Any other Sam Shepard fan out there? I like his plays, his acting, his stories, his general exploration of the American male psyche. A complicated beast it can be at times. The New Yorker recently published a new Shepard story, 'Land of the Living'. It is very good-- midwestern family vacation strains, tourism on the Yucatán penninsula, pharmaceuticals, social anxiety, complications of technology, battle of the sexes, capitalistic world culture, and how the wilds of the jungle can hit the folks of St. Paul, Minnesota just as hard as it hit the Mayan empire:

The tables in the dining room are set with pink napkins and bright sprigs of bougainvillea propped in skinny glass vases. A Mayan waiter is pouring ice water from a metal pitcher. We sit by the window across from a pair of women with boyish haircuts, dressed exactly alike, in white starched shirts and red ties. They hold hands across the table and stare out at the crashing surf. New Age music is playing in hypnotic repetition, like massage-parlor background atmosphere. It gives the room a gloomy, apocalyptic air. Nobody’s smiling. The spectacular view of the white beach stretches clear down the narrow peninsula, evaporating into billowy sea foam. Two dark soldiers emerge, strolling casually along the surf line, their hawklike Indian faces set hard against camouflage uniforms, black machine guns strapped to their backs. A fleet of white pelicans sail past them, then dip low to the water. One of them plunges headlong into the green tide and comes up spewing mullet. “I just want you to know something, Emma,” I tell my daughter as I smooth the pink napkin on my knee. “Your mother has no idea what she’s talking about."

[Patti Smith/Sam Shepard, performing their play, Cowboy Mouth, 1971]

White Rose
--César Vallejo (trans by James Wright)

I feel all right. Now
a stoical frost shines
in me.
It make me laugh, this ruby-colored
rope
that creaks in my body.

Endless rope,
like a spiral
descending
from
evil...
rope, bloody and clumsy,
shaped by
a thousand waiting daggers.

Because it goes in this way, braiding
its rolls of funeral crepe,
and because it ties the quivering cat
of Fear to the frozen nest,
to the final fire.

Now surrounded by light
I am calm.
And out on my Pacific
a shipwrecked coffin mews.

Werner Herzog in the throes of ecstatic repulsion.

[The Snake Charmer; Henri Rousseau, 1907]

But the wind, this bundle of invisible snakes, roars across our wandering island-- it is a wandering island, of course, unlocated in space and quite out of time-- and seems to heap the shoulders with an armlike weight, to coil about my naked legs and pulse and cool and caress the flesh with an unpredictable weight and consistency, tension, of its own. These snakes that fly in the wind are as large around as tree trunks; but pliant, as everlastingly pliant, as serpents that crowd my dreams. So the wind nests itself and bundles itself across this island, buffets the body with wedges of invisible but still sensual configurations. It drives, drives, and even when it drops down, fades, dies, it continues its gentle rubbing against the skin.... I am wrapped in wind, walk always-- from the hips, from the hips-- through the thick entangled currents of this serpentine wind.

--from Second Skin; John Hawkes

Everyone knows that professional tattoo parlors are safe, sterile environments. However, for anyone who's gone under the gun for more than three hours-- when the process really gets painful-- they also know that they can start to resemble something more like this:

Prolonged inspection of disintegrating cardboard box of little scabrous dusty bottles, none full, some empty. Bottles of dye. Chicken blood, ground betel nut, baby-blue irises of child's eye-- brief flashing of the cursed rainbow. Tossing one particular bottle up and down and grinning. Thick green. Then fondling the electric needle. Frayed cord, greasy case-- point no more than a stiff hair but hot as a dry frying pan white from the fire. Then he squints... Then lights a butt, draws, settles it on the lip of a scummy brown-stained saucer. Then unstoppers the ancient clotted bottle of iodine. Skull and crossbones. Settles the butt between his teeth where it stays.... holding the needle away from his own face and flesh, pushing a fat leg against the victim's. Scowls. Leans down. Tongue in position. Rainbow full of smoke and blood. Then the needle bites...

[from Second Skin; John Hawkes]

John Hawkes spent a portion of his childhood living in Juneau, Alaska, which at that time was only accessible by water. This remote frontier lifestyle inevitably influenced his writing. From a 1979 interview:

Really, I didn’t like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year. It was very forbidding: terrifically overgrown, with such things as devil’s clubs, which were long stalks with spines on them that would leap out if you touched them. I simply didn’t like it; it was a frightening place, and it certainly was mythical—it must have had a lot to do with the source of my fiction, with the sense of rich desolation.

I: Could you expand on this a little? On Alaska as both desolate and mythical?

JH: I remember that right across from our house I could see a little town, more or less abandoned, with an abandoned mine running half-way up the mountainside, as if painted rust red, and old, horrible, rusted pieces of machinery scattered over the landscape. Our house was, in effect, on a ridge that faced the bay from the front, and in the rear it faced a bowl, at the bottom of which they made a playing field for children. At the edge of this field, down in the bowl, was a terrific river, so that, symbolically, the place was a mixture of Hades and Freudian imagery. It gave one a tremendous sense of isolation and loneliness living in this place, though only in retrospect—I don’t remember feeling lonely at the time. I remember my mother being quite valiant in being able to live there with my father gone a great deal on small boats that were always dangerous. I, myself, was interested in chemistry at the time, but only in a poetic way......

I have one more memory, of an Indian with an artificial leg whom my father knew, who carved magnificent things out of ivory, and made a hunting knife which my father gave to me as a present. It had a bear on the front of it; when I think of it I remember this Indian, who was a kind of Huckleberry Finn figure. The Indians there lived in terrible poverty, in shacks right on the waterfront of the city. I was always aware of them: I remember one time seeing a piece of canvas draped, cutting off a part of the capitol building, where they were hanging an Indian outside for some crime. It was a strange, nightmarish world.

"For me, everything depends on language." A quote from author John Hawkes and a good place to start when thinking about his novel, Second Skin. Hawkes is known as being one of the originators of the post-modern novel and his contributions within Second Skin (1964) include an effulgent use of captivating language and elliptical approaches that circumvent traditional narrative. It’s writing that requires a certain amount of wrestle from the reader to make it work, but this also means a more active engagement, which in turn infuses that much more life into the text.

Its probably more important to first relay the quality of Hawkes’ language prior to mentioning what the book is about. Excessive would be an apt description, but it goes further than that– exotic, seductive, to the point of being lurid as Hawkes’ writhing sentences and paragraphs are as menacing as they are sensual, with all the devastating richness that might be found in the most sweltering pits of a tropical rain forest. A place where German filmmaker Werner Herzog would find himself in ecstatic repulsion.

So this is the verbal environment we find our narrator, Skipper-- a retired Navy officer living upon an isolated island with his granddaughter, and who spends his days artificially inseminating cows. Gaugin meets contemporary surrealism. The island also is a safe hermitage that allows Skipper to relay the events of his life, which becomes the artistic method to overcome the atrocious difficulties he faced in the past. And what were some of these difficulties? Included would be the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, as well as the brutal murder of his son-in-law. Not pleasant and explains why Skipper has a somewhat bifurcated conception of his life. Two thirds of the chapters told as flashbacks, the other third told from his current days upon the island, and the language in both with stark variances to express Skipper’s internal emotional states. And while the past is quite dire, the contrast of the present makes it that much more heroically splendid.

Second Skin was not the easiest book to get into as it initially carries on in a more allusive introductory fashion which, in most books, typically lasts only a page or two, which made me think that it wasn’t just an introduction but how the entire book was going to proceed. However, Hawkes eventually pulls in Skipper’s stories to solidify a narrative and gives the reader something to work from. And when I finished the book, I actually returned to the first few chapters to read them over again, at which point I could better appreciate how Hawkes constructed his novel. There was effort involved in my reading, but well worth it because Second Skin creates a unique drama almost entirely through lingual atmosphere.