Somewhere between Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Cormac McCarthy’s darker roads is situated the powerfully bizarre and intriguing Motorman, written by David Ohle. It’s not a new work, but it has generated a consistent buzz in terms of the ever popular dystopia-themed literature. It’s a short offering that provides only glimpses into an utterly improbable world that’s actually quite fathomable when framed from a sense of despairing fabulism. It’s concerns the flight of a character named Moldenke away from a series of meaningless activities in Texaco City to a safe-haven away from the omniscience of one ever-present Mr. Bunce. More than his flight though, Motorman is about a vision of a future, or perhaps a dream, in which our conception of time, survival and humanity is greatly accelerated and/or extended. With the appearance of multiple suns and moons (invented or otherwise) along rapidly moving calendars, it is either a cosmic time-shift or mild concussion upon which the reader must decipher and refocus. That, along with the buzzing and fluttering of one’s numerous implanted hearts, especially upon an ubiquitous onrush of mindless jellyheads. Ohle doesn’t provide many answers, but he does depict fragments of a life under continual decay amid continual surveillance. Ohle writes his chapters briefly, often corresponding between characters as if in the middle of a war, though eerily the setting is oddly quiet throughout. As such, Motorman is a hazy, prescient and disturbing work that bridges our dreams to a fantastic reality. ( )

A patron told me in that this was a book I just had to read. Now, a lot of folks tell me about books I have to read, and most of them are either wrong or lying, but something about the hushed tenor of the pitch, together with the authors we’d be talking about - I recall Beckett - made me put in the interlibrary loan request that very day. I’ve been through it a couple of times now, and I have to send it back (thanks Tulsa City library) - but first let me scratch down this remarkable book here. Wildly strange, set in a vivid yet offhand dreamscape, the perfectly recorded account of Moldenke’s journey, caught between Burnheart and Bunce (and Buxtehude), his hearts breaking (it only takes one to kill the whole string), the suns setting, the jellyheads showing up like Raymond Chandler’s man-with-a-gun… Everything I’ve ever read and called ’surreal’ (including quite a bit of wonderful stuff lately) now sort of pales in comparison, for Motorman seems more Real than Sur- A non-story with pathos and pull, the language is rich and re-readable, the book is brilliant without calling undue attention to itself or its originality. I’ve seen echoes of this in some of George Saunders and others, and there’s some affinity w/ Jean Echenoz and Stanley Crawford’s Gascoyne, but this, this is… hm. Really good. If you get the new version, save the gushy intro by Ben Marcus ’til after, as the book needs no introduction (they rarely do, I find). I have since requested a couple of Ohle’s other titles (he’s still writing?) - The Age of Sinatra, and what has to be one of the best titles I’ve seen recently - Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers! (I hope I give our wonderful interlibrary loan crew as much entertainment as grief; today I reserved The Psychic Sasquatch and their UFO Connection.) ( )