Eckhard Gerdes

review of
Eckhard Gerdes' The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin & Nan
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 14, 2012

"'Needless to say'", despite my having heard about "bizarro" writing, if that's a potentially correct term, for quite some time now & despite its being a genre that I'd somewhat naturally find interesting, I've only recently started reading w/in it. Perhaps the 1st such thing I read was Bradley Sands' My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7675864-my-heart-said-no-but-the-camera-crew-... ). I certainly enjoyed Bradley's bk & I've certainly enjoyed Gerdes'.

"'In today's society'", I reckon that the obvious lineage of bizarro writing stems from absurdism: Alfred Jarry to Eugène Ionesco to Edward Albee to Monty Python's Flying Circus to "Blaster" Al Ackerman. This is a lineage I can whole-heartedly identify w/. Astute social observation coupled w/ subversive nonsense.

"'In conclusion'", Gerde's writing is full of literary references. I even suspect that details such as place names may be references. EG: "The first time I'd heard of him was in Dubuque." Any chance that Dubuque was chosen b/c of Albee's play "The Lady from Dubuque"?

The Unwelcome Guest plus Nin & Nan might be appropriately called novellas. Both are full of surprising changes but w/ different styles. I think The Unwelcome Guest is dream-like & Nin & Nan relies more on puns & plot. In The Unwelcome Guest the protagonist's profession changes in wildly diverse ways. Fairly early on he stops at a hardware store w/ his 2 youngest sons & then starts to walk home, having forgotten that he drove. Perhaps he's senile. Not too long after, we're informed that he was a trucker:

"I remember one time I was driving my rig - 1 full 18-wheeler. I had to tank up at this gas station I knew of at the intersection of two alleys in the warehouse district. I'd been drinking, so I wasn't at my best, and I pulled up short at the pump - the nozzle reached to a foot away from my gas cap. I had to get back in the cab and pull forward some more, which was a little embarrassing. I pushed past a couple of smoking busybodies by the pump. Right as I was about to reach for the cap to open it again, the rig started moving. Oh, shit, I thought. I'd forgotten to apply the brake. The rig rolled ahead and then made a sharp turn, barely missing the building across the alley. It swung around and then barreled into one of the warehouses. I heard an explosion and figured I was in serious trouble."

A comedy of errors.

Gerde references people that many of us might not've heard of - probably to both promote them & pay homage to them. EG:

"I see Jim Chapman coming back the other way.

"'How're the woods?' I ask.

"'Freaky. I just wrote about them.'

"'Oh.' Better find some new ground.

"This time make sure it hasn't already been taken.

"Gerdes and Chapman, in a land grab for material, race neck and neck."

Who's Jim Chapman? I'd never heard of him but the mention here made me deduce, obviously, that he's a writer so I looked him up online & found that he is AND that he's one of Gerdes' publishers. Worked for me - now I want to read something by him. Other slightly more well-known writers are mentioned such as Raymond Federman, William Gass, Kenneth Patchen, & William S. Burroughs. Arno Schmidt is mentioned at least twice. Now I'm extremely interested in reading something by him.

The writing flows in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style but is liberally dosed w/ whatever possibilities seem to titillate the author. Despite this being true of both novellas, they're significantly different from each other. Here's a sample passage from The Unwelcome Guest:

"On board will be provisions for my feelings as well as my hunger and thirst. Stowaways might tell me I'm a good captain - my first mate apparently finds doing so demeaning. However, I still trust my first mate and will not find in the stowaways a replacement. As I said, I am loyal, even if no one else is. I'll stay here and work crosswords. I'm safe in my cabin.

"A knock.

"I ignore it.

"Another.

"I ignore it, too. I have work to do. I'm not looking for love again. It becomes hate. I don't understand the rules of trinkets, phone calls, ex-husbands, or whatever is in that jewelry box. I can announce a tornado by accident - I savvy the weather. I know when to duck. It's duck season. I have my waders on. I crouch. Low-flying projectiles are heading at me. I'm being told again that I'm the sorriest human who has ever lived. It's okay - I've been hated before. I don't think it's permanent."

Some gender-critical language makes it in here such as the pronoun "hir".

I initially liked The Unwelcome Guest a bit more than Nin & Nan but that eventually evened out somewhat. The drawings, handwriting, & juvenile comics inserted in The Unwelcome Guest helped liven it up - shades of Patchen, perhaps.

Some of you may've noticed what might seemed to've been irrelevant beginning phrases to the 1st 3 paragraphs of this review. Allow me to explain by quoting:

"But instead of giving up, like a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer, they give me their "in today's society" and their "needless to say" and their lame "in conclusion" and stupefy me - they bash in my brains with their misplaced modifiers, random punctuation, and ignorant disagreements."

Gerdes' "Or: reject the unwelcome guest who comes to occupy your head" reminds me of the Street Rat(bag) slogan: "Evict the ruling class from the real estate of yr mind."

Nin & Nan has a more straightforward plot than The Unwelcome Guest despite its extreme fluidity. Nin & Nan are 2 characters of uncertain human form who continuously resist the Empire in its many forms. References to modern-day problems, filled w/ word-play, abound:

"Unfortunately a refried-bean-colored Pinto was already in that stall and exploded when the Barracuda slammed into its infamous and exposed rear-mounted gas tank. refried-bean-colored crap blew all over the place."

The infamy of the Pinto's deliberate & fatal misdesign gives the author a chance to make a joke off of pinto beans. Another example of this: "The crap tables stank."

I cd particularly identify w/ the rebelliousness of Nan as expressed here: "Well, maybe not Nan, who instinctively suspected any synchronized activity."

Having the Emperor be named "Pinocchibush" was the touch that made this the most topically obvious as political satire. (Now, fortunately, ex-) President Bush's notoriously ill-formed speeches are parodied thusly:

"'And now! Live from the Empire City. His Highness!' Canned applause.

"'Good evening, My Subjects. I have been told by my advisors that some of you have tried and failed and have deconstrued incorrectly what my earlier states meant, er, statements, er, meant. If you have assumed I have leveled a permanent ban on resorts and terriers, you have misapprehended me incorrectly. Though we need to guard against terriers' activities in our resorts, I of course am not suggesting we close our hostilitality industries. But let me not allay your fears one more second - every dog has his day."

"Chapter Nine: The Makil Health Care Center" was esp endearing to me as a critique of modern medicine. "'It's designed as a huge cross, each wing dedicated to one specialty: hysterectomy, tonsillectomy, circumcision, and cosmetic surgery.'" &, yes, it 'may kill'.

I love puns - & Gerdes may even be a bigger homonymphonemiac than I am: "Nin was thinking they'd take a long walk down a short beer."

"'I had a wallet made of foreskins. Whenever I rubbed it, it turned into a briefcase,' said Sam.

"'That joke is as old as the heels,' said Nin.

"'So's that metaphor,' said Nin."

Was having Nin refute himself rather than having Sam do it a mistake or deliberate? "'In conclusion'", "'in today's society'" it's "'needless to say'" that:

"Will you all just shut up? My house has just been invaded by ladybugs and box elder bugs - there go those elders chasing the young ladies again - and I can barely walk without crunching something. Even the harmless can be annoying. Unless annoyance is their harm.

"They attack the paper I am writing on. They distract me from the table. Now I have nothing to Chase Manhattans down with the fascist regime! What am I hunting for, again? meaning? Or just the next word? Or do I want the last word? Omega. Which ends in an alpha, which begins the whole stinkin' process all over again."… (more)

I’ll be completely honest here. There were moments I had no idea what was happening in this book and when that occurs, I generally blame the book. But this time I think it was me, literalist that I am, seeking stable ground in a book where the only real knowledge I could have was that love will probably die. So I should have hated this book but I didn’t. This is not a case of the dim embracing the difficult in an attempt not to show their dimness (or at least I hope it isn’t) but rather an admission that despite at times realizing I was in over my head, I loved the prose nonetheless. The humor, the desperation, the at times lovely turn of phrase Gerdes employed. Read my entire review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/my-landlady-the-lobotomist-by-eckhard-gerdes/… (more)