The Janus Tree and other stories – by Glen Hirshberg
Subterranean Press 2011
Real-Time Review by DF Lewis: continued from HERE.
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Part Three: Book Depository Stories
Esmeralda
“That desperate, driving hunger to get inside other people’s stories.”
You’re telling me! This is seriously one hell of a story for me. Can’t thank the author enough. A dystopic vision, I take it, where the Ebook / Real Book interface has become almost a religious setting up of real book depositories: with certain sects intent on preservation or creating some sort of evolving primeval-soup of pages, words, covers wherein meaning and knowledge and vision still reside osmotically… But with hidden dangers of a vast ‘millwell’ of sucking readers into a new sinister place or, perhaps, into nirvana, particularly, it seems, for women among them. A negative or positive subsumation – the jury is out, I guess. The story’s utter power abounds with these dark abandoned buildings now used as depositories-with-sense-loads and book-ghosts and tangible book-remains; it has to be read to be fully appreciated. And simply has to be read on book paper: no other way will do. [My own non-fiction take on this ebook/book interface from a few months ago: Future-Nostalgically. Plus a short extract shown HERE from my story-fiction entitled 'Salustrade' - that I feel is relevant to one particular aspect of the "Esmerelda" interface - first published in 1994: reprinted in 'Weirdmonger' 2003]. More book gestalt quotes from ‘Esmerelda’: “That whining never leaves your ears. I swear, it’s like the world has sprung a leak, and everything is just spilling out of it somewhere.” — “But we saw a buffalo. It strolled right past the doors while we were inside. One Buffalo.” — “There was more. I can’t explain the effect. It wasn’t any one thing, but the cumulative impact.” –Indeed. I’ve used that word ‘cumulative’ several times already in my review. And it refers here to a particular cut-up book, with marginalia and Venus erasures etc.: cf the world’s first blank story in ‘Nemonymous’ #2 (2002) and the Dada ethos of Erik Satie…(No wonder ‘Esmerelda’ is spelt differently in different places in this story’s text). That cut-up description is a major scene out of many in this major major story. Catch 22. What comes first: the book or the book? (27 Mar 12 – 2.00 pm bst)
After-Words
“…the dead ducts of my Saturn’s fan,… [...]…their heads sinking into moldy mounds of paperback books,…[...] …probing into the crease of the binding and scratching softly at the words on the page…”
Somehow I’m reminded of the Dickensian teacher in ‘The Janus Tree’ with the ‘gas mask’ – as if he didn’t want to catch polio or diphtheria, in view of what I know now. And Burton’s Melancholy and, unless I imagined it (there is no search facility in a real book), a different Burton’s Nile. All perhaps needing a reader’s mask: as if in a book hospital. Another Depository story told by a woman whose adopted nephew has joined the Library: the hub of literal book-terrorists, where the religion I mentioned in the previous stories has developed into vicious rebellion and book crawl-spaces. She’s a doctor asked to treat the Librarian himself. There is equivocation with the aforementioned jury. But I know where I stand – whatever the dangers: i.e. with the real books. This book with which I’ve been making love for the last few days, fearing nothing that may be passed between us as a result of such intercourse. I relish, too, of course, the squashed meadow-fly or buffalo poo, a ghost’s spore or, even, an invisible deadly germ, left upon the page of a book from childhood’s endless Summer… or from this my endless Autumn: now merging gently into what I shall call that Pikesville ‘distance’. “Look now, children. See those things in their hands? They called those ‘books.’ See how still they all are? This is what it was like…” (Sic: ellipsis)
END (27 Mar 12 – 3.30 pm bst)