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lefwrites
, January 01, 2011
(view all comments by lefwrites)
I've been a fan of Eckhard Gerdes' work since I first saw the manuscript for "Cistern Tawdry" back in '96. Its adventurousness and Gerdes' creation of a language all his own was, to say the least, spellbinding.
Fourteen years and nine novels later, EG has continued to build on—and break—the ideas of time, reality, and psychological states. "The Unwelcome Guest + Nin and Nan" make an engaging literary double feature.
In the former, Gerdes' protagonist voyages through mazes of geography (urban, rural, small town) and, in the process, satirizes the concept of political and personal power, as well as the idea of united states. What's more, he delves fearlessly into the terrain of love—the psychological interior of the self, its perceptions of the other, and the carnal realities of both. Anyone who has ever attempted intimacy can relate to the altered states it binds its captors in.
The latter splits the protagonist into two people--Nin and Nan--halves of a codependent whole where gender roles and the traditional power imbued them are not always what they seem. The use of the word codependent has, due to pop psychology and the self-help genre, gotten a bad rap. Nin and Nan (a clever play on Yin and Yang, methinks) function without either overpowering or suffocating the other and achieve a sense of balance which makes their mission to thwart the ecological sabotage of those who would ruin their haven that much more powerful.
Gerdes has, since before the brilliance of "Cistern Tawdry," always challenged conventional literary/lingual notions his drawings. Each tells not one, but many stories of their own that heighten not only his work, but expand the possibilities of what a novel can be. He doesn't paint-by-numbers, he paints by words that make pictures that fuse both, leaving the reader's imagination to run as masterfully wild as his own does.
If you're a fan of art, literature, and experimental fiction, you should definitely grab a copy of "The Unwelcome Guest + Nin and Nan." It rewards readers who hunger to be engaged, challenged, and need a break from the traditional novel format.
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