SUICIDE by LANGUAGE succeeds St. Thomasino’s recent novel STEPHEN’S LANDING.  Tho it’s not until the last page, that we learn, This novel was inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Godard.  And again . . . inspired by the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet.  French New Wave cinema continues to startle and fascinate, so it’s not surprising that that era’s operandi, endures to nourish our own metatextural Neo-genesis.  

As such the novel leaps to cleanse itself of any incarnation or fanciful metempsychosis, essentially in the service of wide-awake facticity and realist veracity.  St. Thomasino’s humanistic metaphor-shy expedition, bolts together, in sum, a wild filmic primer.  Prep for turbulence nevertheless, and fierce cyclonic gravity: . . . the doodle of the Wonder Wheel.  Surreal effects flicker and penetrate the presumptive commonplace, the everyday savage vacuum of familiar assumptions, with tact and poise, and best of all, thru many fun and humorous conflicts.  

 

There are hints of plot.  But it’s emphatically Eros all the while, that fuels, invigorates, the anti-normative narrative.  Passion, often as anguish, complex into delicious (binary) woes: The taking of Elian at gunpoint?  In all, I particularly enjoy the writing’s exuberance, its jouissance, flickers, and surreal effects.  It’s a case of the incredible shrinking life.  The book examples how the combustable person, caught in the propositional present, survives proprioceptively, “as” love.  

 

The manuscript breaks into four parts.  The last section blithely revisits, mirrors the first, which necessarily clusters-together ruminative fragments.  She did the whole first chapter of The Whale for me.  We’re talking magnitudes and properties, she said.  Seems some letters are more equal than others.  Be prepared to withstand these literary mechanics: If you want to stretch a sweater sleep in it.  Poetry and prose often miss-mingle; thus for the reader, no easy précis.  

 

Consider the book’s epigraph.  Listen!  They are saying: Give us Barabbas!  Wait, hasn’t a universal froideur always overshadowed this bit of scripture.  Nevertheless, and we have no doubt: reliance on violence, will spill, from political necessity.  How to countenance this, unless as here, obliquely.  The metaphysical descent of self, the irony of death, simply adds to the price of a better world.  Did you say something Corky ?  The word you are looking for is holophrastic.  Thank you, Corky.  

 

—Jasper Brinton

 

Coming soon. . . .