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Deep breath.
I seem to be a fan or rather at least I find myself in the position that I accumulate and appreciate novels which by any other objective standard might or might not with very little pressing or pushing of authorial voice be deemed tiresome or exhausting due to quirks of structure both narrative and in the essential framework thereof such as for example those novels of John Barth whose reported speech when relating the tales of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor reach ridiculous levels with the seventh or eighth or more iteration of new tale tellers or equally ridiculous or perhaps brilliant given the notional narrator and his predilection for rambling and palavering perhaps due to his enjoyment or over indulgence of Bavarian or Moravian ales at the local ale house the book-long sentence that is Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Czech author and personal hero Bohumil Hrabal hence the eponymous label attached to this review of Laird Hunt’s own attempt to write whole chapters without resorting to a thing so abrupt or disruptive to the flow of words on pages as a period or full stop a feat he manages across every single chapter of the book no matter in which direction the action flows or how many conversations Harry and Solange and golden centaur Alfonso and the sinister and mysterious Connoisseurs have with each other or themselves or in fact with dead neighbours taking a bath or people who think their running shoes are speaking to them or old ladies who see dim auguries in the dust motes and air movements of closed rooms and thus summon protagonists and antagonists to seek their counsel but shroud the meetings in fakery and theatrical illusions which serve no purpose but to obfuscate the truth and confuse and distract Harry in particular from his pursuit of the Silver Angel Solange whose glued-on tears and silent and graceful beauty are as a flame to a moth albeit it a moth on the run from some tragic or perhaps simply embarrassing but actually completely tragic incident in his past and which has led Harry to leave his life in its entirety behind him in whichever nameless city it was contemporaneously trudging towards its inevitable conclusion and instead take flight to this equally anonymous city by the sea which bears striking resemblances to the capital city of Catalonia that is Barcelona with its long wide boulevards dotted irregularly but consistently with what some might consider the blight whereas others might consider the art of the living statue and who form the community into which Harry attempts to inveigle himself following the serendipitous or perhaps zemblanitous discovery of his Angel in a café after which he is drawn into the world of street performers and the shadowy forces directing their lives and which culminates in a chilling and otherworldly conclusion belied by the profound pathos and small lighter moments that dot the telling of a tale of a man at sea in a foreign land not unlike Metrolpole by Ferenc Karinthy but with less of the blank and unyielding and satirical foreignness that arises from a culture so far removed from one’s own that even the simple act of asking for a room in a hotel leads to confusion and distress but similar in the suggestibility of Harry who is a man perhaps struggling with post traumatic symptoms which he can feel are there but which he deigns not to confront for the same reason that he followed a random postcard to this city and thus into the story woven to provide him with a framework in which to explore his own narrative.
Luckily, for you and for everyone else, this structure is far, far less long-winded (or should that be far more short-winded?) than this ridiculous attempt to ape Hunt’s style. Indeed, the breathlessness of it is mitigated by the brevity of the chapters, and it provides Hunt with a curious capacity to force the reader to stop and breathe just where he needs him or her to stop, making for a powerful and arresting novel. Laird Hunt is one of my current favourite authors without a shadow of a doubt.
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