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My Landlady the Lobotomist

by Eckhard Gerdes (Goodreads Author)

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 20 ratings · 4 reviews

The brains of past tenants line the shelves of my boarding house, soaking in a mysterious elixir. I'm pretty sure something has infected my gray matter; an epic battle between Godzilla and the divine She-Sus rages in my hypothalamus. In my pituatary gland a dragonfly woos an electric blue angelfish and all the while brutal prog steampunk echoes through my cerebrum. One mor...more

Paperback, 120 pages

Published June 9th 2008 by Raw Dog Screaming Press (Hyattsville, MD)

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Apr 21, 2009 Garrett Cook rated it 5 of 5 stars

Where the hell are my words? There's something truly great to say about this book. Something that nails it down like a Roman soldier would an impertinent messiah. Those words lurk in the head of a wise orangutan shaman in Borneo or something like it. Layers of headspace peel back or rush ahead with new revelations constantly in My Landlady the Lobobotomist, a story about heartbreak, the artistic process and the nature of one man's hell. And Godzilla. And his love for She-sus, the female messiah....more

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Apr 02, 2011 Erik Graff rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: writers

Recommended to Erik by: Eckhard Gerdes

Shelves: literature

This short novel describes love in terms of three modalities. The first and most normative is a middle-aged college professor in love with a much younger woman. The second is an insect impossibly in love with a fish. The third is Godzilla, the Shadow of the other two, versus She-sus. As the author is a middle-aged college professor, that would seem to be the pivot of the whole. Presumably, however, he does not live in a boarding house run by an amateur lobotomist.

At best, Gerdes has a sense of h...more

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Aug 27, 2010 Kane Faucher rated it 5 of 5 stars

Landlady Mrs. Lardenswill has a diabolical knack for collecting the frontal lobes of former boarders in jars on display, and this is where we the readers come in. There is a somewhat Brahmanistic hierarchy of habitues under the stern and matronly landlady whose arcanely diabolical predilection for lobotomizing tenants who irk her on issues such as chronic back rent and bad table manners. The cruel and Procrustean selection of a landlady metaphorically mirrors the "headlessness" of the small town...more Landlady Mrs. Lardenswill has a diabolical knack for collecting the frontal lobes of former boarders in jars on display, and this is where we the readers come in. There is a somewhat Brahmanistic hierarchy of habitues under the stern and matronly landlady whose arcanely diabolical predilection for lobotomizing tenants who irk her on issues such as chronic back rent and bad table manners. The cruel and Procrustean selection of a landlady metaphorically mirrors the "headlessness" of the small town's residents, a town that has effectively submitted itself to a regimen of social and mental lobotomization.
Gerdes presents us with a cast of characters as sordid and varied as a Tom Waits song, with a pace and vociferously biting prose reminiscent of early Heinlein, it is hard not to dissociate the reading of this novel from listening to The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby. The main character, fraught with mourning, boredom, irritation with stale norms, and tormented by a seemingly impossible love for a married woman appears to represent that other option for social health, a hapless Ugo Cerletti with electroshock as social cure. But for all his attempts to "auto-lobotomize" or stifle his troubled heart, both redouble their efforts to throw our narrator deeper into despair. The litany of failed escapades and constant environmental irritations carries the narrator to a surreal hotel where the rooms are filled with fowl and puns, and people fish off the balconies. And yet, the narrator cannot completely extricate himself from a stormy love affair with an angelfish fatale and her retinue of dragonfly messengers. A shore-side "lottery" of running the rapids as a brief and temporary ease of the small town malaise quickly displays a dark and bizarre area-specific application of Malthusian principles. Wending and weaving its way through this traffic of the absurd is an allegorical tale of Godzilla versus the divine She-sus, bringing us on a lubricious romp through the absurd, an intercalation of high and low brow effects that merge into a non-prosaic symphony.
If this were just a tale of unrequited love, the chocolate box sentimentality might turn away readers with more a more ravenous appetite for the complex, but this novel can hardly be called conventional fare. Poetic interjections are seamlessly integrated, putting one in mind of Gass' The Tunnel. The musings are erubescent and provocative, studding the plot without pretentious dithering or preachy maundering. Erotic interludes are composed with a frank realism that avoid both the mundane and the tastelessly sensationalist.
Gerdes, a leading voice in the Bizarro movement, runs decidedly roughshod over the finicky fetters of narrative causality, frequently displacing the temporal and spatial dimensions of the plot which effectively leaves the reader adrift on a listing sea where only the transcendence of the events themselves can provide any reliable anchor. Enthusiasts of Gerdes' work may find his Cistern Tawdry a difficult act to follow, but despite his newest volume's somewhat svelte offering, Gerdes succeeds in giving the readers a commanding prose performance.
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Nov 10, 2010 Anita Dalton rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bizarro, fiction, books-we-own

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 admis...more

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Shelves: award-winning, bizarro

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About Eckhard Gerdes

Eckhard Gerdes is an American-born novelist & editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He's author of ten published novels:
Projections ['86 Depth Charge]
Ring in a River ['89 Depth Charge]
Truly Fine Citizen ['92 Highlander]
Cistern Tawdry ['02 Fugue State]
Przewalski's Horse ['06 Red Hen]
The Million-Year Centipede, or, Liquid Structures ['...more

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