Matt read and liked Eddie's review of Dark Spring:

"Stark, both horribly pent-up and incisive, etched in copper with a child's raw nerves, inevitable tragedy mounting in each line with flashings of sunlight (inner coalescing ecstatically with outer) offering exit stairs, then snapping shut like armore...more Stark, both horribly pent-up and incisive, etched in copper with a child's raw nerves, inevitable tragedy mounting in each line with flashings of sunlight (inner coalescing ecstatically with outer) offering exit stairs, then snapping shut like armored eyelids and the stark world resumes, where steely elaborate fantasies (innocent, demon-infested) well inarticulately up from within to offer provisional outs through masochism and tortured chastity.

This novella provides the nearly impenetrable, though pellucid, outer circumference of a psyche with vortical & ramified drawings (terrifying, playful) nesting within:


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Matt read and liked Eddie's review of Last Nights of Paris:

"Is there a better book, and in the determinants for this “better” must be factored in brevity, whose sole purpose is to make of a woman a city that one can live in and travel through, lured on by sweet and tragic mysteries, and by dread? Silly q...more Is there a better book, and in the determinants for this “better” must be factored in brevity, whose sole purpose is to make of a woman a city that one can live in and travel through, lured on by sweet and tragic mysteries, and by dread? Silly question, but I pose it only to say that even Breton’s Nadja can’t compare. Last Nights of Paris is something of a proto-noir, but a noir whose urban backdrop has been brought to the fore and endlessly (yet finitely) elaborated upon, while the plot is swallowed up by shadows; in these ways it has an abstract, impressionistic quality, like a painting whose main point is atmosphere and texture rather than narrative or discursive meaning. But there’s enough “story” to lure one into the insubstantial body of the narrator and merge with the pages as they turn. This is one seductive book!

It makes me very curious about Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris, a hugely popular 19th c. book that served as inspiration for the Surrealists and the Fantomas books. Though I haven’t read it I nevertheless get the feeling that Last Nights of Paris is a pure distillate of it, a pure and unassuming distillate that carries the full flavor, in concentrate, of its mystery and intrigue. “Unassuming” is a key word. This book is so unassuming that it has an air of anonymity, albeit an exquisitely formed and proportioned particularly French anonymity, and that the narrator himself is little more than an observing nonentity only adds to this anonymous quality, and this anonymity only adds to the mystery, in fact makes it irresistible. Like a city (or a woman?) this book can swallow you up (willingly) before you know it.


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