Sorcererer

by Jace Brittain

Schism Press presents Sorcererer, a novel by Jace Brittain.

“O! I loved this feverish yarn set in the cartilaginous environs of the ear and/or the mucilaginous environs of the Menlo Sanitorium, where patient Felix has collapsed on the footpath, attended by a clutch of snails. Part speculative Walser biography, part fan-fic of the Schumann-Brahms-Schumann love triangle, part dime-store mystery about a lost volume in a spooky library, part late-nite documentary on the lives of snails, this batty, brainy book has something for everyone.”
"Sharp, grimly comic, vertiginous, extraordinary in its myriad misbehavings, Jace Brittain’s Sorcererer celebrates the illegibility of the body, the mind, and language within a librarial architectonics designed by Borges and described by Beckett to Leslie Scalapino on a stroll through Heraclitus’s garden, or, as one of its protagonists 'stay vim stay vigor.' Brittain’s un-novel announces the arrival of an important new voice in the post-genre wilderness."
“Jace Brittain's thickly spare, indelibly sticky prose spirals at the "final edge of heliotropic civilization," gooping the horizon line between history and illusion. All across Sorcererer's pages, the ailing body of western knowledge coughs up its secrets and myths, its fatal false promises. This is an unbecoming book, a book of slime-enciphered messages, language fluxing from the sentences' cracked shells. Read Sorcererer with the slowness of snails, with your feelers, backwards and forwards. Leave your own oozy traces on the patterns you find.”
" Sorcererer collects a network of interconnected prose poems (a system of constant meaning / messages of constant noise) into a singular housing. At first this might appear as a means to ease the reader's transition from one segment to the next, but in reality it lures them into an occulted maze of death--rendered animate by plosive displays and an arcane lexicon.

Genres: Fiction

138 pages, Paperback

Published March 10, 2022

Reviews

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

At this point, anyone who keeps up with me on here or over on the bird app is probably pretty well aware of what I'm up to. I read a lot of weird stuff - mostly a mix of classics, counterculture, and experimental/transgressive fiction - and I try to offer thoughtful, informative reviews of anything I read from the fine small presses out there doing the yeoman's work of keeping that last category alive amidst the Biblically flooded content streams and TikTok attention spans of the 21st century (I think I've probably always been a fuddy-duddy, but it's only in the past few years I've allowed myself to be ok with it. Lucky you all). In my capacity as self-appointed champion of under-covered independent titles everywhere, however, I have gotten into the not-entirely-helpful habit of reading pretty quickly. Small presses tend to produce small books - often under 200 pages - often strangely typeset or adorned with illustrations, such that even their already-diminutive page counts are wildly overstating things - and if I set out to read a book in one sitting, I tend to accomplish that goal whether it serves the book in question or not. I rely on context rather than look up words I don't know. I tell myself ambiguity is the author's intention, rather than reread a passage I didn't quite make sense of. I press on, when I ought to double back. And I don't think I'm alone in taking these shortcuts. There are more great books in the world than anyone could read in ten lifetimes - with more coming out every day - and anyone who's seeking to be a part of the online literary community (or, really, any online community) is going to place a certain amount of value on volume - on breadth, over depth of knowledge - almost out of necessity. It is harder now than ever before to keep up with your homework and actually know what you're talking about (and I wouldn't necessarily claim either of those accomplishments for myself, though I do try). But all of that is just a longass preface to my saying this: Jace Brittain's Sorcererer cannot be read quickly. And I should know. I read it twice.

I can probably count the books I've read twice, in my entire life, on one hand. For all the reasons I stated above, I've never been a big rereader. There's just too much out there. I'll revisit my faves in the nursing home, is what I've always told myself. But after zipping through Sorcererer's 123 pages in about two hours last week, I sat down and realized I had no idea what, or even how to write about it. Ostensibly the tale of two mental patients - Oswalda, the caged free spirit subjected to increasingly medieval curative techniques as she rails against her incarceration, and Felix, the narrator recounting his doomed love for her while being slowly devoured by snails (a bizarre, last-ditch treatment of his own) - the book runs the English language through so many different lexical filters as to feel like the real-time scan readout from a legitimately altered mind; a plunge inside a brain that operates wholly differently from your own.

And that's just the first scrim. With the specter of some nebulous-but-diagnosed mental illness as our jumping off point, we then learn that, within the context of the narrative, Felix and Oswalda regularly communicated by inscribing coded messages - circling keywords in the existing print, scribbling new ones in the gutters and margins - betwixt the pages of the least popular science texts in their shared sanatorium's library. This maze of ecologically-tinged ciphers and communiques must then be interpreted through the twin lenses of Felix's own misfiring memory, and the slow deterioration of his faculties, poisoned at the hands (well, pseudopods) of his carnivorous snails. The story he tells - of sink basin naval battles and garden shear attacks, of Heavens-assisted shock treatments and fires in uncrowded theaters, of two people trying desperately to keep their "equally treasured sanities and insanities" - is one of mad convolutions and beautiful grotesquerie. Brittain has invented here a kind of poetry of the unraveling senses; a palimpsest upon the brain, written in gastropodal slime.

I took four hours to read Sorcererer the second time around - twice as long as the first. I looked up words, reread passages two and three times, and allowed Brittain's haphazard punctuation and shifty, mucilaginous linguistics to gluck and slorp across the page before my very eyes. What I got for my trouble was an endlessly imaginative and malleable story of resistance against the institutional forces of darkness, and hope for some kind of light at the end of whatever curvilinear tunnel we might be trapped in at this present moment in history - my extra time and effort more than rewarded. And whether the snail shell of existence spirals outward or inward, I am grateful to Sorcererer for forcing me to settle down and take it slow. Even fuddy-duddies like me need to be reminded sometimes.

[Paul Cunningham · Rating 5 out of 5]

In one of my favorite books—Sebald’s THE RINGS OF SATURN—the early pages are concerned with the whereabouts of Renaissance polymath Sir Thomas Browne’s remains. Sebald poetically notes Browne’s fascination with mortal earthly existence “from the things that were closest to him to the spheres of the universe, with the eye of an outsider”. In Jace Brittain’s Sorcererer, their use of language patterns and vibrates much like the book’s title. Sublimely golden, the book’s alchemical language reshapes and errs, solidifies and spits itself new again, resisting all structural laws, going on and off its own slime trails like a crazytrain snail. Jace and I both share an admiration for Sir Thomas Browne’s writing. Both of our new books also, in different ways, engage with Browne’s thoughts on mortality—specifically Hydriotaphia. In the third chapter of Hydrotaphia, Browne, calls fire a “devouring agent”. It is the agent that chews that which was once life into ash and, in Rings of Saturn, Sebald likens Browne’s thoughts on burial to that of a gnawing. But he intriguingly calls it a gnawing out of the grave. This gnawing might be the text that comes after the person. This gnawing might be grief. Grief is something I believe to be continuous. This gnawing might be the “expectorant” that blackens and crinkles and wrinkles a page of once legible text into a fragment. But Brittain—their Felix and Oswalda—suggest that the illegible is still legible. You just need to look at things in a different way. With the eye of an outsider. When presented with a fragment, one can still attempt to read the fragment. That fragment is, after all, a record of a person. The fragment becomes a sublime new story. Like looking into the unknown of an empty snail shell. You won’t understand what happened to the snail unless you are willing to give up the known and go deeper. Let corruption slowly enter as you read SORCERERER!

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

A riotous, zany book, dripping with mucus and snail goo, Sorcererer is a reminder that language is the stuff of play, the connective tissue of friendship, a site of resistance, and "a shell to crawl into." Buy this one now, yo.

Full review forthcoming.

[Hannah Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely wild rump of a novel crafted through poems. Snails snails snails.