Recent reads

The Stone Ship, by Peter Raftos. A surreal journey into a Kafkaesque parody of a university. The narrator, despondent after the death of his wife and child, goes to an isolated island where he intends to commit suicide. While contemplating different methods of self-annihilation, he's confronted by the spirit of a past suicide, who persuades him to undertake a mission of revenge against a distant and unnamed party.

The destination of the resulting journey proves to be a grotesquely funny, Gothically grim parody of a university characterized by casually corrupt bureaucrats, senile administrators, and perpetual organizational infighting which occasionally results in violent riots between feuding factions of the faculty and staff.

"Does this happen often?" I asked.

Vance shrugged. "Often enough. They reorganize the circles every so often, and that's the most likely trigger for a librarian's riot. But really, they just need to get it out of their system every now and again. It's a venting of spleen."

"One of them tried to brain me."

"Oh yeah. They'll kill you if they catch you. At first they fight each other, then they'll blame it on the 'outsiders', by which they mean any non-librarians. Then it's torches and pitchforks, and the hunt is on for us, people who neither understand nor care abut [sic] the Dewey Decimal system. Not even the poor old porters are safe,", he noded to the p[orter who shared our shelf, "and the porters work here. They're as liable to lynching as any of us."

This seemed like a good time to load my pistols.

It's as if the denizens of Jane Smiley's Moo or Robert Grudin's Book had set up shop in Gormenghast. Like Gormenghast, the immensely convoluted University seems to exist in a kind of parallel world which is different from our own, but similar enough that even its most surreal aspects resonate with a kind of reflected truth. The Place of Dead Books -- where books that have remained on the library shelves untouched so long that the ideas in them have died and leached out of their pages, leaving them completely blank, are stockpiled in vast anonymous heaps -- seems uncomfortably familiar for a place that of course does not, can not exist. (Can it?) The sublimely clueless narcissism of tenured faculty, and the lengths to which they will go to viciously avenge purely imaginary offenses of which no one but themselves is even marginally aware, is pitilessly portrayed. Then, of course, there's the undermonster, who dwells in the lower levels and is rumored to feed on those rejected by the University....