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Round II of esoteric French awards: Prix Femina

Exclusively female juried prize awarding books since 1904. It includes the Prix Femina Étranger and the Prix Femina Essai, but as those sections aren't going to be have buried works, I haven't completed them yet. A quick look through of author bios on Wiki garnered lots of lesbians.

P.S. There is no accent. Don't believe me, look it up.

Another buried award, this time Japanese. The Yomiuri Prize (/award/show/...), inaugurated in 1949, has a multitude of authors who have translated/been influenced by the usual Eurocentric rabble, a list of pairs of which follows.

Masuji Ibuse - Shakespeare (influenced by)
Kōji Uno - Gogol, Russian modernists, Symbolist poetry (influenced by)
Shōhei Ōoka - Stendhal, French writers (translated)
Shigeharu Nakano - German literature (influenced by)
Kōbō Abe - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edgar Allan Poe (influenced by)
Akatsuki Kambayashi - English literature (influenced by)
Kiku Amino - English literature (influenced by)
Haruto Kō - English literature (influenced by)
Tan Onuma - English literature (influenced by)
Ken'ichi Yoshida - Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue (influenced by and translated)
Junnosuke Yoshiyuki - Thomas Mann (influenced by)
Yoshinori Yagi - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, French literature (influenced by)
Hisashi Inoue - French literature (influenced by)
Kenzaburō Ōe - Mark Twain, Selma Lagerlöf, William Blake, Jean-Paul Sartre (influenced by)
Takako Takahashi - Baudelaire (influenced by), François Mauriac, French writers (translated), became a nun!
Hideo Takubo - French literature (influenced by)
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa - André Breton (influenced by), Marquis de Sade, Jean Cocteau (influenced by and translated)
Yoshikichi Furui - Kafka, German literature (influenced by), Musil, Broch (translated)
Sō Aono - Charles Bukowski (translated)
Momoko Ishii - A. A. Milne, English (children's) literature (influenced by and translated)
Nobuo Kojima - Gogol, Dostoevsky, Kafka, English literature (influenced by), Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud (translated)
Taku Miki - Russian literature (influenced by)
Anna Ogino - Rabelais, French literature (influenced by) (NATHAN. HEY NATHAN.)
Hisaki Matsuura - French literature (influenced by)
Toshiyuki Horie - Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert, Michel Rio, Jacques Réda (translated)
Rieko Matsuura - Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet (influenced by), Postmodernist Woman!
Yōko Tawada - Russian literature, German literature (influenced by), writes in Japanese and German (HEY NATHAN. AGAIN.)

Pick your poison. Mind the translations of their own work. Also, there's some Dalkey/New Directions in there, but other than Tawada for ND, I can't remember. Also a Translation Prize Nominee. Somewhere.

Most excellent! I seem to recognize a few names buried in there. Several of them most certainly have been unjustly BURIED as to the English speaking world.

Perhaps we oughta have a Thread dedicated to Aubrey's unEarthing of The BURIED Prize -- and the inevitable BURIED Author/Books contained therein? Aubrey hereby Authorized to create such a thread should she so desire to go to all that trouble..

Also, aren't you Listopia-izing the Yomiuri? Link please.

Aubrey wrote: "Another buried award, this time Japanese. The Yomiuri Prize (/award/show/...), inaugurated in 1949, has a multitude of authors who have translated/been influ..."

Thanks Aubrey - Yoshikichi Furui caught my eye and I have just ordered "White Haired Melody" and added some details on it to the synopsis on GR - looks good!

Jonathan wrote: "Yoshikichi Furui caught my eye and I have just ordered "White Haired Melody" and added some details on it to the synopsis on GR - looks good! "

Judging from the wikipedia data, he's BURIED. gr db is useless again. Only three books in translation?

Steven Moore mentions how disappointed he was to find the Japanese novel almost entirely disappear during the period of his second novel=book, 1600-1800 ; prior to that the Japanese novel looms large. Seems like a veritable explosion in the 20th century of Japanese fiction. Was the encounter with Europe an essential piece in the emergence of a new Japanese fiction?

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "Yoshikichi Furui caught my eye and I have just ordered "White Haired Melody" and added some details on it to the synopsis on GR - looks good! "

Judging from the wikipedia data, he..."

Yeah - only three translated so far as I can see and all but one out of print. Abebooks has a few on there, but not much.

The history of Japanese fiction is an interesting one, and something I would be keen to learn more about. I know that there was a massive shift post-war, of course, but don't know enough about 17th-19thc Japanese history to have any ideas...

Wiki says:

Many genres of literature made their début during the Edo Period, helped by a rising literacy rate among the growing population of townspeople, as well as the development of lending libraries. Although there was a minor Western influence trickling into the country from the Dutch settlement at Nagasaki, it was the importation of Chinese vernacular fiction that proved the greatest outside influence on the development of Early Modern Japanese fiction. Ihara Saikaku might be said to have given birth to the modern consciousness of the novel in Japan, mixing vernacular dialogue into his humorous and cautionary tales of the pleasure quarters. Jippensha Ikku wrote Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige, which is a mix of travelogue and comedy. Tsuga Teisho, Takebe Ayatari, and Okajima Kanzan were instrumental in developing the yomihon, which were historical romances almost entirely in prose, influenced by Chinese vernacular novels such as Three Kingdoms and Shui hu zhuan. Two yomihon masterpieces were written by Ueda Akinari: Ugetsu monogatari and Harusame monogatari wrote the extremely popular fantasy/historical romance Nansō Satomi Hakkenden in addition to other yomihon. Santō Kyōden wrote yomihon mostly set in the gay quarters until the Kansei edicts banned such works, and he turned to comedic kibyōshi. Genres included horror, crime stories, morality stories, comedy, and pornography—often accompanied by colorful woodcut prints

- which seems to suggest Moore is either incorrect or there is some other reason he is ignoring these texts

Jonathan wrote: "Wiki says:

Many genres of literature made their début during the Edo Period, helped by a rising literacy rate among the growing population of townspeople, as well as the development of lending li..."

I just added An EDO Anthology to the datebase which looks like an interesting overview of this period

Jonathan wrote: "- which seems to suggest Moore is either incorrect or there is some other reason he is ignoring these texts "

First, he'll ignore any text which is not a novel. First-point-one, he'll ignore an awful lot which is generally enumerated as conventional. Second, "When the Japanese resumed writing fiction in the early 17th century, the initial results were trivial booklets (zoshi): derivative tales modern in setting but medieval in method, parodies of the classics, fictional travelogues, ghost stories, and collections of anecdotes, many of them written by and for the demobilized samurai class. Even later, when Japanese writers started producing more ambitious novels, they dismissed them as gesaku--"playful compositions," entertainment written for money, not to be taken seriously as art. For a round-eyed outsider, evaluating the Japanese fiction of this period is handicapped by the paucity of translations, as though even scholars don't consider much of this fiction worth translating. Nevertheless, there are a few works that illustrate the millennium-long tendency of Japanese writers to keep the novel novel." Only twenty pages of evidence, compared to seventy pages in volume I, pre-1600.

Japanese novels treated in vII :: Ukiyo monogatari or Tales of the Floating World (1666) ; The Life of an Amorous Man or Koshoku ichidai otoko (1682) ; Wankyu issei no monogatari or The Tale of Wankyu the First (1685) ; Hosei monogatari or The Animal Court (mid-1700s) ; Rootless Weeds or Nenashigusa ; The Modern Life of Shidoken or Furyu Shidoken (1763) ; Those Familiar Bestsellers or Gozonji no shobaimaono (1782) ; and a few other items..... "The last genre of Japanese fiction to emerge in the premodern period was ninjobon, sentimental novels intended for female readers (specifically, for geisha and young girls), and the finest example of the genre is also the most innovative novel of the whole period. Love's Calendar: The First Blush of Spring (Shunshoku umegoyomi, 1832-33) [sic! on those dates] -- all the forgoing should be spell-checked against the Moore volume itself ; don't trust my transcription and arbitrary truncation of the listing...

Or, from the interview with Friend Jeff Bursey, ::
"JB: What country or time seemed to promise the most and deliver the least, or the opposite, in terms of enduring literary quality?

"SM: Japan. From about 970 to 1370, they were on fire, producing some of the most sophisticated novels ever written. Then the culture changed, and hardly anything of note was written until the twentieth century."


Which seems to suggest that Moore is neither incorrect nor ignoring these novels.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "- which seems to suggest Moore is either incorrect or there is some other reason he is ignoring these texts "

First, he'll ignore any text which is not a novel. First-point-one, ..."

Sorry - was just responding to your comment "how disappointed he was to find the Japanese novel almost entirely disappear during the period of his second novel=book, 1600-1800" - I have not read his book so was not aware how much he had gone into things. I agree completely with your final sentence...It seems that along with the move towards isolation, there was also a move towards producing "entertainment" for the emerging middle class, rather than "literature"...

Jonathan wrote: "Sorry - was just responding to your comment "how disappointed he was to find the Japanese novel almost entirely disappear during the period of his second novel=book, 1600-1800" - I have not read his book so was not aware how much he had gone into things."

Quite alright. I owe vII a revisit in order to create some more accessible and useful lists. My unnecessary claim in this situation, however, is that if Mr Moore says it is so, it is so. I think the only misunderstanding is the difference between Literature and Novel ; Moore will only deal with the novel -- even so poetry and drama may flourish in an age devoid of prose fiction. Interesting note ; following his section on the Japanese novel he has a section on the Tibetan novel which we should put in our collective pipes and smoke.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "Sorry - was just responding to your comment "how disappointed he was to find the Japanese novel almost entirely disappear during the period of his second novel=book, 1600-1800" - I..."

I really need to get hold of these and get round to reading them....

Jonathan wrote: "I really need to get hold of these and get round to reading them.... "

Great Heaps of LOST books!!

Jonathan wrote: "Aubrey wrote: "Another buried award, this time Japanese. The Yomiuri Prize (/award/show/...), inaugurated in 1949, has a multitude of authors who have transl..."

I knew someone would go for the Musil.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Most excellent! I seem to recognize a few names buried in there. Several of them most certainly have been unjustly BURIED as to the English speaking world.

Perhaps we oughta have a Thread dedi..."

The thread is a thing I could do.

I wasn't planning on doing a Listopia list. 80% of the award's books didn't exist before I added them, so it'd be a very lopsided result. Also, I usually only Listopiaize stuff that doesn't have its own formatted GR page already, examples being 'Best Novels of blah blah blah', author specific awards, lists of things that haven't won a common thing, etc.

Aubrey wrote: "The thread is a thing I could do."

Done. If you could move your Prize posts from this thread to that thread ; I think the Heaps created by Prizes have a distinction about them which brings them higher than the average Heap.

Can I move Le Prix Alain-Fournier despite its lack of buried?

Aubrey wrote: "Can I move Le Prix Alain-Fournier despite its lack of buried?"

Yep. It's for all your prizes. Your criteria for which qualify as BURIED Prizes. Individual authors will (still) have to qualify via the typical criteria for inclusion in the BBC database.

Sweet. In that case, I'll get on the migrating/ameliorating business when I have access to my laptop.

I don't have time to give anything more at the moment but thanks Aubrey, this is all amazing! I need to go through that Japan list in much more depth (of all of them, I've only read Kobo Abe...)

You might've read more, Nate, as I only listed the small time authors who have Eurocentric connections on record. There's some really popular folk on the list, aka Ryo/Haruki Murakami, Kirino, Mishima, that didn't need delving into.

Pharos Editions is publishing BURIED Books. Titles are chosen by authors people know. So far, everything (except a Norris title) they list is BURIED. If you find something of interest, please let us know ::



Julie Hayden
Theodora Keogh
Dana Spiotta
Charles L McNichols
Todd Walton
Richard Hallas
Robert Cantwell

In Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction Friedman and Fuchs collect a jumble of authors for consideration of the terminus experimental. Without myself having worked systematically through that list I have noticed that a number of those author=books are BURIED. That list is reproduced in my Review thereof.

Not everything here is buried, but lots of good stuff:

/list/show/7...

There is additional work of interest by these authors, but it is not on the list as it was not in the source book

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Pharos Editions is publishing BURIED Books. Titles are chosen by authors people know. So far, everything (except a Norris title) they list is BURIED. If you find something of interest, please let us know ::

Julie Hayden
Theodora Keogh
Dana Spiotta
Charles L McNichols
Todd Walton
Richard Hallas
Robert Cantwell

Theodora Roosevelt Keogh was the granddaughter of an American president, but I forget which one. Most of her books were published in cheap paperback editions with lurid covers. I picked up a couple recently, since they looked more interesting than expected...but I haven't read them yet.

Under his real name "Richard Hallas" wrote a surrealist novel with a non-human protagonist. It was later made into a cult film, which made me cry when I first saw it. This was a long time ago. I believe, however, that Lassie Come-Home is not actually BURIED...

Ausgrubber MJ's got a review up of a volume of essays edited by our very own BURIED Federman. I'll remind that it was Federman himself that kicked this Mound of BURIED Books Collective into righteous action ; Think of us perhaps as FC3!! At any rate, MJ's got a bunch of names listed in a listerly fashion within his review; not mentioning that he has kindly provided the ToC for that volume. Please to read and Like and maybe grab a name or two with a book therefrom :: Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow.

As cited in my post on Russell Marois, the House of Anansi was a prime exponent of Canadian experimental literature (along with Coach House Press, slogan: "Published in Canada by mindless acid heads") starting in the late 60s. As of 1971, here's a list of their fiction publications, often well buried and largely experimental, particularly in their Spiderline series:

Five Legs, Graeme Gibson
Fallout, Peter Such (needs cleanup, is this even him?)
Korsoniloff, Matt Cohen (later work not buried, though Korsoniloff isn't even in the database)
The Telephone Pole, Russell Marois
Eating Out, John Sandman
A Perte de Temps, Pierre Gravel (in French, untranslated)
The String Box, Rachel Wyatt
La Guerre, Yes Sir! Roman, Roch Carrier (Francophone,translated, and actually unburied!)
Victor Victim, Michael Charters
The Afterpeople; A Patheticon, George Payerle (7 entire works without a single rating)
Circuit - These Are The Sacred Places, Visions Before Midnight, Death By Toilet, Lawrence Garber (how can this possibly fail to intrigue?)
The Honeyman Festival, Marian Engel (I've been meaning to read her later, unburied-er, and quite mad sounding Bear, look it up.)
Floralie, Where Are You?, Roch Carrier
Bartleby; A Novel, Chris Scott
When He Was Free and Young He Used to Wear Silks, Austin Clarke (later unburied)
Communion, Graeme Gibson

^ Exemplary! These look spadeworthy and then some.

I hadn't run across it before (hadn't noticed?) but New Directions used to have this series "Revived Modern Classics". A list at The Neglected Book blog ::


For instance, Kay Boyle's Fifty Stories.

Yes her Death of a Man belongs to it as well. As does does the late James novel The Sacred Fount.

Please can i add the many short stories of Ivo Andric i read in Italian but have never seen translated into English? Some may have been but i assure you most have not and they are truly wonderful - both great writing for style and content and easy to read and short.

Maia wrote: "Please can i add the many short stories of Ivo Andric "

I'd have to say no. I don't know anything about how frequently he shows up in English. But his gr numbers are simply HUGE! HUGE!

I thought books never translated into english counted? I know they weren't because i didn't want to bother read them in italian and i searched all over... (or to put it another way, he'd been even huger if more had been translated and if publishers would just notice what's under their noses (whinge whinge))! To which i add: "Vetrate
by Andrzej Kuśniewicz, Alberto Zoina (Translator), Ludmila Ryba" Chap is famous for 'the kingdom of the 2 sicilies' and is abundantly translated otherwise but not, as far as i can make out, this book, which i still haven't ploughed through (foreign languages are hard work for me)

Maia wrote: "I thought books never translated into english counted? I know they weren't because i didn't want to bother read them in italian and i searched all over... (or to put it another way, he'd been even ..."

Very likely we can work something out! I'm looking closer and those HUGE numbers are, true, a bit deceiving. Not many English reviews. So I think we can do something here : either he belongs in "BURIED books by KNOWN authors" :: /topic/group...
OR
in "Please! tranSLATE BOOK" :: /topic/group...
depending on how you'd like to emphasis his BURIED status. IE, either those untranslated stories, or the fact that, even though there are a number of his books translated into English (cf his wikipedia page), not many folks reading in English are reading is stuff. With The Bridge on the Drina he seems to be almost a One Hit Wonder in English, and if his other stuff it good, it should -- as you most correctly point out -- be included here.

What are your thoughts?

[could you include (copy and paste) your request for additional authors in the May I ADD please? thread :: Please! tranSLATE BOOK :: /topic/show/...
(a formality, but it makes things easier for me.)]

Maia wrote: "Vetrate
by Andrzej Kuśniewicz"

Oh yeah. If he's any good, he's totally BURIED! ADD please!

Adding to Nate's unEARTHings of Canadian fic:
Avant-Garde for Thee

MJ, that sounds super-intriguing actually. The Martin Vaughn-James piece is presumably visual?

^ Yes, I think so (was short graphic story using the prisoner's constraint.)

A blog. Proustitute to thank for the attention=drawing.

"FURROWED MIDDLEBROW :: off the beaten page: lesser-known British women writers 1910-1960" includes "The Hopeless Wish List"

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "A blog. Proustitute to thank for the attention=drawing.

"FURROWED MIDDLEBROW :: off the beaten page: lesser-known British women writers 1910-1960" includes "The Hopeless Wish List"
..."

This is the website for the publisher Furrowed Middlebrow refers to:
I read one book they have reprinted, Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for a Wedding, and it was a real gem.

Pretty sure everything on the following list is BURIED ::

"The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Chicago Series"
Originally founded by series editors Margaret King and Albert Rabil and the Press in 1993 as a modest proposal to make available in English translation perhaps a dozen key texts by women writers who contributed to the development of humanism during the European Renaissance (ca. 1300-1800), the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series began publishing books in 1996. After the first half-dozen books were published, it soon became clear that the mission of the series had grown into the larger ambition of the textual recovery, not just of works by or about women that called for gender equality and equal education, but other important works, many quite popular in their day, from many different disciplines and genres, including religious history and devotional writing, economic equality and female autonomy essays, anatomy and medical treatises, philosophical and scientific works, and imaginative literature (including memoir, fiction, drama, and lyric and epic poetry). This project of textual recover has to date generated sixty volumes, with a final volume, Marguerite de Navarre’s Héptameron, forthcoming in 2012. Although the Chicago portion of the series is closed to further submissions, Iter and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, are continuing to publish related volumes.
/series/9759...
[more links at that link]

I'll say that the decades=long feminist SPADE=wielding (including Virago Press) has yielded some pretty damn enormous fruit. Especially here for fans of the history of modernist thought.

SPADES hoch!!!


[no but seriously, if you're at a university, go talk to your librarians about acquiring this stuff]

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Pretty sure everything on the following list is BURIED ::

"The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Chicago Series"
Originally founded by series editors Margaret King and Albert Rabil and the P..."

Good.. I had seen this list and sent it to Aubrey for her Women group.

Kalliope wrote: "Good.. I had seen this list and sent it to Aubrey for her Women group. "

Yes!

I wonder how many buried authors could be discovered within the pages of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Though many of the authors were famous or notable enough in their time so that their words could enter the public imagination, the authors and most of their works may have long faded away. As a random sampling of someone somewhat recent whom I'd never heard of, there's Bernard De Voto, a writer mainly famous (according to wiki) for history of the American west, but he also has written a few of novels.

The most interesting quote given by Bartlett was this:

You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.

So, that's just a random grab and sucker may not be any good for all I know, but the point is there may be hundreds of such folks in these pages, for anyone who wants to go mining.

Here's a free online edition of it, scanned as a rough graphic. The .pdf is a staggering 120 MB, and it would almost cerainly be wrecked by any attempt at OCR, but anyway, it's there:

I should add the disclaimer that many of the sources are of such valueless genres as theater, poetry, sermon, and speech, and there may be plenty of chaff to sort through before finding the wheat.

The Internet just led me to this. Since I should be working instead, I only had time for a brief look, but there should be plenty of buried books:

That, and A Journey Round My Skull before it, were my original go-to's from long before this group even existed. And it's still fantastic.

Now, though, has anyone actually read The Review of Contemporary Fiction cover to cover? The 50 pages of reviews in the back of the Angela Carter / Tadeusz Konwicki issue from 1994 is packed with intriguing leads. Perhaps slightly too late for our usual purview, but just think of the issues from the 80s. I'll post some finds here, nonetheless.

Nate D wrote: "The 50 pages of reviews in the back of the Angela Carter / Tadeusz Konwicki issue from 1994 is packed with intriguing leads. Perhaps slightly too late for our usual purview, but just think of the issues from the 80s. I'll post some finds here, nonetheless. "

Oh yes! I do always at least browse through the review sections. Very likely some good stuff there ; in addition to the names featured on the covers (frequently BURIED!)

D.N. Stuefloten - Ethiopian Exhibition (FC2!)
Cyrus Colter - The Hippodrome (Actually they were reviewing City of Light, but his truly buried catalogue starts in 1970!)
Evelin Sullivan - Games of the Blind
Michael Brodsky - * * *: A Novel
Bayard Johnson - Damned Right
A.G. Mojtabai - Called Out
Niall Duthie - Duchess's Dragonfly
Sheila Kohler - The House On R Street

Thanks to Spade=Wielder Jonathan, this from The American Scholar ::

Neglected Books Revisited, Part 1 & 2 --



The thing they say about what this is :: Last month on LitHub, a writer and bookseller named Stephen Sparks published a list of “Ten Great Writers Nobody Reads,�� lamenting the fate of 10 great prose stylists from the last century. Sparks included Jane Bowles, who, he writes, had been mentioned in “a list of ‘undeservedly neglected�� writers in The American Scholar as far back as 1970 and likely will be again in another 40 years.��

We plunged into our archives and dug up the list in question. In “Comments on Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years�� (Spring 1970), the Scholar’s editors asked “distinguished men and women�� to name “that book published in the past quarter of a century that they believed to have been the most undeservedly neglected.�� Sixty-four poets, playwrights, historians, critics, novelists, and sundry literary figures answered the call, suggesting everything from avant-garde fiction to forgotten French histories and even a book about neglected books themselves.

The Scholar’s editors noted that 15 years prior, the magazine had posed the same question to another set of writers, and that “our correspondents made a small impact on American literary history. Two of them—Margaret Mead and Alfred Kazin—chose Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, which led to that book’s rediscovery and reissue, and subsequent critical acclaim.��

We’ll be republishing the 1970 responses over the next week, with relevant notes on their reemergence or continued neglect. With any luck, a small impact can be made on American literary history once again." (view spoiler)[apologies for the ugly italics (hide spoiler)]

Nate D wrote: "As cited in my post on Russell Marois, the House of Anansi was a prime exponent of Canadian experimental literature (along with Coach House Press, slogan: "Published in Canada by mindless acid head..."

I found of the Lawrence Garber book Nate includes in his House of Anansi Press list above. The OCR is a bit off, so I cleaned it up a bit and posted below. Sounds like the promise held by the title is borne out.

My library holds it in off-site storage so I've requested. Will report back and create a Garber thread if deemed worthwhile.
_______________________________________________

Exuberant Surrealism

Circuit by Lawrence Garber

Reviewed by Stephen Scobie

(originally appeared in Canadian Literature #52 (Spring 1972), National Origins. (pg. 105 - 106))

LAWRENCE GARBER'S Circuit could be described as a "brilliant" book, though the trouble with brilliance is that it is sometimes merely superficial. There is no denying what the blurb describes as the book's "stylistic dazzle." Garber's writing certainly does not aim at any transparency to reality; it insists throughout on the artifice of the narration, and on the super-reality of the events described. These events are startling, bizarre, and touched by a wild sense of humour. The impressions are conveyed with great vividness, and reinforced by an overflowing abundance of detail. The effect is like a dream, or a comic nightmare; perhaps even the fact that (for me at least) each of the three novellas goes on just a little bit too long is part of this effect. The narrative images presented are very densely textured, yet, again like the super-reality of dreams, them seem to exist entirely in their own world, making no contact with what is normally called normality. The central concepts of each story establish their own systems of insane logic; but outwith these systems there is no reference to realism or probability. In "Death by Toilet", the Count undertakes a grand tour of Europe, but the writing makes no attempt to convey any sense of the unique character of the cities and countries he passes through. Barcelona, Paris, and Ravenna exist, it seems, only as aspects of the characters' minds (or bowels. ) The stories, then, by virtue of the force of the writing, the wealth of comic detail, and their exclusion of all other senses of reality apart from their own closed systems, impress themselves on the reader's mind with the intensity of a hallucinatory image. This in itself may be felt to be enough, and certainly it marks a very individual Canadian writer. But the reader, and/or the critic, is perhaps tempted to ask more, to ask,for instance, whether these images have any "significance", whatever that is. The previously-quoted blurb certainly encourages this with its proclamation that the stories "explore the decadence of our literary sensibilities and of our civilization." Without wanting to hold Garber responsible for a blurb which he probably didn't write, o n e is entitled to some doubts here. Is it seriously the purpose of his book to explore how much or how little "shock" is aroused by a story whose primary image is human excrement? Or is "These are the Sacred Places" seriously intended as a satire on the movie industry? Mr. Garber seems to be far too intelligent a writer to have aims as facile as these. So consider the possibilities for an "interpretation" of "These are the Sacred Places." The first step would presumably be to identify Reynolds Hall as an image of the artist: a point which Garber reinforces by his reference to Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" and simultaneously undercuts by putting the reference into the mouth of his most pretentiously arty character. Hall sets out to expose the "reality" behind the carefully manufactured image of a superstud filmstar called Bruce Karle. But this "reality", as seen through Garber's writing, appears more floridly and lustily unreal than the camp unrealities of Karle's costume-epic movies; and Hall records it in a style which Garber accurately describes as laughably overwritten shit �� though again the reference is undercut by being attributed to a rather bizarre nun who wages a continuous war against Hall's attempts to record his insights on toilet-paper. Hall's reaction to events is, physically, to become more and more diseased, while mentally he resorts to viler and viler imprecations against the subjects of his writing. He finally regresses to complete paralysis and dumbness, with his words being spoken for him by an impersonator, Shirley Azfal, who also dubs in Bruce Karle's voice so consistently that the two cannot be told apart. The pretentious director dreams of filming Paradise Lost with Shirley dubbing not only God, but all the other voices as well, thus giving a supreme illusion of Divine Control. But Shirley, who may then perhaps be seen as the ultimate artist, has no personality or existence of her own, living only as a series of impersonations. Etcetera. The ramifications of such an interpretation would have to be pursued much further into the multitudinous detail of Garber's image; neither in this nor in the other two stories is there any clear-cut "statement" to be extracted. Rather, Garber's exuberant surrealism is continuously evocative, suggesting extensions of meaning and application which the reader is free to follow. That is, his narrative operates as image rather than as statement, and the reader may search for the "significance" of these images at any level he chooses. There is,it seems to me, nothing superficial to Lawrence Garber's brilliance.