NONEXISTANT BOOK REVIEW

  THE HEAVY REPOSE OF TWILIGHT’S HEARTACHE
(or A KIND SHEPARD’S PIE IN THE EVENING) -Sam Gerschwaitt Hedelson
    Mr. Hedelson takes an ambitious turn with his new book, about the seemingly innocuous lives of temporary dustbin inspectors and transient placement position technicians. Mr. Hedelson brings us this new book in a time in the literary world is in what would many call the literary Gold Rush (that is the Gold Rush around 1858)
    Hedelson tries to develop a prose by writing his novel as though it were a screenplay made into a film and then made into a novel again. This thus removes all the overly complex, tired and unnecessary traits of literature. Instead he tries to put the images that would have been on screen directly into our heads. For pages on end characters will just sit there, doing nothing and be enveloped in their surroundings, indulging in the realistic yet artistically, finely dulled and blunt world. There are nearly endless descriptions detailing what must be both the most benign, eloquent, seething, aphonic staring contest. This gives the reader a change to slow down from all the pacing and pacing around the room the characters do in other chapters.
    Occasionally Mr. Hedelson will take a step away from this realistic take, seemingly written in the vein of 16th century novels. He then tries to take a more modern approach by quickly grasping the styles of 17th and even 19th century novels. A large portion seems to have been influenced by such classics as Wuthering Heights, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Charlotte’s Web, Antigone, and Stephen King’s The Dark Tower saga.
    In his most breathtaking portions the author seems to evoke Henry James combined with Hunter S. Thompson. All this would still be considered an excellent novel if not for the inclusion of a quoted, unfinished text by Thomas Pynchon (that legend is that it was written drunkenly by Pynchon on a cocktail napkin.) The text details the life of a dust speck as seen from the perspective of a nearly blind man with Down syndrome. However that perspective is then revealed to be the view of the old man being watched by a man on the street as an angry dog chews his face. The plot completely raps one in the sublime world of the mundane. Our main character, Juan Everything, must go through a series of heart flattening struggles. The writer bares a psychological insight as if Dostoevsky had written an opera with the help of Dean Koontz (and Clive Barker wrote the music.)
Our hero struggles with the quest of not finding true love or ambition and remains intent on keeping the most intensely static dustbin in all of Bristol. However, events force him to leave the safety of his dustbin, as he must travel to his kitchen, remove the garbage bag and place it in the waste receptacle outside his flat. The drama grows, as our hero must race into his flat, because it has begun to rain. The psychological brilliance flourishes as we sink deep into the facial features of the character as he waits for the rain to stop so he may once again inspect his dustbin.
The story takes a big jump when it switches to the perspective of a female transient placement position technician. This protagonist, Ana Personaltrauma, first appears walking along the street on her way to inform Juan that his position as a temporary dustbin inspector is officially temporary and that he will soon, although no one knows when, be moved to inspect another dustbin. Ana continues walking down the street. A hobo asks her for change. Then comes the most Shakespearean piece of brilliance in the book; she does not hear him and keeps walking. The hobo tries to call her again but in an act of fate, or just crafty storytelling, a police officer comes along and beats the hobo for vagrancy. Ana does not notice the intense splatters of blood on the sidewalk, for they are only alluded to by way of not being written about at all. It is a brilliant reverse metaphor.
Ana continues her epic quest of walking down the street. Her inaction not only demonstrates the power of her actions, but they also demonstrate the intense psychological battle of the everyday person. It shows that deep down every human struggles with not doing something even if they are not aware of it. As people argue around her and a dog is run over by a bus, Ana remains sincerely light in her mentality. As drunks argue over who fucked the other’s girlfriend outside a pub, Ana beautifully dances through a ballet of Kundera-esque non-existential quandary in light of post-Nietzschien propaganda.
Will Ana be able to give Juan the news? Will Juan see the rain stop in time to check his dustbin? Will their heartfelt and earnestly irksome emotions be translated into verbal dialogue? How will they not fight the bitter irenic ironies of their lives?
Even without the achromatic word choice and the descriptions so full of suffocated emotion, this would still be one of the top books of the last month. This marks a bold step for Mr. Hedelson who spent the last four years writing this 60-page novel. However with all the footnotes and self-analyses of text it comes to about 500 pages.
Hedelson’s other works include; Times at the Paraplegic Runner’s Funeral, The Lost Art of Staring into the Sun, The Bliss of Cheesing on Siamese and his self help book; At the Back Door of Bahammut: an exploration of ways to break your own hands. He covers many of the same themes in this book; the love of medieval dentistry, the reemergence of the soul by caffeine poisoning and the relation between economic instability racism and haggis. A lot of his writing is an expression of his love of making characters think about something, not do it, having a deus ex machina do the pointless action and then have the characters discover the beauty of dendrophilia (known to some colloquially as ˜tree fucking.’) All this slowly leads towards the most famous trait of his writing (and a fan favorite) of re-writing the novel halfway through. Without any warning at all the narrative will pick up in a completely different location with the same characters but with completely different traits and plotting. Without this, no one would understand his poignant approach to inciting on inaction with ironic incentives to inspire innocuously insipid idiots into investing. Who knows what we may (or may not) see from him in the future.