Great Reissue at a Great Time

So we started a fairly comprehensive list of books for my Daughter in college and most of these would make for some fabulous summer reading for anyone who missed any of the classics the first time.

Something to add to that list is the re-release of Adrift in the Vanishing City a novel by the award winning author Vincent Czyz, who also contributed to the reading list by the way. It got some great press the first time around and I think it deserves more this time.

Like this, which came from Matt Badura, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2000
Adrift in a Vanishing City by Vincent Czyz is a collection of 9 interconnected fictions constellated around the love story between Zirque Granges and Rae Anne Kelly. Zirque—a world-hungry cavalier raging against Thanatos—is “trapped being who he is for eternity, tired of being Zirque, distracting himself from himself with a change of scenery.” Zirque’s restless nature impels to continent—and bed—hop, while the love-locked Rae Anne recedes into the depths and learns to “live through the never-knowing of her man.” Within this basic yet inexhaustible framework, Czyz composes an Orphean song of desire and longing that explores the tenuous nature of human intersection and memory with a tenderness rare in experimental fiction. 
Enhancing the pleasures produced by Adrift’s multiple narratives, Czyz’s primary accomplishment stems from the quality of his language. Indeed, Adrift is a book that rewards multiple readings and demands to be quoted, as the multilayered construction of Czyz's prose enables Adrift to speak toward those depths of mind and memory that tend to elude language. In this sense Adrift is ostensibly a work of prose poetry. As Czyz says, “This is the land of the guttural tongue, the great dead stone cities, the legend that has begun to lift itself out of the ruins, like those surreal paintings in which the images are raising themselves off the canvas, emerging from flat two-dimensional art into the four- or five- or 22-dimensional actuality we cannot keep track of anymore.”

Throughout Adrift in a Vanishing City, the city is a metaphor for memory—human and mythic—and its unspeakable reaches. Readers should rejoice that Czyz has explored this city and has returned from the underworld with a song to recover the vanishing dimensions of ourselves."            

And from Capper Nichols

Certain books require a patient reader, one with the ability to concentrate closely and intently. Sentences are not straightforward or transparent, but long and labyrinthine, like intriguing yet shadowy dreams. The writing, more like poetry than prose, calls attention to language, to the fullness of a word, a sentence, with the purpose of expressing inexpressible emotions and experiences. Think of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or, more recently, William Vollmann's Fathers and Crows.
In such works, plot is secondary to language, image and character. What happens in the story is less interesting than how the writer writes the fictive world and its residents into our consciousness. And what we come away with after reading is mood and idea more than a narrative.
Vincent Czyz's (pronounced "Chez") Adrift in a Vanishing City is just this sort of work: lyrical and pensive, an odd and often beautiful portrait of longing. Many sentences and paragraphs need to be read more than once, sometimes for meaning, sometimes for the striking words and images. Czyz's feverish style can get tiresome, but more often his sensuous writing is a pleasure:
Leanin against the fender of my car ... Blue Jean would work so hard on gettin that malt thick as it was through the straw she'd forget me ... she looked so happy, the cold sweet malted slush in her cup all it took, a warm kiss against cold lips, her tongue cold too...
Neither a novel nor short story collection, Adrift falls somewhere in between. Or somewhere else entirely on the genre map. The nine stories (or chapters or sections or...?) share characters and settings, but there's no narrative progression in the conventional sense. The characters do stuff, talk, ruminate, do more stuff.
The main character is Zirque Granges, a man who can't stay put in one place for long, but who always comes back to Pittsburg, Kansas, and his long-suffering girlfriend, Blue Jean. Blue Jean teaches kindergarten and hangs out with the Duke of Palluca, a "famous walker," and with Pap, a drunk with a clubfoot and harelip. When Zirque blows into town they all hang out together. The point of view shifts among the characters from section to section, giving each a shot at telling what they see and think and feel.
Some of book follows Zirque on his wanderings, to Mexico City, Budapest, and to Paris, where he hooks up with his other (though less important) girlfriend, Veronique, the bad girl to Blue Jean's good.
Each of the characters is dissatisfied, longing for something, someone. But there's no sense that anyone can or will or expects to get what they want, except maybe for brief moments. The mood of the work is melancholy but not forlorn. The characters are adrift in memory and in anticipation, yearning for what (supposedly) was and for what could be. "It's always that way," Zirque says. "In a pocket fulla crumpled, unanswered (or once-answered) desires, we keep a photo of what it is we want (again maybe) and hold it up to everything we get. Time after time there's a shakin’ a the head, a return a the photo."


Our desires, how we want and what we want, are never simple. Adrift shows just how intricate and troubling desire and memory are. What makes Czyz's book so satisfying is that he accomplishes that end not just through the depiction of his characters' inner lives, but with a strange language that is hauntingly appropriate.


I look forward to getting my copy and you should too.  http://amzn.to/1GlIjlY
And of course check back for the reading list in it's editable spreadsheet soon.

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