Summer of Jest - You Have Been Warned

And but so, if you can't tell from the prose style into which I tend to drift on this blog, I'm kind of a fan of David Foster Wallace.* I like his fiction and his nonfiction (though I do tend to be somewhat partial to his fiction insomuch as I enjoy its autobiographical character in that it reminds me a lot of my own thought processes because our backgrounds, David's and mine, are not as dissimilar as some might think) and his in-between, but first and foremost, I like his weird blend of the two that is Infinite Jest. I am one of those first generation readers of same who spoke, as I staggered around Boston with a first edition hardcover copy of same in my ubiquitous backpack, of my "Infinite Jest cramp" and who enjoyed poring over the novel's minutiae with other Boston friends solely for the purpose of elucidating how Wallace wasn't entirely accurate as regards the street map of various areas of Alston and Cambridge and other bits of the Greater Boston Area but also agreed with them that the errors we found only made the book more endearing. Mostly.

So here's the point in the post wherein I refer you to Summer of Jest, an organized group read/re-read of my hero**'s breakout novel that kicked off today but which I only learned existed a scant two days ago.

But of course one of the participants is my beloved friend SJ, whose literary dumbassery I am generally somewhat powerless to resist. Witness last summer's non-stop sojourn through The Dark Tower, from which I am still recovering. But really, I love this book. I'd probably be up for doing this even if she weren't. Because David Foster Wallace. And all the rest.

So, if you haven't read this book, I will counsel you to ignore all my upcoming posts with "Summer of Jest" in their title, because they will probably be spoilery -- although really, of all the books I've loved this one is the least capable of being "spoiled" by a mere plot revelation or two, because the plot is only the smallest tiniest element of what is on offer here in this ridiculous, impossible, ponderous doorstop of awesome of a novel/stream of consciousness/meditation composed by a man I'd long dreamed of meeting someday and whose suicide on Sept 12, 2008 is a terrible, wrenching, horrible, soul-destroying milestone in my own dear personal life that dwarfs, say, Sept 11, 2001 and make of that what you will. I still cry like a baby every year now on that anniversary, and have yet to finish reading his posthumously published The Pale King because I can't bring myself to finally complete my first reading of his last bits of fiction. Instead I just read his nonfiction collections over and over and over again to the point where I have most of the essays by heart (and completely freaked out my Simpsons-loving little sister last summer when I hilariously overreacted to an episode I was seeing at her house for the first time ever, based on his famous cruise ship indictment*** "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again"****). And about once every year or so, and yes, during the summer, I pull out my giant herniating hardcover of Infinite Jest and read it again, just to enjoy, just to admire. And yes, just to  be annoyed all over again.

Now, of course, with my completely ruined elbow tendons (all four of them, in each arm now!) I am reading it in ebook form again. How different will it be, I wonder? Stay tuned, true believers.

Stay tuned.

*And, more importantly, a frequent and not wholly conscious imitator of his style inasmuch as certain quirks of his have drifted into my own prose style, namely lots of footnotes in works of so informal and loose a character as being not wholly but almost entirely not the sort of thing that would normally employ footnotes, but hey, at least so far I've mostly managed to confine my footnotes to the length readers of modern Standard Written English generally consider to be normal footnote length, i.e. not a printed page long or longer, so far. So far.

**So okay, I have a lot of heroes. I am a child of my age. Deal.

***Oh dude. Every bit of poop cruise type news that hits my feeds, I wish he was around to hoot at in his erudite, eloquent, pathetic way.

****One of my friends from my Boston days, who may Tweet at present under the username of @Hoover_Dam, once seized the opportunity after a talk of his to thrust a Celebrity Cruise brochure under his nose to sign, only to be told with a sigh "I thought I was done with these." Poor guy.

Walter Moers' THE ALCHEMASTER'S APPRENTICE

Every new-to-me Walter Moers book I pick up immediately becomes my new favorite Walter Moers book, and thus one of my favorite books, full stop. This has happened ever since I first stumbled across a somewhat battered copy of Rumo and his Miraculous Adventures several years ago at my local public library and wondered what the hell was going on with that. One is always going on with the mix of over-the-top imaginative fantasy, adorable illustrations, sophisticated plotting and outrageous wordplay that is Walter Moers. Oh, do I love this man. And his translator into English, the wonderfully named John Brownjohn, who has the unenviable task of turning all of those invented and ordinary compound German nouns and verbs into something intelligible in English without losing any of the original's wit and charm and, as far as I can tell, succeeds brilliantly.

Or at any rate, if Brownjohn is in any way not hitting Moers' mark, then I'm not sure I could handle more Moers. As such. Feel free to throw something at me now.

The Alchemaster's Apprentice is another Zamonia book, Zamonia being, of course, a lost continent that once took up most of the Atlantic Ocean and was home not only to sentient and literate dinosaurs who achieved a very high standard of culture indeed (at least a high Middle Ages standard), but to a myriad of other astonishing creatures as well, including the new-to-this-fifth-novel Crat. A Crat being a sort of cat who can speak every language, human or animal, in the known world, and whose body fat is an alchemist's, well, I would say an alchemist's philosopher's stone, but everyone knows that the philosopher's stone is the alchemists' philosopher's stone, so something just short of that. At any rate, very desirable indeed.

Enter one Succubius Ghoolion*, titular Alchemaster, who is a sort of Jean-Baptiste Greouille through Moers' funhouse mirror in that, like the perfidious perfumer of Suskind's most famous novel, he is obsessed with capturing the essences of things in the most durable possible form, that form being the rendered fat of rare and fabulous creatures like Crats. Of whom Ghoolion suspects our adorable little hero, Echo the Kitty Crat, to possibly be the very last one. Um.

What follows from this state of affairs is another deliciously daffy Moers adventure -- perhaps the most delicious of all because, when Ghoolion finds Echo, Echo is starving to death and has no fat on him, but Ghoolion is a culinary genius and so sets about fattening his foundling in outlandishly opulent ways. If one doesn't drool through at least a few of these chapters, one is obviously some kind of icky ascetic who subsists on room temperature water and celery sticks or something.** Echo befriends a cyclopean owl-type thing who speaks in spoonerisms (Brownjohn must have had a heck of a time with those. He needs all of the awards for translating. All of them, do you understand me?) and is dedicated to helping Echo escape the terrible fate that awaits him, learns a lot of alchemical secrets, eats a lot of absurdly delicious food, and develops a charmingly weird relationship with Ghoolion in the process.

Along the way he picks up some other weird allies, such as a Cooked Ghost (which Echo helps to cook himself as part of his education), a couple thousand Leathermice (like extraordinarily ugly vampire bats with extremely strange habits of thought. Nobody understands Leathermice, dude. Not even Leathermice), and the last remaining Uggly in the city -- an Uggly being, of course, a sort of itinerant practitioner of a natural/homeopathic/herbal medicine that is pretty much the absolute antithesis of what Ghoolion does. Who despite Ghoolion's long history of persecution of Ugglies in every horrible way imaginable, has a crush on Ghoolion. Yeah, it's complicated.

It all builds to a thrilling and insane climax, Moers' best yet! So yeah, The Alchemaster's Apprentice is my new favorite Walter Moers. At least until the next one.

But yeah, I'm still puzzled about that roast wildfowl Echo was sort of tricked into eating mid-story. That's a head-scratcher of a loose end. But Echo does spend a lot of this novel tripping balls on some hallucinogenic meal or other... so... umm... yeah, I've got nothing.

*The character names are part of the fun of Moers, most of them being anagrams of popular authors' names, though so far I can't figure out whose name became Succubius Ghoolion, and I have tried. Oh, have I tried. But I'm a poor hand at anagram solving.

**Seriously, the food porn in this book is completely off the hook. Imagine Lewis Carroll and China Mieville collaborating on a cookbook and you might just get a hint of the flavor. WOW.