Bori Praper's CYNICISM MANAGEMENT: A ROCK'N'ROLL FABLE

"For a while there I wondered whether Jesus Christ is a gerontophile..."

"Excuse me?"...

"Well you see Fidel, it's simple really... Nuns are supposed to be virgin spouses of Christ. They mostly spend their days in convents, untouched, so I assume they're waiting to finally join their husband and, I imagine, to consummate their marriage. Most of these devoted young women turn into withered hags by the time they manage to kick the bucket, you know, especially since they're not supposed to speed up the whole process much in any entertaining way anyway - I don't believe many of them take a lot of drugs or drink themselves to death very young, or die of cholesterol overdose... Anyway, once they finally get to shag the lord, the majority of them are, well, mature, even elderly, or bloody ancient, if we're completely honest. So you see since this suspicious arrangement had to be organized by our lord, and if he himself has decided this is how he wants it.."

More novels, whether or not they are chiefly concerned with the farings of a newly-formed progressive rock bands in a suburb of Ljubljana, Slovenia, should come with their own soundtrack album. Perhaps there are more than I know of, but until I stumbled across Cynicism Management: A Rock'N'Roll Fable while perusing the offerings at corona/samizdat (my new favorite indie press*), I only knew of one in all the world.** But now I know of two, or rather, three, because I see that the sequel to this madness has a soundtrack album of its own.***

This, of course, delights me. It would even if the album was not to my taste, or if it were but the novel was not. But in fact, I'm pretty delighted by both .

Cynicism Management is the name of a fictional-yet-also actual band comprised of a motley international crew of ridiculously talented but as yet not-very-successful musicians with high standards for themselves and each other, a taste for rather baroque time signatures and somewhat outmoded instrumentation (an early and only slightly heated discussion among the members concerns the practicality of acquiring and incorporating a Hammond organ, for instance) but a punk/metal sensibility and somewhat revolutionary politics. 

These are the friends I've always dreamed of having and I began to miss them mere moments after putting the book down: Finnegan Frotz, an "extraordinarily pale" Black Scotsman, the lyricist and main ideas man; Amalia, Scots vocalist, hostess, his on-again off-again lover; her brother Randy, bass player and weed connoisseur; Bogomr, a Ukrainian performance artist/exotic dancer/musician who has been raised to believe he is an actual vampire; Eric, an Australian heavy metal guitarist with an unhealthy fixation on his perpetually receding hairline; and Fidel, an Italian revolutionary by day,  kickass prog drummer by night. I mean, come on!

But wait, there's more. Like a group of six women who have all turned up in a certain basement in London where they are employed to monitor feeds from various spy cameras installed in various toilets in various airport bathrooms around the world. And whose employer, the amusingly named Omnipile Industries, a multinational conglomerate so large and far-reaching that its in-house intelligence service has usurped the function of most governments' services, has suddenly sent them all to the Ljubljana suburb to observe the activities of one of Cynicism Management's members. He has a unique tattoo in his nether region that seems to offer the only clue anybody has found to the kidnapping of the children of Omnipile's CEO. Could be a coincidence, but nobody seems to think so.

By the way, the solution to the whole tattoo thing may be the single geekiest solution to any mystery that I have ever encountered in life or in fiction.

Incidentally, about midway through the novel the group of women acquires a thoroughly disrespectful but awesome nickname that I think I'd have enjoyed being called as a younger woman, myself: they are the Bitch Scouts. We never learn their actual names, by the way. They get unique and sometimes humorous personal designations (though one is simply referred to as Another One) but never names. But we don't miss them.

And of course this suburb of Ljubljana is populated by a host of fantastic tavern keepers, would-be-porn soundtrack composers, drunken firemen, pensioners, peasants, lunatics, picturesque trollops and a mayor on the make who can't stop spinning cockamamie economic development schemes that are probably doomed to fail, either entertainingly or depressingly, or both.

So, the resulting tale feels an awful lot like Laszlo Krasnohorkhai and Virginie Despentes decided to collaborate on... a thriller of sorts? Except kind of funny. Sometimes very funny.

The novel starts out a bit scatological -- the way the Bitch Scouts learn about the tattoo that kicks off this whole story is on the gross side but also on the paranoia-inducing -- and makes fun of alcoholism quite a lot (Superman Nap!), and commits many other sins against propriety in all the ways one would expect a so-called "Rock'N'Roll Fable" to commit, but never quite delivers up what we expect, except for equal parts of big, amazed laughs and thrown devil horns. And it's full of weird conversations like the one I quoted at the beginning of this post.

The result is the most sheer fun I've had in reading a novel/listening to an album than I have had in a long, long time. There is a sequel, Pendulum Pet, which I have already acquired on the strength of this one and you'd better believe you'll be hearing about it soon right here at Kate of Mind.

In the meantime, I've got a new album to put on obnoxious heavy rotation, chez moi. My housemates don't like I nearly as much as I do, but even they have to admit that a few of the songs are genuine bangers.

*Note, I originally tried to buy Cynicism Management from corona/samizdat and yes, you do have to wait for them to ship your copies to you from Slovenia but it's totally worth the wait and the shipping charge because they have some cool, cool stuff and publisher Rick Harsch is an excellent human (who is also a writer and you'd better believe you'll hear more about him here soon) BUT he was fresh out of paper copies of this so I had to look elsewhere to get its words into my eyeholes. Fortunately, ebook editions of it also exist and hey, if, like me, you've recently abandoned the Big River for less fashy climes, both Cynicism Management and its sequel, Pendulum Pet are not only available via Kobo but are part of its Kobo Plus subscription, so you can read them that way if you don't want to wait for corona-samizdat to get some more paper copies printed. But I still call dibs on a paper copy if one turns up, Mr. Harsch!

**That one, in case you're interested, is Eating Eight by Lars Paul Linden, a cyberpunk-ish romp about a book -- or actually a comic book script-and-cassette tape combo referred to as a "book-dope-book" that gets you high when you read it. The soundtrack really did come on cassette, featuring music from Linden's band, Penis Fly Trap. It was my honor and joy to receive review copies of these back in the day when I was an occasional scribbler in an underground music and politics 'zine, The Pit Report. Back in the 1990s when I lived in Boston. But rest assured, dear readers, I wasn't cool then, either. But I knew some cool people and got to do some cool things like get high on book-dope-books.

***Here's a link to the main soundtrack album, Tit Augmented over at the least shitty music streaming service I've found, but note: there is additional music featured in scenes from the book that isn't on this album because it's not by the band, but by another musician who is also a character in the novel, Ray Kosmick, who does some very cool electronic music that he (the character at least) intends for porn soundtracks but which I find are great listens just on their own. By the way, here is my very favorite track from Tit Augmented, just because:

Miha Mazzini's THE COLLECTOR OF NAMES (Tr Maja Visenjak-Limon)

After what I saw in the cellar I often thought about God. For some time, that was all I thought about. This is how it is, I think. The only time we’re in contact with him is when we sleep. And dreams are our defences, our earthiness, trying to lead us away from Him. If we fight them and break through them we come into contact with Him. That’s what we call a nightmare. The more horrible the nightmare, the closer to Him we are. And that’s why in our everyday life it doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not: but when your life starts becoming a nightmare that belief is the only thing that can save you. There are no decisions when you’re in contact with God. There’s no free will. And that’s what makes the nightmare so horrible. Things happen to you. Horror is the prayer of our time.

What could be more idyllic than a few months' stay on a relatively unpopulated and undiscovered Mediterranean island in the summer between your school years and the start of your adult life? Plenty if you're a teenaged character in Miha Mazzini's cosmic chiller, The Collector of Names, which explores the experiences of a passel of teen boys who've been given the keys to a newly-acquired but still pretty much abandoned villa on one end of the island, and a girl who's come to have her first taste of independence while staying with her great uncle on the other end, where a quaint village braces for the influx of tourists that are about to start pouring in now that a campsite has been established in the island's interior and word has gotten out about it.

Ana's great uncle, Aco, grew up on the island and was the first to encounter its weird and terrifying secret, which manifested in his childhood only as a weird green glow coming from the cellar of the villa when it was newly built and the home of a diplomat's subcontinental Indian widow. Aco took a dare to go check it out as part of his initiation into a gang of older boys who were themselves too afraid of, in particular, the hue of green that shined out of the basement window. He emerged from his encounter with his hair turned completely white, but we don't get to find out what he saw until much later. 

Cut to decades later when Ana has come to visit, and four teenaged boys re-open the villa with the weird secret in its cellar: Max, the son of the villa's new owner and a self-imagined lady-killer and the first to strike up a conversation with Ana on the ferry to the island; strong and fit Sano; less assured farm kid Alfonz; and poor, skinny, clumsy Raf, who is really only along because Max felt he owed Raf a good time after copying off his schoolwork for years and years. They've come for a little while to get good and drunk, having brought rucksacks full of homemade schnapps and cleaned out the entire beer and brandy stock of the village's only store-cum-bar, but since the villa has no refrigerator and the ocean tides on the nearby beach are too strong to use seawater as a cooler, the boys decide to use the spooky cellar to keep their drinks cold -- only to discover a weird crate full of a plastic-like substance that is warm to the touch, and a bunch of tiny stalagtites of what turn out to be some kind of amber, each one containing the letters spelling out somebody's name. All kinds of names, from the commonplace to the exotic and foreign. And there are a LOT.

By the time one of the boys has a direct encounter with the... entity in the cellar, it's too late. 

Some truly gruesome scenes ensue, and some truly touching ones as well. The monster from the cellar affects everyone differently with its simple tactics, but as its victims meet or approach their ends, their unique emotional wounds are reopened as we experience their madness from the inside. The Collector of Names could have just been an entertaining gore-fest, but Mazzini isn't interested in writing a literary slasher film; he wants us to feel what everybody's feeling rather than just pointing and laughing at their deaths.

Livening things up still further is Aco's childhood gang, all of whom grew up to serve in the same military unit, with Aco emerging as the leader with the moral authority he gained when his hair went prematurely white. They have maintained a certain military discipline together over the years, for all that it looks like, to the teenagers arriving on the island, they just sit together on a bench every day and codge (that's what a codger does, right? Codges? Anyway, these guys codge). In other words, under Aco's direction, they've been planning for the day when whatever is in that cellar emerges. Were their preparations effective? Only one way to find out, friends. It's a tight, short read. Go and get it!