PRAISE AND HATE FOR ALMOST
Writerly writers write about topics other than their own sorry selves. Quill in hand, the mature novelist surveys the constellations of city lights on the antique globe in her treatise-lined library, searches for the universal amid the particular, builds her dignified, understated tales around entire peoples and epochs; and when she does put feather to parchment, her austere sensibility steeps into the text so faintly that we detect her presence only through the tone and taste of the wind of the words. But the author of this trainwreck of a text, well—his sense of self is so swollen, so rubiginous, rock-salted and puffer-fishy that he cannot see anything past his own inflamed and engorged cheeks. He, to reach the reader—let alone the rest of the world—must chop his way out of dense forests of self, and everyone he meets he will turn into a mirror. Heed the abject lesson his example provides: the man folded too far into his ego is a deck of appearances shuffled to impress whoever is closest and most willing to clap. He is but a series of routines both lively and lifeless.
Stebbin Whab
A capricious magus squiggling magic flows of charmed language … a populist optical wizard who creates with dashing legerdemain the bright shadows of flames between his five-jointed fingers … a strange and raging sage whose linguistic gesticulations make heavenly majesty flicker across the soiled windshield of the reader’s mind … goes from pathos to bathos and back in ten seconds flat. Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah is the long-longed-for harbinger of hysterical surrealism, and a nightmare about a systems novel of the self.
Nafets “Fensta” Tafens
Absolutely unbearable. The only book that will ever make you wish your brain could throw up and thus purge itself of the loathsome particles it has ingested. The book that will turn you against books forever …. I have been moved to propose that we (the revolted) set up a fund and send the author a small but livable income on the condition that he immediately stop writing.
Brocklebart Thimblefire the III
It’s as if the author wears mask after mask after mask, but each mask is a model of his own unmistakable contours and expressions and demeanor, and as he puts on each mask it becomes his face, it turns into flesh and starts moving, and you would swear it was his real face were it not for the stack of masks clutched in his other hand, jests ready to be tossed into place with the quick dexterity of a juggler. But do any of these million faces say something real? Is his plea, his implied injunction that we not take him so seriously, nothing but a form of self-defense? He calls himself a buffoon so that we won’t. He laughs at himself to forestall our hilarity—never mind that we’d never actually laugh.
Aristephanes
Squibs for the cruciverbalists. Kicky adoxographies and two-handled amphigories. Steganography of God! Eulalia with pro coloratura, tractates of suaviloquy, a phonesthetic chrestomathy of inkhorn alchemy deserving of an electroluminescent stichometry! An ordonnance of brashly brummagem auxesis rife with loptopped metaposcopy and fabulist humoresques, matelassé capriccios, confiteor perissology, fascicules of morceaux, superluminal raillery and rude cadenzas of influenza! To wit: every sentence is an all-hands-on-deck party at the end of time, a city-sized cherry bomb from the author’s basement, crafted for his own solo explosions. Every clause is an attempt to live within the unrolling of a lavish creation, to turn the act of writing into reading, so that each day the author moves startled through a new world.
Thomas Da Qinci
I’m submitting this blurb only because I know no other way to draw attention to my cause. I couldn’t care less about this book and would not read such prolix drivel even if paid or at gunpoint. All I want is for the author to face justice—to have his plans thwarted before there is nothing left of me to beg for an intervention. Stefan has been following me for decades, studying me, converting me into words and images, inch by inch taking my life from me and transforming it into something dead. He turns my friends and partners into fuel and has begun to replace me with his creations; I am now more than half fiction, and every day there is less of me still living, still able to reach out and possibly speak to you. Will no one stop him before I am entirely gone?
S.W.