notanotherbookreview

Peter Cherches’ LIFT YOUR RIGHT ARM, (March, Pelekenesis) Peter Cherches is a master of the conundrum, a poet of the nuance that makes nonsense of logic and meaning where it wouldn’t be caught dead.  Imagine the love-child of Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein, or the uneasy marriage of Archibald MacLeish and Harold Pinter and you may have an idea of the singularity of his style. Mr. Cherches' new book of minimalist prose, LIFT YOUR RIGHT ARM, is a novel with five movements or five novels--as you find it. Coincidentally, Cherches means to search for in French and his humor is found in unlikely places. Take the opening section with the adventures of Mr.Deadman. Here's an excerpt: “Life,” Mr.Deadman says, “is a death-defying stunt.”  And with some chill and much amusement, you accompany Mr. Deadman to a sushi restaurant, a barbecue, keeping up with the Joneses, and on a holiday.  The punch line is, as always, as you knew it would be, that life's different bec...

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, is a very smart novel that pits new technologies against old (think Google vs, Name of the Rose) and in the process, it examines what language tells us about meanings.  Is our consciousness transformed by the medium? Marshall Mcluhan, sage of communication, believed the medium is the message and that technology is the content. In Don DeLillo’s The Names, clashing languages form a furious Tower of Babel. Sloan has similar questions about the language of technology and how it’s shape shifting us in the 21 st century. But that may be his next, darker book. Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore is an entertaining mystery wrapped in a love for the miraculous tools of our 21 st century technological genius. Language, code, is the heart of this mystery, which begins in a strange bookstore of unreadable books. Clay Jannon, web site designer, is desperate after being laid off from his job. He’s walki...