Evan Lavender-Smith

A discovery this morning in an old issue (Spring 2006) of Colorado Review. Finished Evan Lavender-Smith's short story "Based on a True Story." Amazing in that it constantly revises itself and points toward trauma (a fire) at the core of that revision. The drafts of the story itself are in danger of burning. "There is a true story upon which our story is based, but that story has been lost, utterly lost." And at the syntactical level, the words themselves are also always in the process of semiotic reevaluation. Also, it's very funny: "...the careful reader will feel compelled to open a can of beets and drink the beets down as if it were a can of beet juice, but only after finishing the story." The kind of tautology I've always loved in "Borges and I."… (mehr)

A tour de force--a single sentence novella. Some have described the book as a monologue, as stream-of-consciousness, as a study in solitude, as an extension of Beckettian subjectivity, or as Cartesian worldview. All of which is true. But ultimately, it's a book that is both about forgetting and refusing to forget, of being torn between engagement with one's life and relationships or turning inward and dwelling alone with contempt for the world's demands of the self. It's a stunning achievement. I couldn't help of thinking of Virginia Woolf's The Waves the entire time I was reading the book. I sense there is a paralyzing trauma in the background of the narrator, but no reviewers so far have mentioned this.… (mehr)