Fresan’s second part is a dream incarnate.
It contains a plenitude of poetry, mixed similes, mingled metaphors, quirks, smarm, charms, verve, meandering melancholia, free-form, dare-I-say dreamlike anomalies, pop-quoting, trans-textual, atemporal, hallucino-generic, and anti-modern coagulations of language. It quivers; it writhes. What with all the billowing prose exudations, the quavering, stuttering processes of thought, the cathedrals of suggestion, the post-Proustian tight-rope-straddling, the encyclo-mytho-poetic verbivoratious, anecdotal maxims, it swells to the proportions of a particle accelerator of words, of sentences, piled up and paragrabbing, paraglyphing, parachewing, in maximalistical experimenial, penumbral, peripatetic precipitation, a preposterous product of monstrous reprisals, of liter-airy illusions swilling gargantic biblio-gargling mind-wash, all while riffling, rapping, grappling, doubledreaming, sentences experiment on each other, and experience existential crises, until they are forced to cruise over fallen foes and compose footbridges from those floating prose-corpses. His pages are composed of an organic mulch emulsified through ferocious observations bordering on divination. This thing corrupts the DNA of the novel form. It is a formulaic un-novel, birthed from the ur-mind, umbilicaled to the collective (fractal) consciousness, unraveling a consistent accumulation of abstraction, which acquires gravitational pull toward some frightening, undefined singularity. While metamesmeric, tessellated interrelations merge in sybillance (sic.), recalling the elusive phantom of imaginative epiphany, the subversion of pre-packaged cliches, acquiring biological momentum, its very own patented A. I.. It might be self-referential, self-propagating, conjuring thought-polyps, as it posits infinite scenarios of its precognitive dissonance, while dreams are playacted by munchkin homunculi behind our eyelids, and kaleidoscopic menageries, in cinematastic splendor, recount a recursive quest for truth, within an embryonic echo chamber, reenacting the dreamed fiction of human history, with post-hypnotic stress disorder. It relishes its incompleteness, with circumlocuitous convolutions, a slave to the word-smith within us all, a willing tribute to the tribal tribune of writers writing about writers reading about readers. Fresan writes his way out of a box with 15 open sides, and is trapped in an amnesiac loop wherein he pines for the nostalgic afternoons spent in a bookstore which never closes, which contains infinite floors and each floor infinite shelves, each shelf infinite volumes (et chetera ad infinitum), spinning tapestries of delicate cadence, leitmotifs galore, compressed digressions, regressed impressions, conversensational, lexdysic trajectories of dreamscience, oozing dreamessence, in endless variations – the literary equivalent of Groundhog Day on repeat, until it becomes Nidhog Day, in dreams nurtured in coma fugue, in slomo pulp-promo locomotive emotional, talismanic, contexual reflexion, both morphological and serpentine – to put it simply, he never gets to the point, even while his beatific, oneiric reality is extruded from a dream within a dream (ad nauseum), and it becomes less a novel and more a continuous essay on dreamlogic, with so many references and quotes, it’s hard to distinguish what’s appropriated from what’s original – blurring the line – repetitive save-scrubbing and polishing, wear and tear, both of the reader’s attention and the writer’s technique.
It examines how media transposes its layers into real life, how books/ film/ music transform reality for us, so that we can better consume it. Our relationship to other humans is interpreted through these mediums & our celebration of culture is a result of our technological accomplishments, our idolizations and our obsessions. It is at once intimate, irreverent, wily and bloated. The primary discussion moves from the aforementioned into 19th and 20th century literature, the Brontës and Nabokov in particular. Circular digressions ensue. The “radiation of influence” is everywhere apparent.
A discussion, a forum, a panel, for pop culture enthusiasts. More than 1 Twin Peaks reference and innumerable 2001 and Twilight Zone plugs, an accumulation of character biases, the microstories within paragraphs – with all these, Fresan purposely spoils endings – he did it in the last one and he does it here. Alberto Manguel tried to do this in his books on reading, that is to say, to communicate the painful joy of reading certain books. The way they have a powerful effect on sensitive aesthetes and often massage souls into bibliophilic rapture.
If the endless concoction of slipshod biographies of his favorite writers don’t bother you, he still blathers to the point of minute obsession. Fresan is an idol-worshipper of the highest order. The literary giants exert such influence upon him that the intimidation of their lingual prowess prevents him from joining their ranks. He is a fan-boy with consummate ability, down-played into imitative madness. What he manages to communicate is the desperation of the lonely, misunderstood artist, the deception of perception. This is a well-padded goddess-medusa, full of pomp and circumdance. Spoofing, complaining, giddy, fierce ineluctable modalities of the frigid and dead interiors of modern humankind.
L. S. Popovich 