THE MANIFOLD DESTINY OF EDDIE VEGAS

This here is my magnum opus, coming out from River Boat Books in late May of this very year of 2020. I will be 61 years old when it happens.

Let’s take a closer look, starting with the flap content:

Rick Harsch told me that for The Manifold
Destiny of Eddie Vegas, he reached into a
bag of tricks left in a closet in Brussels by
forgotten literary masters, and as the punning
title might suggest, he attempts no less—
and much more—than to come to grips with
what empire has wrought, and how over the
recent two centuries the United States rose to
global economic mastery and nuclear proliferate madhouse. 
A serious tome indeed, with
serious purpose, to the delight of the reader
Harsch recognizes that seldom do tricks
accomplish their purpose without humor—
thus he is able to render the story of Hugh
Glass and the grizzly with dark humor and
quotidian accuracy yielding what meaning
of that story was absent from the film even
as the location has been moved 1500 miles
westward.
Yet Harsch plays no tricks with time:
his modern characters are modern and his
historical characters are, well, historical, all
of them from the days of the mountain man
right up to those of nuclear testing, down
the Oregon Trail, with the gold rush, into
the nuclear age, Vietnam, and even Blackwater—or, in this novel, 
Blackguard, the CEO
of which is Mandrake Winchester Fondling,
father of Drake Fondling the second, friend
of Donnie Garvin, the two of whom dash off
to Brussels much in the manner of Bardamu
joining WWI at the beginning of Celine’s
masterpiece. Heedless of the history hurrying
their fates, they befriend the artist/bartender
Setif, whose role in the story may be no
more than to suggest what Harsch calls ‘an
adamantine luminescence of the sane and the
good buried beneath the degradations of time
and the humans who keep track of it’. Their
return to the United States is as if the fording
of a stream across stones of history:
(Summary continued on back flap)

Fallujah, Twin Towers, Assassinations, and
the familial dysphagia that bedevils the
themes of US literature.
My favorite of Harsch’s tricks are the
Rabelaisian lists, for this novel may be above
all a gift from one lover of language to all
literary lovers of language, and the shock
upon realizing the meaning of the lists—
where the surreal, the hypermodern, and
the mundane finally meet in an equation
of horror—is jarring enough to elicit guilt
in the most innocent reader. Meanwhile,
this book is a romp, a romp through history
and the present, story after story told in the
jargon of the mountain man of the old west,
the Indians, the coal miners, tycoons, the
Joycean—at times, at others the clochard—
narrator, the anonymous songsters of the
old west, and one madman montagnard, the
mysterious midget Nordgaard. Ultimately,
the legends presented in this book are
unknowable, where the wild Joaquin Murriata
and the first Nevada lawman—shot six times
only to survive—intersect, and what veins of
story lead us to the present, where the logic
and illogic of rapine dust off the irradiated
dust to find that the inevitably violent and
absurd have remained as complicit and inseparable as horse and rider, 
rider and horse.
—Klaus Hauser, Stuttgart, for River Boat
Books
Rick Harsch is the author of seven books,
including his cult classic The Driftless Zone
(1997, Steerforth Press), Billy Verite (1998,
Steerforth Press), Sleep of the Aborigines (2002,
Steerforth Press), Arjun and the Good Snake
(2011, Amalietti & Ąmalietti), Wandering Stone:
the Streets of Old Izola (2017, Mandrac Press),
Voices After Evelyn (2018, Maintenance Ends
Press), and Skulls of Istria (2018, River Boat
Books). 

There is no author photo, but let's include one here:

 or maybe this one


Here's the blurbery on the back cover:

Praise for Rick Harsch:

Readers, don your thinking caps and hiking boots, for The Manifold Destiny of
Eddie Vegas is an epic journey through Harsch terrain, where at any moment
language erodes into a mindscape of hoodoos and canyons—not unlike that
geological fantasia, that palimpsest of usurpation: the American West. In an era
when many writers concoct their trifles inside the cosseted lairs of academia,
Rick Harsch is a refreshing counter-example, a chronicler of our nation’s nightmares from his balcony overlooking the Adriatic. You hold in your hands a
nuclear apparatus of a novel, operated by characters all too aware of what their
futures promise—like Rowor, the tongue man of the Nimíipuu, a night-languaged injun who befriends Hector Robitaille, the bear-mauled, buck-skinned
ancestor of Eddie Vegas. Harsch weaves the roughhewn with the recondite like
no other living novelist of my acquaintance. You will revel in his century-shifts,
vast erudition, and the cock-eyed, half-cocked ardor of his men and women.
 —Scott Coffel, American poet and author of Toucans in the Arctic
 (Etruscan Press, 2009)

“I think that once in every generation a few writers appear with the talent,
brilliance, curiosity and DRIVE to dare to go their own way, to follow the lead
of their own imaginations. I believe that Rick Harsch is of this group. In my
view, Rick Harsch is one of the most talented and interesting young writers it
has been my privilege to meet in all my years at Iowa.”
 —James Alan McPherson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his
 short story collection Elbow Room (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1977).



EXCERPT (one of my favorites):

Oh! And what a rendezvous that was, despite the absence

of Rowor, who would never come on his own, and Hector

and Jeffers come from straight north of there, having braved

Blackfoot country, so Rowor was hunnerds and hunnerds of

miles west.

Oh yes, the rendezvous of ’32: they were right on time

at Pierre’s Hole, now Idaho, the far side of the Tetons, where

the Chikisaw Crow held their annual trout twattery, and the

balls of gopher fried in whiskey, the bear swilley cries of

“Homch fer that air bearskin” and the answer comic “Howmch

fer that bareskin,” led to a dance ruckus laughfest of flapjawed

contestants for the following days savvy parlay drum-timed

where-that-get-to wrassle, and throughout the month the

backstabbing stabbing gargle of gargoyles of death dwarfs

and murder, and Scurvy Sam n his tales tall of wolves and

rainmuck-squabblery-frenly-like-oops-nuther drown-thas-losi-

va pale-face guzzlers, Jacques-knifed redskins, and Law?

Hah? Banjaxery ruleth the dog-tortured vomit bloodshittery,

beaver fer bearskin fer hide fer hairscalp, and the backscuttling

frontventing, anal twat cunny cockhole rectal labial nipple

ballsackery salted beefsides durnt saltedslabs hairdowntotheass

beard down to the knees and the shitting and pissing and lakes

and quicksand, and lookey here fren thattheresheepyereatin.

deerferall, axetraps, drygulching horseracing ponytrekking

rifleshooting Blackass Creecrow, Crow Cree, ShowshowKnee.

Pie-ute, Flathead, Blackhead Cheyenne Sioux, Mandan my

ass go-own git, ye pounding shrinking smearing stinking

beads-fer-suck-me-alls-slinking bowenarrah rattler peddlin

REDSKINS! How many redskins, if you just count the Nimipoo.

1000 lodges, the Flatheads 800 lodges, the mountain men, 4000.

and if you needs to check particular they say there was 30,000

horses at the rendezvous that year, but there was more oh

yes there was much more: oh yes, the atmosphere was festive,

the dirt was festive, the women and men were festive, Indian,

trader mountain man, gambler, whore, all were festive, and

their number in the thousands, and their thirst unquenchable,

their hunger insatiable, their lust phallicimous vaginous, their

mood ecstatic, their physiognomy boisterous, and such was

there fooferraahh that one could not distinguish the dance from

the game from the coupling from the trading from the stealing

from the rapine from the camaraderie, so that the names of the

dishes, the dances, the sexery, the so on and so off the et and

the cetra were all, too, indistinguishable, for they were many

and oft drunkenly accomplished, one acrostically, and that

includes even

The itch and scratch

The itch and snitch

The snatch and scrabble

Tendered is the bender

Hogleg and whirligiggle

Extraversion and ropov

Yams for Gerty

Shame and Shone

Labial lectures

Idjits fer midjits

The furbelow cuckold

Flick the nipples

Ike makes haste late

The priestly babble

Zeno settles for half

Pigpile on Vladimir (the advanced copy/paste mechanisms gave us pimple on Vladimir)

Angles of Grind

Cram the lamb

Kate, ye rewent me

Earwigs in the pie!

Rumpus and bumpus

Sphincter, my lobe

The wheat and the scroff

Harley, I can’t break it

Ruxus and fluxus

Oh deer, I have shot you

Ants in the hole!

The grl and mer of life

Whet the wistle

Harlots heaven hellsup

Ingots in guts

Leopard frog targets

Eviscerate the monk

Heads roll

Embed the lead

(and so on for about six more pages)…

Recently my publisher referred to this as a modern western classic, but you’ll find elsewhere in this blog extensive excerptal proof that it is hardly limited to the west of the United States, as there is a long piece from the book that takes place in Vietnam. In fact, you get plenty of indication in the flapcrap above that the book is about the formation of the empire as a whole, how it got here and what it’s like being here.

River Boat Books does not collaborate with Amazon, so it is best found at http://www.riverboatbooks.com.

rick harsch

About VOICES AFTER EVELYN and its Author, including how to pre-order the novel, and some reviews of his SKULLS OF ISTRIA

Voices after Evelyn by Rick Harsch

An unsolved crime that jaundiced the way a town saw itself and its relationship to the outside world is rendered into a polyphonic, farcical, yet accurate visitation to the 1950s Midwest, where banality and inspired caprice make for an odd mix of the hilarious and terrifying.

“Rick Harsch is America’s lost Midwest noir genius, an heir to the more lurid Faulkner, an ex-pat living in Slovenia, a master of dialogue. “Voices after Evelyn” is a fictional take on true crime, and its bloody heart in the real, still-unsolved 1953 disappearance of teenage Evelyn Hartley in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Through that victimization, Harsch makes us look at other victims, survivors too, and throughout the novel, a Greek-style chorus sings songs of rage and loss and puzzlement. Voices after Evelyn is taut and funny, smart and haunting, enraging and true.”
— Daniel A. Hoyt

In Rovigo, Italy

Here are the two presses involved in publishing the book. You can pre-order from Ice Cube, but take some time to read about their imprint, Maintenance Ends…

Ice Cube Press Homepage v1

https://www.facebook.com/maintenanceendspress/

From Harsch’s other publisher, River Boat Books:

A Conversation with Rick Harsch, the author of Skulls of Istria

When I asked Peter Damian Bellis what I could do for River Boat Books right now, he asked how far Stuttgart was from Slovenia, wondering if I wouldn’t mind interviewing Rick Harsch, who lives there in the coastal town of Izola. I said sure, so he put me in touch with Harsch, who insisted that if I were to do this I must agree to stay at least three nights at his apartment. That made me nervous, so I agreed to two, which turned into five, and a great vacation, as Harsch and his family are wonderful hosts, and the region both beautiful and rife with mixes of culture and history.

I arrived Sunday night, June 24th, after about 13 hours on buses from Stuttgart through Munich and Ljubljana and finally to Izola. He met me at the bus, where I was pulling my luggage from the side bottom, rushing up to me and telling me to grab a few other suitcases while I had the opportunity. It doesn’t take long to get to know such a man.

But he had another surprise. Apparently all the Germans he knows live in Stuttgart as I do, as well as one of his Slovene friends and his family.

 The Germans are in the band Kaufmann Frust, and he said the final condition for the interview—remember, commissioned by his own publisher—was that I present myself as a former member of the band, which I have done in my introductory piece for the press. So let me correct that here and now: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the band Kaufmann Frust, though it is true I can play a lot of American cover songs and make small change in big cities throughout Europe doing so.

I read Harsch’s currently published book Skulls of Istria on the bus—it’s a short, what he calls ‘tavern-confession’ novel, and so I was able to not only read it but give it a thorough going over—but the first night he dodged all questions about the book. Our talk was more general. Here’s one exchange:

KH: Who do you think the most important living writer in the world is?

RH: Antonio Lobo Antunes  [he answered without hesitation]. If you want the most important writer in English it’s Sesshu Foster. Sesshu Foster is a Los Angeles writer, author of Atomik Azteks, most recently a book of poems called The City of the Future, and several other books, poetry and prose poetry. I’ll get to him soon.

KH: Why?

RH: Besides various requisites such as talent, inventiveness, disinclination to acceptance of prescribed order, revolutionary sense down to the marrow, which I think any writer I mention in answer would have to have, Foster is an adamant small press writer, or if adamant isn’t the right word, he’s fully aware that the best writing is generally out of the view of the main writing culture and he makes every effort to advance the cause of small presses, while at the same time absolutely refusing to let himself get worn down by the near total lack of concrete award for doing what he does, what he does via tireless promotion and tireless work, writing work.

KH: I’ve never heard of him, which probably doesn’t surprise you… But I feel I have to ask the awkward question: How can he be the most important writer if, as I am guessing, most even modernist writers, most writers who read Gaddis and Barth, for instance, probably have never heard of him either?

RH: All I can say is that that is a fair question and at the same time underscores Sesshu Foster’s importance. To take one shortcut: if it were not for Sesshu Foster, proto-Sesshu Foster’s, Barth and Gaddis would be unknown as well. There must be someone throughout the continuum if the continuum persists. You might know that William Gass might have had a lot to do with the recognition of William Gaddis; yet still, the holy New York Times mistook the two in a review of one of Gaddis’ most important books, actually publishing a review that had Gass as the author. In such a literary world you surely must imagine that the most talent on the continuum is at that part not shoved up the ass of wealth, fame and propriety.

It’s not surprising to find that a writer has himself surrounded by books. Harsch has most of his books in a large bedroom where he also has his work table and computer. The children’s room (he has a 14-year-old son, Arjun, and a 13-year-old named Bhariavi) is filled with books. The bathroom has a small shelf on the floor with books piled to waist height. There are two cases in the dining room, and his seat on the balcony is surrounded by books. These are the ones he is currently reading. I noticed a biography of Pasolini, Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, and two books pertaining to Malta.

KH: So what are you reading now?

RH: Sesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook.

KH: Come on, you said the books in there [I point to a shelf] are books you’re in the middle of.

RH: Foster’s in the bathroom. I am also nearly finished with a manuscript by my publisher, your boss Bellis, called Gods and Gazelles. I could look around if you want and come up with at least 30 books I’m reading with some urgency.

KH: Then why say Foster?

RH: It’s the most important one to mention…For reasons stated.

KH: Okay…Well, then, what are you working on now? Are you writing?

RH: Like a madman. I’m writing a book on little league baseball in Italy. I started in early March, intending to follow my son’s 12 game season, you know, a book for baseball fans and travel fans, and it turns out I have a lot more to write about than I realized. There are three games left and it’ll end up being more than 500 pages. Maybe 600. I don’t know because I’m using single space and small font, but I did some calculations and it’s nearing the length of my longest novel.

KH: The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas?

RH: Peter told you about that?

KH: I do my homework. It’s coming out in January, right?

RH: Approximately.

KH: What can you tell me about it?

RH: Ah, shit…it’s best to have a fly leaf or something. When I think of one of my books, especially one that long, something over 500 pages I would guess, in book form…I think of various sections. Like for instance this one has a truer version of the bear story of that film Dicaprio was in, the Hugh Glass story. I moved the location a thousand miles or more, but the actual description of the event even presented somewhat comically is closer than what the film depicted. So I think of that. It’s a book about the ancestors of one of the few main modern characters, and it alternately follows the modern characters and covers a great portion of US history covering this family’s generations. The first is a mountain man, who speaks some authentic mountain man as do others, and…and then there’s the mining in Nevada, the atomic testing…some Indian lore…And there are a lot of Rabelaisian lists.

KH: Does it have a distinctive style?

RH: What doesn’t?

KH: I mean, how would you describe the book, you know, stylistically?

RH: Harschian.

KH: Right, so you aren’t much on labels then. Neither am I, frankly.

RH: They don’t bother me, really—it’s just that the more you say generally, the more misleading is the description. I can say it’s dark and funny and plays with language a lot, that it makes fun of itself sometimes, that it’s rather scathing towards US history…but what would that make it? Postmodern? Hyper-real is good. I don’t mind if someone calls something of mine hyper-real.

KH: Is that accurate?

RH: No.

KH: But you don’t mind.

RH: No…Look, at the Iowa Writers Workshop, I was there over, what? I started there almost 25 years ago. That’s where someone first called my writing meta-fiction. So some guy read something in a university class and it was called meta-fiction, and when he encountered mine, which was probably similar only in that it refuses to obey standard literary notions in whatever ways, he called mine meta-fiction, too. Probably Joyce and Beckett are both meta-fictional, but…

KH: I thought Skulls was great, I really did. But I didn’t think of it categorically. I was trying to think of it like a literary guy would and what I came up with was a kind of mix of Camus and Conrad, the Marlowe books, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness.

RH: That makes sense, though, because you’re just describing the storytelling technique. But I hope you liked it more than The Fall—I couldn’t stop laughing when I read The Fall. All that ‘Here we are again today my friend’ bullshit.

KH: I read it ten years ago.

RH: Go for twenty.

KH: You’re right, though, in that sense, Skulls of Istria is a very realistic work, which is not something I would ever have thought of your books. [We had already talked about how I came to know his work.]

RH: The story is surreal enough, particularly the one that never really gets told but is the center of the book, Viezzoli’s story. A man, a 26-year-old man, goes off to join the International Brigades and gets killed in Madrid in his first encounter. Gets his name engraved on a plaque.

KH: The engraved! That’s what the dedication means. I didn’t think of that…I thought about graves.

RH: Right. Both.

KH: What about your other book?

RH: Which one?

KH: Voices after Evelyn.

RH: You do do your homework. That should be coming out in November as the inaugural book from Maintenance Press, a new Midwestern press, sort of the avant-garde wing of Ice Cube Press, a well-established Midwestern press based in Iowa. Back to Sesshu Foster, this press began with a fundraising, you know, one of those crowdfunding things, and shot for 10,000$ and got to their goal in about two months, which suggests that there is awareness and interest in less commercial literary ventures.

KH: What’s the book about and how is it avant-garde?

RH: Finally an easy question about one of my books. Avant-garde is sometimes essentially the failure to concede. For instance in the ‘realistic’ Skulls of Istria, the most dramatic action is presented in a page—I’m talking about the war crimes in Mostar—most novels that contain the same basic elements would make that central in an obvious way, the action would be presented in lengthy scenes, characters made of victims and perpetrators. Imagine the film: bad guy required. Evelyn is a historical novel accurately depicting the pivotal moment in a town when a babysitter disappeared, was almost certainly murdered, her body never found. Every expectation given that scenario is rejected. The book is comic, lively, and playfully dark, in fact slipped in to the novel is the murderer played by Peter Lorre in M as a means of conveying a modern chiaroscuro to this colorized event that is researched in blacks and whites. My agent of the time I wrote the book did not get it, and was even, believe it or not, confused by the narration, which is by a series of characters, something twice done by Faulkner and not at all meant to be modern or unmodern or anything but the way the tale needed to be presented. The novel also focuses far less on the victim—in fact, does not focus really at all on the victim—the novel focuses on people living in a 1950s Wisconsin river city who would have lived similarly whether the crime happened there or elsewhere…yet at the same time it is in its way a tip of the hat to the bizarre, the mysterious, the perverse, which is sometimes misunderstood as a characteristic of the Midwest, which is all that but only in its most extravagantly subtle lineaments different from the same excretions in other geographies.

[Given a limit to what I can present to the press, I cut much of the interview and focused on selections I felt were important. I will end with an exchange on River Boat Books.]

KH: Are you happy with River Boat Books? By that I mean many things, but at least address the financial aspect, as it is not a known press that afforded you a large advance.

RH: [Laughing] I need money because I have a family, so if a large press offered me substantial money I would have to take it, for my children. But more important in real terms is the proximity of a press to the essence of its books. Maintenance Ends perfectly matches its first book. Perfectly…right, stupid word because what I need to say is that in the end River Boat Books may be an even, no, I won’t say better fit, but they are more or less the same in regard to my sense of what is—shit, I’m babbling. Look, I am being published at the same time as an enormous masterpiece that came from out of nowhere, The Mad Patagonian, and at the same time along with the historic publication of one of my literary uncles, Roberto Arlt, his great book The Flamethrowers published in English translation for the first time. Now, after reading my publishers novel Gods and Gazelles, I know with certainty the press is run by a mad genius. I am extremely happy, yes, and if River Boat Books survives the coming year, you and I will both be even happier, for there is much more to come that—recall Mr. Foster now—would otherwise be preserved by bark-ravenous insects.

Klaus Hauser, Literary critic (for lack of a better label) and Book Connoisseur (because there are 1,759 books in his Stuttgart apartment)

When I asked Peter Damian Bellis what I could do for River Boat Books right now, he asked how far Stuttgart was from Slovenia, wondering if I wouldn’t mind interviewing Rick Harsch, who lives there in the coastal town of Izola. I said sure, so he put me in touch with Harsch, who insisted that if I were to do this I must agree to stay at least three nights at his apartment. That made me nervous, so I agreed to two, which turned into five, and a great vacation, as Harsch and his family are wonderful hosts, and the region both beautiful and rife with mixes of culture and history.

I arrived Sunday night, June 24th, after about 13 hours on buses from Stuttgart through Munich and Ljubljana and finally to Izola. He met me at the bus, where I was pulling my luggage from the side bottom, rushing up to me and telling me to grab a few other suitcases while I had the opportunity. It doesn’t take long to get to know such a man.

But he had another surprise. Apparently all the Germans he knows live in Stuttgart as I do, as well as one of his Slovene friends and his family.

 The Germans are in the band Kaufmann Frust, and he said the final condition for the interview—remember, commissioned by his own publisher—was that I present

 Rick Harsch  on his Izola balcony with Sesshu Foster’s World Ball Notebook and The City of the Future.

 

REVIEWS OF SKULLS OF ISTRIA:

1

The last book I read in the English language was over four months ago and the first book I picked up after this sojourn was Skulls of Istria by Rick Harsch and the second book I picked up was Skulls of Istria by Rick Harsch, thats right I read Harsch’s novel and was so impressed I immediately re-read it. Being a little out of touch with the English language in novel form, may have helped because Harsch bends and twists his words in ways that gets the most out of them, for example:

“How many secret stercoricolous tribes of coprophagi have lived and died unknown”

Perhaps the most disgusting sentence in the whole novel, but at the end of the day I am glad that those tribes lived and died unknown.

Weighing in at 144 pages the novel is not one to exhaust the reader or lead him to regret that time may have been misspent, because the curious thing is that it is also very readable and because I was so fascinated by the word play on that first reading I imagined I might have missed some fundamental themes and a good story and so when I re-read it I found I this to be absolutely correct.

Novel writers live by the art of their story telling and this novel opens with the Speaker/Author inviting a customer at a waterside taverna to sit at his table while he plies him with drinks and proceeds to spin his tales of loves lost and won, plagiarism, intrigue and murder with dollops of Balkan history and a background of a rugged terrain. The speaker/author is an historian (perhaps the best story tellers) with particular knowledge of the coastal towns of Croatia where much of the action takes place, but the speaker/author is also an American and he brings with him the persona of a life time battle with “Uncle Sam”. This is not a two way conversation as the author/speaker says to his guest:

“ But lets not talk politics, you and I, In fact I’d rather you not talk at all, you just listen, I’ll talk.

And talk he does; about the Burja wind, about the history of the peoples living along the coastline laced with passing references to the story he really wants to tell: how he became victim to the machinations of people still trying to escape from the aftermath of yet another vicious war in the Balkans. He tells of his academic career in America his fascination with the war torn region, his attempts to write a masterpiece, the plagiarism that led to his fleeing the country and landing up in Croatia with his partner Rosa. In Croatia he finds a subject on which to hang his chief d’oeuvre, but he is seduced by the gypsy-like Maja who involves him in a Balkan intrigue all of his own.

So what better way than to spend an afternoon sitting at a table opposite this voluble American while he plies you with drinks and tells stories that will shock and awe you, that will drip with the harshness of a people and their surroundings and the history that no one can escape, but underneath there is also a human story of love and lust and that age old conundrum that concerns so many writers: the search for a subject that will satisfy the serious artist. Mr Harsch is well on the way to finding that with this novel whose individual voice will fascinate and entertain the reader in equal measure. Highly recommended and a five star read. (  )

11| flagbaswood | Jul 3, 2018 | 

2

[Skulls of Istria] churns in a fever pitch, soaked in liquor and crusted in dusty grit kicked up by the Slovene burja swirling through the pages. Rick Harsch, himself an American ex-pat residing in the regions highlighted in the book, has created a jolting contemplation on history and culture and violence. Sometimes it is bloody, genocidal violence but, more often in this frenzied, confessional tirade, the self-immolating variety.

As the book opens, we find an unidentified American, on the lam for sins not yet revealed, plying a local bar sot with endless buckets of local swill as he decompensates through his own checkered history. His story is accompanied by a burja – a feral wind roiling through the region that matches our man’s own discord. Early in his account, the mysterious narrator tells the story of Marjan, whose Greek fishing cap was lifted from his head by a similar burja to be blown away to a faraway inland landing spot. The hat’s improbable journey is an omen for the Odyssian voyage about to be described.

Like all epic journeys, [Skulls of Istria] is dissonant and abrasive at the outset, defying understanding; like a discordant jazz piece. But there are secret melodies to which the nattering storyteller returns, until the dissonance is synchrony.

As the harmony begins to resolve, the narrator announces a singular distaste for his home – America:
“Anyway in America the formative vary from one to one with little degree of significance. … America is the great fusion of classes by culture, the fusion of very little into nothing, a clear refutation of the more important laws of thermodynamics: there are many classes but a single caste, and money simply describes specific modalities of inertia.”
The declaration gives the reader some of the first clues about the speaker’s reliability. For, in the explanation, he sheds light on the origins of his exile, and they are self-driven.

The reader is left to wonder – and wander – with him, whether his undoing will have anything to do with a woman. Will it be Rosa? Will it be Maja? Rosa lazily fades into his life during his days in American academia. But she just as lazily fades out of it when he decamps. Maja, the schemer, blows into his life like the burja from which he is constantly on the run. Manipulating him out of his passport, she appears the likely seed of his destruction. But as he accounts for himself, he ultimately blames Kronos, his history professor mentor. Here, the narrator’s earlier disdain for American mediocrity and homogeneity begins to make sense. Kronos was unable to ever write the historical treatise which would deliver on his promise. When Kronos dies, our unidentified Ulysses finds several chapters his mentor’s writing. He takes it for his own, rewrites and completes it, and has it published. When the plagiarism is discovered, he flees. Though he isn’t able to write his own book, he still mocks and derides his mentor’s failings. All the while, he uses his mentor’s unfinished book to complete a task he isn’t capable of himself. The incongruity sets him on a journey worthy of Homer.

In the last chapters – the tale is unclear enough even to the teller that he can’t decide on the chapter’s numbering – he follows a map in search of a subject for an original work; Giordano Viezzoli a Piranian soldier from the Spanish Civil War. With the map folded into his kit, it’s uncertain whether he can actually read the map and readers are wandering (wondering) again. Is redemption the quarry rather than Viezzoli? Redemption in the spiritual since, for his sins? Or intellectual redemption? During this odyssey, he falls into a pit of skulls. And, with all his knowledge, he isn’t even able to distinguish the origin of the remains – which historical genocide produced the mass grave. All the historical violence is indistinguishable, just as his own plight’s origins are indistinguishable to him.

Within site of the saga’s end, the narrator crawls from the pit of skulls as the burja blows its last exhale. Does this mark a self-realization? An understanding? Harsch puckishly refuses to engage in that sort of ending, resolving the tale with a coin flip that always comes up heads.

This is not a book to be nibbled at, but to be swallowed whole, chewed and mashed through. The poetic word-play and sardonic humor throughout will alone keep you busy. But the real value is in the constantly shifting flavors as you masticate long after the final bite.

Bottom Line: A feverish account of one man’s odyssey through the Balkans, and through the detritus of his own life.

5 bones!!!!! (  )

10| flagblackdogbooks | Apr 21, 2018 | 

3

Towards the end of Rick Harsch’s new novel the protagonist – an American historian on the lam in Europe, on the Croatian coast to be precise – falls into an underground crypt filled with skulls, a depository from the long wars of Venice against Turks and Uskoks? Or a more recent ossuary of the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans of the 90s? He emerges from this premature brush with death with all his illusions shattered, his plan for a history of the region as told though the biography of a certain Giordano Viezzoli abandoned, and with a new understanding of reality, of who the people around him really are, and the role that he has played in their lives, how he has been a victim of deception.

I looked out at the world from that skull and saw first myself inert, wounded, and worst of all, a mock historian – an historian to be mocked.

Told in the form of a tavern confessional, Harsch’s novel explores issues of deception and truth, and the fraught history of the Balkans. In Vino Veritas, as the saying goes. The problem with being accosted by the local drunk, as Harsch must know full well, is that it can either be a revelatory experience, if the man can talk (and, boy, how the narrator of this novel can talk!); or it can be an evening of utter boredom for the listener and maudlin self obsessed justification for the tale teller, in which how-it happened is (in)judiciously mixed up with how-it-should-have-happened. Harsch’s tale explores the ambiguities of fiction versus non-fiction, memoir versus history, truth versus lies in prose of sizzling energy, linguistic invention, and confidence, completely at odds with the anodyne beige prose of most contemporary American authors. Harsch is a novelist whose work deserves to be better known, a writer with a style of great originality, power and vision. (  )

10| flagtomcatMurr | Apr 13, 2018 | 

4

“Skulls of Istria” is the spoken account of a disgraced historian in search of redemption, which comes to mean, in any sense that matters to him, an appropriate subject. He tells an uncomprehending drinking companion (the companion doesn’t speak the language, but drinks are free) how he stole his deceased mentor’s work, improved it, and passed it off as his own, to his financial gain but ultimate humiliation when the plagiarism is detected. A fugitive from the law and the bloodhounds of academic and publishing standards, the narrator escapes with his lover Rosa to Venice, a city that he loathes for its opportunistic role in history, and from there to the Istrian peninsula where he stumbles upon his subject: one Giordano Viezzoli from Piran. Viezzoli fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. “So this man, this 26 year old man, had left his home, gone directly to Spain and almost immediately been killed.” He would use the meaninglessness of this young man’s sacrifice on principle to an anti-fascist cause, his freedom to choose, as an arrow “aimed straight into the skull of the Fascists.” He sees Viezzoli’s “commitment against powerful forces” as “enough to bring down the moral scaffolding upholding Western Civilization” depriving “Western empires of their right to govern.” In the course of doing footwork research, the narrator literally falls into the underworld. He meets the dead, skeletal remains in a mass burial site, presumed by him to be Uskok victims of Venetian reprisals in the 17th century. Despite a strong identification with death, world- and history-weary, hunger drives him back to the world of the living where he learns that an act of charity on behalf of a new lover’s “brother” has allowed this man, whose real identity he subsequently learns is that of a war criminal hunted by Interpol, to elude capture. His principles betrayed, having ignorantly aided The Enemy, his rage turns back on himself.

For someone whose passion is for the truth, or for a fidelity to truth, which might not be the same thing, the narrator has a checkered past, given his propensity for the theft of intellectual property. But now he is nothing if not unsparing in his judgment of himself, his fellow students and historians, the empires that have laid waste their conquered provinces, preyed on, betrayed decency, fair and honest interchanges since the historians first sang their accounts of what they’d witnessed or heard. He has always been not merely suspicious of romantic love but actually contemptuous of it while enjoying the benefits that accrue to him from indulgent Rosa who supports him through the lean years that run into decades and then flees the country with him in his disgrace.

Stripped of nearly all illusions by his close reading of history and observation of his fellows, the narrator spares no one his clear-eyed assessment. Clear-eyed, yes, except that he allows his passion for “gypsy” lover Maja finally, fatally to cloud his vision. He doesn’t see what’s coming. What’s that about knowing history so that you won’t repeat it? He is being used and betrayed for his resources as surely as any of the empires he loathes betray and steal from whom they will. Though he has “witnessed” indecency (mild term) countless times in reading history, in reading newspapers, none of that prepares him to encounter something similar on a personal level. He is a man of thought, not action, as he admits, and when given the opportunity to act, he makes all the wrong choices. He does not know with whom or what he is dealing.

“Skulls of Istria” is a tour de force of compact rage that is brilliant in every sentence, in every description and nuance of character and movement. Everything is noticed, and everything means something beyond what it appears to mean. Whom can he trust in this volatile region of the world? Everyone plays his or her cards close to the chest. This novel contains some of the wittiest and most incisive observations of human behavior and human foibles one is likely to find between the covers of a book. The author is a playful linguist but rarely allows his playfulness to become an end in itself. Harsch masterfully describes thought life as beautifully and clearly as he does lived life, to the extent that I found myself reading slower and slower and marking sentence after sentence that leapt out at me for sheer rightness and poetry. No one describes a landscape, topography and the difficulty of traversing it better than Harsch. No one can write a funnier sex scene than Harsch. It should give one pause to be able to say, these days, that he or she has run across an original sex scene, given the overabundance of the same in daily life. But search these pages for just that.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is short but profound, angry but funny, truthful as only the fallen one can speak the truth. (  )

13| flagdavidvardeman | Feb 15, 2018 | 

5

Rick Harsch’s truly excellent “Skulls of Istria” is a book that deserves to be read. This thin novel with less than 150 pages and only 6 or 7 chapters demands but a minimal effort and time investment, say an afternoon read, a few hours on the plane, for what I consider a huge return.

The story too is very readable. I mean by that, that from the first page, the author grabs your attention, you are sucked into the narrative and before you know it, captivated, you keep on reading. Or listening…, for that is what you actually do, you listen to a narrator babbling away while he drinks glass after glass of a local spirit.

The narrator, a self – exiled American academic, a mock historian he calls himself, speaks to the reader from his regular watering hole, a sea front bar in the Slovanian city of Piran. He has taken refuge from the terrible Burja, a legendary storm-wind that rages outside over the Adriatic Sea.

As his voice drones away, occasionally interrupted by his regular trip to the bar’s toilet to relieve himself, you install yourself in comfortable passive listening. But that may be a dangerous lapse of attention for you should listen carefully; close reading is required. The story the historian tells might after all not be as innocent as it is narrated and the steady downing of brandy might not only help the narrator to find his words but maybe also give him the necessary courage to proceed.

The American is basically and safely speaking to himself, for the other person at his table appears to be dead drunk and the other people present in the bar mind their own business playing cards. Anyway, nobody is eavesdropping, and we start following the narrative…

From innocent and funny anecdotes about the excesses of the Burja wind, the storyteller comes to tell us bits of the very violent history of the area, mingling it with his own confessional story of how he washed up in this coastal Istrian town. The man’s story consists of different threads that loop and snake around each other : the reason of his self inflicted exile, his relationship with his traveling companion, his passion for a gypsy women and his desperate search for a historic topic for a book he wants to write.

All this is recounted in a succulent flow of words, full of puns, clever wordplays, literary trouvailles and newly chiseled porte-manteau words. Not only does the narrator’s story turn out to be more than just interesting, it is darkly sarcastic and funny too.

As the reader starts to unravel the separate threads of the narrative yarn, a Hitchcockian structure appears that increases the worrisome mood permeating the pages of the book. The historian seems to have forgotten that what is the past today was the actuality of yesterday. In an area with a history of violent ethnic war, this is a warning not to miss.

Hell under one’s feet, might be but just a drop away.

A must read. (  )

6

12| flagMacumbeira | Jan 2, 2018 | 

Skulls of Istria takes us from a midwestern academia to the Adriatic coast of Slovenia…where an on the lam would be American historian after some nefarious doings on his part having washed up with his girlfriend like two bits of flotsam and with vague notions of starting over. And so the historian sits in a bar in Piran (a smallish Slovenian town on the Adriatic coast) plying a stranger who doesn’t speak a word of English with drink while regaling this stranger with the trials, the vicissitudes of his past and how he came to be where he is–abandoned and adrift in a foreign land and among strangers who for the greater part he has some difficulty communicating with and/or understanding is also part of the confession he feels compelled to dump on his uncomprehending (and probably could give a shit less) drinking buddy. His burdens need to be unburdened out loud and what better place than a tavern? Language, politics, culture, love blending into each other as the burja blows sometimes so powerfully that it can lift a truck off the ground…all the while that the historian’s sardonic black humor pricks away at his own conscience.

While a comparison could be made to the prose device Camus creates in The Fall–one does get the sense that Albert’s hearer is at least sympathetic. And then Camus was always kind of dry to me….which is why he will alway be best to me with large sandy landscapes looking off towards infinite vistas rather than in Amsterdam bars or any bars for that matter. Skulls of Istria works better–much better in fact because Rick Harsch’s prose style breathes life and humor into it. I mean really to me you need atmosphere to carry this off right. That the listener is only interested in drinking himself into oblivion while the historian rattles on and the burja blows as background noise is just one ironic twist but it welds the book from beginning to end.

IMO there are very few really great American fiction writers writing today and Mr. Harsch (a longstanding member of the LT community) is one of them. His stories are replete with intricate plots, interesting characters, modernistic twists in both action and language. I’ve read several of his works and Skulls shows a great writer at the top of his game–at least until he tops it again–which I suspect will happen. This book would be a great place for someone new to his fiction to start. (  )

13| flaglriley | Nov 8, 2017 | 

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3 Novels from Rick Harsch now available on Amazon. Read Harsch’s Adriatic and Balkan novels–prices quite low, if I may say so…

SKULLS OF ISTRIA
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Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HNAXX62
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HNAXX62

KRAMBERGER WITH MONKEY
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Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMZE6OG
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HMZE6OG

ADRIATICA DESERTA
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Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMZ30XE
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HMZ30XE

About these novels:

 

In his USAmerican books, Rick Harsch examined the miasma of the lost souls adrift in empire. In his Indian books, he explored the nature of the foreigner gone deeper into the philosophical chaos of India than any known predecessors. Now in his Balkan/Adriatic books, he finds universals in the thrumming persistence of the harmonics of history, perpetual conflict, and delirious outbreaks of calm.

In Skulls of Istria, a tavern confession novel, a tale told by a brilliant defrocked historian whose first step into the Balkans finds history an active volcano and relates his story in an Adriatic seaside tavern to a man whose only shared language is that of drink, a story that ranges from the Spanish Civil War to seduction and the recent Yugoslav wars.

His recovery he recounts in Requiem for a Suicide, Volume 1, called Noir Slovenia, in which language itself, the Inert, and absurd action suggest a way out for the lost man of the deserts beyond post-modernity – though the second two volumes of the trilogy – works in progress – will perhaps find otherwise, as they will seek to buttress the most extreme notions of their characters, who long for an end to history while forced to search for its very beginnings.

In Kramberger with Monkey, a comedy of assassination, Harsch proves that innovative, experimental fiction can be more entertaining than detective stories, depending largely on the fate of the narrators perhaps, as he probes the surface of humanity’s darkest of jokes only to find the nexus of simian predecessors and exalted artifice.

Adriatica Deserta, an absurdist fable that brings together a mix of eccentric strangers in Zadar, Croatia, is concerned with the more recent politically lurid, occurring during the early days of US war in Afghanistan, an oddity that is perhaps explained by some simulacrum of an eternal fascism, if indeed that is what we are to take from the mysterious tale of the South American fascist Nestor Falco that intrudes on the simpler narrative of a man who has come to take up a position at an office on a street that doesn’t exist.

If there is a palpable thread connecting Harsch’s Balkan/Adriatic books, it is their unpredictability in regard to his delight in the bizarre, his range of expressions of rage, and the tendency throughout for the narration to find purchases on odd excrescences of universals, all of which leave readers space for much laughter and a choice as to degrees of chagrin.

The books can be read in any order, though it is suggested that Skulls of Istria be followed by Requiem for a Suicide Vol. 1. Volumes 2 and 3 of that trilogy are forthcoming, volume one will be out in the Fall.

 

 

The APPEARANCE OF DEATH TO A HINDU WOMAN is published

2.99 USD

 

That link should take you to the page where this novel that has been waiting over 20 years for publication is now available.

The description of the book is as follows

The Appearance of Death to a Hindu Woman explores the spaces where love and delusion, myth and existence weave sinuously, rhapsodically, through the Indian world. An American man loses his Indian love during, significantly, the Kali Yuga, the age of decadence, when the spiritual succumbs to the profane. Attempting through yogic/tantric methods to return to his love, the man makes a pilgrimage that may or may not be real, may or may not succeed, as he journeys through Indian historic and mythological time, eliciting the great loves of Indian lore, Radha and Krishna, Rama and Sita, Kannagi and Kovalan, attempting to overcome the dark forces that would prevent their union. The prose at times adopts the techniques of Indian poetry, and ranges from realistic encounters in and with India to a dramatically poetic and surreal absorption into an India unknown and hitherto unavailable to the outsider. The narrator, by virtue of his knowledge, rises beyond the deluded novice, while by virtue of his poetic and romantic nature as pilgrim defies the distance between historian and subject, in this beautiful and romantic work that ultimately is an act of submission to the mysterious forces of love.

see Books by Harsch