Kubin--The Other Side

[Richard Romeo]

quite enjoying this novel.  reads like an extended
Vheissu vacation. comparable to the Saragossa
Manuscript:

A new translation of a phantasmagoric allegorical
(1908) novel—the only one completed by the renowned
Austrian expressionist graphic artist (1877—1959)—that
has often been compared to Mervyn Peake's fabulistic
Gormenghast. It depicts its nameless narrator's
traumatic sojourn to a remote"Dream Realm" whose
languorous calm is gradually destroyed by an outbreak
of sleeping sickness, attacks by a"teeming multitude
of animals," and further derangements and
catastrophes. Reminiscent as well of Witold
Gombrowicz's aggressively loopy psychodramas, The
Other Side not only demolishes the very idea of
Shangri-la; it may be a wry acknowledgement of the
creative imagination's perverse need for tension and
trauma as stimulants. Blackly funny and boldly
imagined, it's an authentic modernist masterpiece

p.s. check out Kubin's art work--pretty cool, too
Rich

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