Lemon

Rating:
Summary: books? pah! i'll give you books!
Review: i know you haven't read this book. i know i have. i know you know i have. listen, buddy, this here's great. this review, i mean. don't pay attention to alla them other guys sayin' stuff about lemon. what do they know? nuthin'. i know three things, and three things only. 1. this book is a feast for the senses...my copy smelled like new paper, but when subjected to a taste test revealed a hint of duck. i have a refined palate. trust it. 2. lawrence krauser tried to hand draw all of the original covers, but i'm sure his hand cramped up after numero 1000. 3. it's good , man, real good. like a manicure. 4. i don't know. i only promised three things, so it's ok.

Rating:
Summary: books? pah! i'll give you books!
Review: i know you haven't read this book. i know i have. i know you know i have. listen, buddy, this here's great. this review, i mean. don't pay attention to alla them other guys sayin' stuff about lemon. what do they know? nuthin'. i know three things, and three things only. 1. this book is a feast for the senses...my copy smelled like new paper, but when subjected to a taste test revealed a hint of duck. i have a refined palate. trust it. 2. lawrence krauser tried to hand draw all of the original covers, but i'm sure his hand cramped up after numero 1000. 3. it's good , man, real good. like a manicure. 4. i don't know. i only promised three things, so it's ok.

Rating:
Summary: Better as a Short Story
Review: Krauser has a fun idea that worked well as a short story, but grows old as a novel. The prose includes some brilliant sections of great pathos and humor, but also becomes tedious at times--almost as if the author has become as fascinated with his own words as the protagonist has with his fruit. (This is a nice effect at first, but like a lot of experimental writing, it begins to wear thin before too long.) Still, before it tests the patience, the book is enjoyable. I look forward to Krauser's next work.

Rating:
Summary: This is a book.
Review: Lawrence Krauser is a guy who writes books. This is one of those books. I don't write books, but I bet it's hard. I started to write a book once, but I finished the first paragraph and it was very, very bad, so I went to bed. I work hard all day, and sometimes I get very tired. Are you tired? It's funny how much when you ask that question, the person you're asking does turn out to be tired. Why are we all so tired? I just don't know, buddy. I just don't know.

Rating:
Summary: A Love Story Like None Before
Review: Lawrence Krauser's new novel Lemon moves through you like a dream. Its voice is a whisper one moment and a roar the next, its rhythms soothe you with an odd familiarity. And while you're in it, it makes perfect sense.

It's a love story like none before. Wendell is an unassuming but frantic-minded office drone who's just been left by his girlfriend. His life continues to swirl about him, and Marge's departure doesn't hit him as hard as it should. Enduring the consolation of well-meaning friends and hopeless parents, Wendell stumbles upon a discarded lemon in his apartment's hallway. And there he finds love.

The attraction begins as a low thrum, and even amidst absurdity Wendell finds the familiar in unfamiliar form. It's love, "an elusive jungle bird that because it is so durable has thousands of mimics and camouflaged neighbors." And when everything else begins to fall apart around him, from his roach-laden apartment to his health, only the lemon remains faithfully by his side.

The courtship begins as a tactile curiosity, as Wendell develops a slow fascination for the lemon's feel, its comforting consistency. Placed upon his desk, the fruit begins to get his attention as a welcome distraction from his mundane job, but it quickly becomes a singular source of solace. He protects it, admires it, and shortly sees in it what his life cannot provide- purity, light, simple beauty.

Krauser's dancing prose draws us in to Wendell's enchantment. As the man's fascination for the fruit grows to obsession, he finds its allure everywhere, from the colors of the city to the curves of architecture and the perfection of art. We're tempted at first to equate the scenario's absurdity to insanity, but Krauser weaves the narrative so closely with Wendell's perceptions that we actually feel him become saner as the relationship deepens. His hyperstructured observations of the world transform into poetic sweeps of epic scope. The music in his head seems to take shape as his object of desire becomes clearer, and his affection towards it becomes more fully expressed.

As Wendell's passions escalate, so do his troubles. His fixation becomes harder to hide, and he's reluctantly forced to admit to a baffled world that he has found in a fruit what no human could provide. His nurtured upbringing rejects everything about his new source of vitality, but his nature wins out. As the trappings of his existence drop away, life's pleasures take over. His days become playful and lyrical. Even his health improves.

Despite the rising arc of clarity, however, Wendell remains trapped in a world that can never appreciate his new intimacy. Those closest to him try to rationalize his behavior, but Wendell knows his situation is beyond the realm of reason. It's only a matter of time before the forces of nurture take over again in a Kafkaesque attempt to reclaim their turf.

Krauser's gift for language is exquisite. He's a playwright and a musician, and it shows in both the craft of the book's episodic plot and the rhythms of its prose. He does wonders here with the boy-meets-girl routine; in turning half the equation upside-down, he's left with an ever-familiar structure, but without the baggage of every love story inevitable when humans are involved. It's less a high-concept stunt than the embrace of a challenge, and he pulls it off with gusto.

Rating:
Summary: A lemon by any other name...
Review: Lemon is one of the best of the current crop of Nervous Breakdown Novels in its combination of humor, sadness, pathology, and verbal virtuosity. I don't know whether Krauser intended this, since he puts in a claim for a psychological exemption on grounds of Freud allergy, but to me Lemon is a faithful rendering of what can happen to a person who loses
a loved one: regression to earlier levels of relatedness, where the object becomes a teddy bear, blanket, or fetish. Krauser's montage of literary/poetic/musical styles is not only a tour de force in it's own right, it's also faithful to the intellectual fragmentation and obsessional focus on the object/fetish which can actually happen in such a collapse. At the same time it's a hilarious parody of all of the above. So I appreciated both the literary brilliance and intuitive emotional accuracy, the latter being so effective that I actually found myself anxious and worried about the lemon whenever it was threatened. Also the parental confrontations were amongst the funniest I've read. I would rank Lemon up there amongst the best of contemporary first
novels(cf Russian Debutante's Handbook) and would assume the reason why it hasn't had the same initial success is its difficulty, the demands it places on the reader. The shifting styles and modalities can be tough going (like shifting rhythms and keys in modern music) It's possible to get lost in the unscripted dialogue. There are some parts which just didn't work for me (e.g. the long mock-epic poem) but to criticize such parts makes as little sense as to say to a jazz musician to go back and replay a chorus or riff that may not have worked so well. Better to go on to the next chorus or in Krauser's case,
the next book.

Rating:
Summary: Juicy Writing
Review: This book is totally original, brilliantly written. It's also playful and a joy to read. Totally unpredictable--for example, right in the middle of the story there's an entire chapter of lemon-inspired poetry. The writer (where'd he come from anyway?) takes enormous liberties with the English language, which can be confusing but is worth the trouble. The plot is quirky but somehow it grabs you immediately. Krauser did a great job of making his main character Wendell and Wendell's weird problem totally engrossing. I'll never look at a lemon again without smiling, remembering this book.

Rating:
Summary: Peerless citrus
Review: This is a wonderful, inventive, unpretentious, and surprisingly affecting book. Krauser's unruly prose has a tendency to wander at times, but it will never stray so far as to lose your interest, and when it returns home to the central love story, you will be captivated. "Lemon" is both heartbreaking and hilarious. I enjoyed it immensely.

Rating:
Summary: Poetic and prolix
Review: This was an enjoyable read despite the difficult rhetoric. The book draws you in with great ideas and stories about the main charachter breaking up with his girlfriend. The analogy about the relationship to the history of music was witty. There are some funny spots in the first third of the book. After that it gets serious and there is an undertone of tension and anxiety.

The main charachter has to deal with some very difficult situations including the inability to use half of his face. After that his infatuation with a lemon causes him trouble in every aspect of his life.

This was a quick enjoyable read, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys poetry and reads with a dictionary by their side.

Aaron

Rating:
Summary: It's a whole new way at looking at things
Review: Well, there are some interesting points of this new and exciting book. First off, it's new. So that means that there has never been anything like it before, nor will there be anything like it after. Even if the author had a clone and raised himself with similar traumas, that clone wouldn't produce this book. So, you have to ask yourself, why bother? A book written by a clone would seemingly be more interesting. It might have as we say "appeal." Imagine a book called "Lemon" and on the bottom of the book there is a sqaure and in that square the bookseller places the sticker, "Written by actual clone. Clone approved by bio-ethicist as Grade A literary wonder." And there could be other explanations. I mean, when the thing got written up in here ort there, they would point out that it wasn't written by one of those scary clones, but by one of the approved ones. Of course, by this time in the literary biz, there would be a mass of "bad" clones, which were formed from some of Faulkner's hair, or Lutz's pancreas, and all of these clones would write books that woudl try to imitate their former genetic strains. Not so here, however. This clone writes on his own, without the need of the shadow of the former author, which by now has died in obscurity surrounded by family and friends, but not his clone. He has rebelled and written this book. The book on its cover has scribbles made by the clone in random patterns, thereby expressing its need to be original and new and exciting. The clone has also written words inside that are new and original, and will seem that way for some time to come. Auden said something about how author's should be dated by year. This will stick around as new in the mind well into October and therbye be a great example of a 2001 author and great 2001 clone. The words inside are new and freash, and will blow you away this year. Go and buy this new and exciting title.