Lemon

Rating:
Summary: the most pretentious thing I've read in a while
Review: What can I say about this odd little tome?

It is "the story of one's possession." Wendell is a young gen x-er in love with a lemon. His life as memo writer for the payroll department of an obsessive corporation is transformed when his girlfriend, Marge, leaves him, and in that post-relationship state of angst he begins to carry around a lemon.

The conceit works best when his obsession is in the "I just like to carry it around" stage (his embarrassed refusal - his inability to explain it, his own over-reaction to the whole situation - to let a co-worker use it in her tea), and when Wendell encounters situations that would be plausible but for the fruit (bringing the lemon to meet his parents: "-- Does it talk to you? -- Mom, it's a lemon.").

After a while, though, it gets a bit silly, including stylistically. The changing point of view is fine, but Krauser's eschewal quotation marks in favour of dashes, was irritating when Joyce did it, and it's irritating here. It (along with Krauser's penchant for wordplay) also makes one wonder if the entire book isn't intended as Joycean parody: making an epic out of a fruit instead of a Dublin day? oh, please, spare us that.

What begins as a plausible (if off-beat) story suffers from an excess of flourishes. I will confess here a general fondness for the off-beat-but-everday stuff over the outright wacky. Just as in Perv: A Love Story I liked the first part, where nothing really happened (having been sent home from boarding school, disaffected teen skulks around his mother's apartment building). That I liked. But the second part, the sex drugs and rock'n'roll road trip part, that part bored me. But I digress.

Maybe it's just a matter of taste that I prefer the inter-office memos and disjointed limericks that Wendell trades with his co-worker Michelle, but the nine pages of verse stuck in the middle of the book just strikes my as try-hard. A paragraph opener like "Eye to eye in the morning sun. Cougar, doe, stone pharaoh" is pointless, unilluminating, and reeks of teen poetics. It stops being a book and turns into a creative-writing exercise.

I mean, he had me! Krauser had me believing in lemon-love, and then he went and ruined it by getting all arty.

It feels like Krauser lost his way, like he painted himself into a corner and his only escape was to jump out the window. I am reminded of an interview I saw with filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler; he tried to make a "serious" movie once, but got bored half way through and turned his two main characters into caped crusaders. That sort of device may work in the world of ultra-silly b-movies. In the arena of avant-garde lit, it strains the credulity even of someone as credulous as myself.

Rating:
Summary: Light, charming, funny,
Review: What first intrigued me about this book is that the author actually drew by hand all 10,000 first-run covers. Mine has a doodle of a cityscape resting atop a face, with the title and author stamped on it. Then I read the synopsis and had to buy it. This book is about a man, Wendell, who falls in love with a lemon. I thought for a while that there would be deeper meaning-perhaps it's really about the nature of love, or the difficulty of loving in a lonely world. And although the book shows love as difficult and lonely, I think any inference that the book is "about" either of these things comes from the reader looking for meaning. It's simply a book about a man who falls in love with a lemon. And although there are some beautifully poetic chapters about lemons throughout, the best chapters are the ones that deal with the everyday difficulties of loving a lemon. When he tells his less-than-accepting parents. When the lemon begins to rot. When he's laid off and told that it's not discrimination, because discrimination requires the victim to belong to a group by which they are defined and then discriminated by, and that Wendell has no group-he is a lone, lemon-loving freak. Wonderful stuff. And it's fun to tell people, when they ask what your book's about, that it's about a guy who falls in love with a lemon.

Rating:
Summary: Peerless citrus
Review: yellow like the dawn, cool as the wind, sweet as a citrus flake. this book burns like the lemon's acid, into your senses and leaves a brand. like nothing else between two covers. read this book and be blown skyward like a tower of water. sink deep into it and Krauser's brilliant writing, so brilliant that people were terrified to publish it. Truth in his words. this book is perfect like an afternoon nap.

Rating:
Summary: Sensation
Review: yellow like the dawn, cool as the wind, sweet as a citrus flake. this book burns like the lemon's acid, into your senses and leaves a brand. like nothing else between two covers. read this book and be blown skyward like a tower of water. sink deep into it and Krauser's brilliant writing, so brilliant that people were terrified to publish it. Truth in his words. this book is perfect like an afternoon nap.