IndieReader review:
A picaresque novella charting the dissolute and decadent journey of an aspiring writer and his personal obsessions.
Opening in Berlin before shifting to Venezuela, Paris, and New York, Alan Fishbone’s ANIMAL is a first-person episodic novella built from the travails and self-obsessions of an aspiring writer as he drifts amongst the demimonde of struggling artists, sex workers, and rakish intellectuals. It’s a world of bohemian bars, cocaine, and casual sex. As referenced by the book’s subtitle, “Notes from a Labyrinth,” and its cover illustration, the protagonist can be seen as the minotaur: half-human, half-animal, intellect and instinct in conflict, trapped and looking for a light to guide him through the maze of his life.
Alan is a struggling writer, plugging away at a new book that he admits to having already grown tired of. That this narrator shares the same name as the author is perhaps more symbolic self-insertion than a suggestion that this is in any way an autobiographical text. Either way, Fishbone’s authorial voice shifts and vibrates until the reader’s perception of this presented narrative text and the awareness of the external creation of that text begin to blur. Indeed, the narrator dismissively refers to the book’s title as merely an anagram—“Animal is I’m Alan”—without being explicit as to whether he is referring to the book he is writing or the one in which he is appearing. Another meta-textual moment arrives where Alan, when discussing his book with the Berlin artist Dieter, says “I’ll probably put this conversation in it, even though at this point you’re still a semi-fictional character. I’m not sure I can use you yet.”
These literary conundrums elevate Fishbone’s work beyond the otherwise somewhat-familiar escapades of a doomed anti-hero wallowing in self-pity and self-medicating with drink and drugs. Ironically, this elevation is also accomplished through the enthusiastic and committed dedication to exploring the narrator-author’s obsessions with bodily fluids. Most particularly excreta—since it only takes the first few pages for a coffee pot to explode in his Berlin apartment, as if “some malignant troll had sprayed the whole place with hot, gritty diarrhea.” Then he examines the design of the toilet in the same apartment with its “shit-shelf,” a horizontal ledge at the back of the bowl on which a user’s turd is caught to allow inspection before being flushed away. This could serve as a metaphor for the book’s approach as a whole: Alan is looking inside himself, and is not afraid to dig around in the dirt to seek out his truth.
Later he states, “In a way, this whole book is kind of an anal expulsion, without much structure or purpose, just trying to entertain with some of life’s digested residues. A necessary self-indulgence masquerading as a gift.” And, again, whether this is the voice of Alan the narrator or Fishbone the author is open to interpretation.
Fishbone has worked both as a professor of Classics and a translator, and there are numerous diversions into the Classics—including a long section on Catallus. While these are interesting in their own way, they have a tendency to shift the perspective too far from the narrator’s more base perceptions. Overall, the philosophizing seems to be coming less from Alan the character, edging towards erudite showboating from author Fishbone.
IR Verdict: Boldly experimental in form, yet with enough narrative drive to hold the reader’s attention, ANIMAL: Notes from a Labyrinth is a refreshingly challenging read. Author Alan Fishbone’s meta-textual, frequently scatological novella will linger long in the memory of those bold enough to enter its labyrinth.
U.S. Review of Books:
Book review by Mari Carlson
“In a way this whole book is kind of an anal expulsion, without much structure or purpose, just trying to entertain with some of a life’s digested residues.”
Fishbone’s work begins and ends with accidents: first, a coffee stain on a sublet apartment wall, and last, the accidental ending of a book. The symmetry suggests that this is no accident or coincidence. Rather, it shows the book’s playful purpose. It spills, tricks, and moves on. Just when two chapters seem to build up one storyline, the next changes direction. The book employs a plethora of comparisons.
For example, the story of painting over the initial coffee stain is succeeded by an invitation for Fishbone to be painted by an artist. The painter’s tragic love story is set alongside the author’s. Fishbone’s childlessness relates to the loss of the painter’s child. They both devolve into unintended messes using cocaine in their grief. The author wonders how the painter’s country, Germany, compares morally to his (America). Plagues of then and now are compared. While these parallels don’t provide convergence or direction to the narrative, they succeed in expanding and deepening its scope. The book doesn’t travel forward so much as inward, asking big questions that have been pondered throughout time about humanity’s purpose. Just as the painter asks Fishbone to sit for a portrait, the author’s book invites readers to look into their own souls.
Part novel, part essay, part travelogue of trips to Europe, New York, and South America, the book is also a letter addressed to Fishbone’s lover, referred to as “you.” The writer looks into his own soul with brutal, crude honesty and asks the same of “you.” Toggling between erudition and sexual fetishes and violence, the narrative is hard to stomach, beautiful, forgiving, and tender in equal measure, much the same way as looking in a mirror is liable to feel. Fishbone’s work is a courageous, curious, and experimental example for “you” to follow.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review
https://www.theusreview.com/reviews-1/Animal-by-Alan-Fishbone.html
