Andreas Schroeder — The Late Man [1972]

Sometimes I want a book to bewitch. Sometimes I want a book to beguile. Sometimes I want a book to blast me from the consumerist coma into which I have slumped. Sometimes, most times, I want a book to bemuse. Sometimes I want to be reminded that existence is a nightmarish stumble through one bewildering scenario after another and that the absurd charade our carbon-based forms endure is to be treated with snickering scorn and amusement. The stories in this slight collection of surreal fiction from a Canadian man meets these requirements. Most of the narrators speak in the same flat confused manner and most of the stories slide past without making much impact upon one’s recall (a second skim-thru was required for the purposes of writing this), however, this is not the intention of such fiction. At the moment of reading these, sat up in bed with the blinds closed to the Scottish equivalent of summer sunlight (an achromatic cover of drab clouds), I entered the mesmeric drift of absurd and cruel life—from the musings on technique in ‘The Painter’, to the ominous disruptions in ‘The Pub’, to the absence of a notable hole in ‘The Roller Rink’, to the hammering in the kitchen in ‘The Past People’, these twelve vignettes reveal more about existence in subtler ways than a dozen heffalump tomes and hectoring sagas. In the perfect farce of ‘The Connection’, Mr. Derringer’s name is misheard so often during a sequence of connecting trips, the nature of his business is morphed and his whole life is stolen into sabotage. In the playlet ‘The Freeway’, Magda and her grandfather embark on a futile quest to the Revell River, their purpose or motives never revealed, with their mutual desperation to complete the quest the one driving desire. And in ‘The Theft’, an irate man whose suspicious of trespassing are flipped upon discovering he is the trespasser, and has nothing. The drift of life: where are we, what are we doing there, how did we end up there, and what, sweet Jesus, is the point of our being there, or here, or anywhere at all? How after so long on the planet did we end up sharing a bungalow in Skegness with a retired sailor and his cancerous Alsatian, or working for a mafia-run self-help book publisher in Des Moines, or [insert your own dire circumstances here]? This collection succeeds not in disturbing the comfortable, nor comforting the disturbed, but in disturbing the disturbed. You and me. We need fictions that prod us from our self-made cocoons of alienation and force us to confront the wider world of alienation and mania several feet from our doorsteps. Upon completing The Late Man, I stepped from the bedroom and out into the Scottish sunshine (torrential rain). I walked towards the river in a trance, nothing but the random prattle of aimless thoughts on constant transmit in my head. And I revelled in the chaos. And smiled. Then frowned at the pointless act of my smiling.

Editions:

Hardback, The Sono Nis Press, 1972.

Bibliography: 

Novels:
Toccata in ‘D’: A Micro-Novel, 1984, Oolichan Books. 
Dustship Glory, 1986, Doubleday.
Renovating Heaven, 2008, Oolichan Books. 

Short Fiction:
The Late Man, 1972, The Sono Nis Press. 
The Eleventh Commandment, 1990, Thistledown Press.