Evan S. Connell's "Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel" is the strangest book I have read in 20 or so years. Epic, but in a modern or post-modern sense; fragmented, yet cohesive; deeply allusive and lateral-minded. (I felt quite at home, though I don't quite know what it adds up to or if addition is the proper sequencing. A record, an indictment, of humanity, at the least.)
Imagine if Melville's Ishmael had written Marlowe's Doctor Faustus? Imagine if Cervantes had written Pound's Personae or The Cantos? Imagine if the Archpoet of Cologne and an astrophysicist teamed up to write Eliot's The Waste Land in 243 pages? Would Joyce describe -- and delineate -- Connell as an amateur, imitator, or brother?
I felt narrative tension, a pressing forward, so much so that I don't want to quote out of context, and yet Connell gives us 243 pages of accretion undivided by parts or chapters. Amazing. Did Connell create that (my default) or am I such a perfect reader here that I imposed order and momentum upon chaos?
If chaos is the point, then how I answer that last question truly matters.
