Apikoros Sleuth

Back from Toronto (never got into TO itself, the only free day turning out to be the day of the TTC’s wild-cat strike) but remained stuck on York campus. Much excellent time spent with my room mate, the poet-novelist-translator-playwright Robert Majzels. What a treat that man is! A true nomad traveller in life, languages & literatures. I have been reading in, at, through, around his “novel” Apikoros Sleuth (published by The Mercury Press) for the last couple days, (& heard him read from it at the York reading): a veritable delight, food for eye & intelleto. One of the true ex-centric texts of these last years. It is a murder mystery in the form (and “form” here also literally applies to the shape of the text in the book) of a Talmudic inquiry. As the blurb puts it: “In an unlikely and extraordinary combination of genres the author weaves together over the surface of each page a breath-taking whodunnit, a poetic exploration of the limits of language, and a philosophical inquiry on the terrain of ethics, issues of life, death, guilt and community.”

FROM Apikoros Sleuth:

Before we were narrative, we were boots and vertigo. We leapt across a canyon of traffic. We flung ourselves into the net of language. A horse was an inch of music. Dogs danced, wings gathered rock. Now we are the small brown pigtail of a mystery trailing behind its solution. We pour murder out of a tenement and lay the limp and soggy rag of story in the street.