Walkups

By Lance Blomgren

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 189499437X
• ISBN13: 9781894994378
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Conundrum Pr
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.1" x 0.5" x 4.3"

Customer Reviews

Living Apartments

Blomgren's writing is honed and spontaneous, his plundering deft enough that the ideas always seem entirely his own. Used in un-obvious ways, Blomgren's sources (in particular Polanski's film The Tenant, based on the Roland Topor novel) seem somehow more relevant. In this case, the unnamed, troubled narrator -- navigating a central story identified with a specific address (Apt. D'Amours) -- inherits a sense of the psychological weight of a place rather than the personality traces of its former occupant. Blomgren's central character starts a vaguely distant affair with Jane, a biology grad student who conducts experiments by candlelight. He clears something unmentionable out of a widow's garburetor. He learns another neighbour's kids have discovered a way to run the microwave with the door open and are giving themselves hallucinations by zapping their heads on the defrost setting. As with most good writers, the perception is that Blomgren knows more than other people. Perhaps it's just that he reveals more of what he knows -- about others and himself -- especially in the skilfully imagined, unconnected vignettes that interrupt the central story. In a chapter entitled "2120 Clark," which in 200 words fully imagines an overwhelmed mother vexed by a line of black insects trailing through a hole in her door, Blomgren sells it all with the stray detail of a phone that "stops ringing long enough to hear the toaster pop in the other room." Similarly, in one of the Apt. D'Amours sequences, the narrator awakes in a kind of familiar post-coital funk, unsure whether Jane has recently been with him or he's just dreamt it: "When I woke up this morning Jane wasn't in bed. Somehow the condom had stayed on. Surprised how strong the room smelled of sweat and stale air, considering I'd been immersed in it. A flickering image: Jane on her hands and knees, checking out her ass in the hall mirror, grinning: 'What's the big deal? I don't get it.'" Those inclined to view poetic language as vague (rather than distilled) and prose as concrete (rather than limited) should take a good look at Walkups. Blomgren has created a credible narrative of loss, paranoia and psychological collapse against a panoramic swirl of poetically rendered human detail. In the process, he's also pulled off one of the most impressive literary debuts of the year.