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Fra Keeler (2012)

af Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingOmtaler
593439,574 (3.5)4
The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.… (mere)
  1. 00
    Rupert: A Confession af Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (bluepiano)
    bluepiano: In both books the interior lives of disturbed and, in the end, criminal narrators unfold. Both books are absorbing and both are excellent.
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You can make John Cage’s 4’33 seem interesting in theory, if you try, but it’s a boring experiment. Fra Keeler: same. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
I ordered Fra Keeler after reading about it on its publisher's site but before reading reviews of it, and I'm glad I did; some of the reviews give too much away, some make the novel sound too worthy or difficult to be enjoyable, and most would have forestalled my apparently eccentric conclusion that the narrator's problems were symptoms of a physical rather than emotional disorder.

A man buys a house in hopes that by living in it he will discover how the previous owner, Fra Keeler, died. He finds clues, he receives a strange parcel and mysterious phone calls, he takes a walk in a canyon, and in the end he's obliged to account for himself. Until a climactic event (an event which is handled beautifully but that seems to me at the least slightly discordnant) there's little action other than that. Most of the book comprises the man's thoughts about objects--a skylight, a 'yurt' (shed?), papers referring to Fra Keeler--and the people--a postman, an old woman, a visitor, all seemingly in league against him--he encounters and, especially, the chains of reasoning (perhaps sophistical, though they seemed to me logical) by which he determines, for example, that there is no present and that everything beyond the body's confines is death.

Throughout the book the narrator is disoriented by memory loss, dizziness, confusion, unexpected bouts of deep sleep, and possible episodes of blindness and aphasia. The author conveys a pervasive sense of that disorientation very well indeed: I stopped reading at one point to make a cup of tea and had my mug not been where I remembered putting it I might for a moment have panicked. Moreover, the writing is careful and smooth, the novel isn't without humour, the canyon walk is memorable, and Vliet Oloomi has taken an idea that an inferior writer might have made the basis for a lurid and ordinary book and developed it into a story that is subtle and thought-provoking. And it's very nice indeed to be able to wholeheartedly recommend a book from so tiny a press. ( )
  bluepiano | Feb 20, 2014 |
Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: Fiction. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow more strange, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.
BLURBS: "Obsessive. Surreal. Darkly comic. Chilling."--Robert Coover (!!!!!)
"Obsessive/delightful, FRA KEELER subtly elaborates on life's details, its ordinary lunacies. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's observations are droll and often hilarious. Her novel's incidents pile up and on, tilting and shifting under the weight of language's bizarre disturbances. FRA KEELER is wonderfully imaginative, the work of a terrific young writer."--Lynne Tillman
"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the descendent of writers as brilliant and disparate as Max Frisch, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Per Petterson. FRA KEELER is a compelling and humorously associative meditation on how 'one lives against one's dying, ' and how that living will be in contra-distinction to all that explains that death on paper after its fact. Would that more book groups read books of this complexity and intelligence; discussion would reach on into the wee hours!"--Michelle Latiolais
"In FRA KEELER a mind churns on itself, while reality--if it is reality--comes rushing at it with a strange stutter, everything a bit lost, a bit off, and ready to be ground up further by the uncertain perception of the narrator. This is a book by turns funny and strange, but always entertaining."--Brian Evenson

My Review: You will never see an endcap at your local Buns and Nubile featuring, or even including, this weird little bagatelle. It won't be piled in pyramids at the Costco. I'd even be surprised if it was among the Staff Picks at BookPeople, Austin's excellent indie megastore.

It's too weird to be a commercial force. It's a short work, so it's not likely to be used by the hoity-toity to display their Good Taste and Erudition. (Cloud Atlas, , I'm lookin' at you.) So who will buy and read this book?

Beats me all hollow, and I suspect the reason it was published by Dorothy, a publishing project, is right there. Who's the audience for this piece? Me? Not if I had to spend my very own personal sixteen United States dollars for it. Not one single damn chance of that happening. I got it from one of my rich county's libraries. (I am consistently astounded and delighted by the sheer variety and quantity of oddball stuff at least ONE library in the county system will buy. Often two or three. It's a pleasure to hit the catalog and request a weirdo book like this one, and three days later go and fetch it.)

But back to this weird little item. It's an interesting attempt to tell a mystery story via the stream of consciousness of a fractured identity apparently having occasional psychotic breaks. The mailman's hand turns into a lobster, the previous owner of a home has a magically shifting death certificate from two widely separated countries in Europe where it would seem we are not, the dust on the skylight comes in for some heavy narrative scrutiny....

Doesn't that sound like a corking way to spend an afternoon?

Strangely enough it is. Van der Vliet Oloomi—now it's time for me to confess that I got this book at all because the author's name makes me laugh until my sides hurt, and I love saying it out loud to unsuspecting housies, the dog, the librarian even and I go out of my way to avoid talking to the sourpusses at my library—is a young Iranian-American MFA-havin' writer whose sinuous sentences are a pleasure to slither alongside, and a more surprising and unexpected compliment I have yet to give.

ROBERT COOVER yes that's right ROBERT COOVER, he who created the uberbrilliant book The Public Burning which if you haven't read don't confess your turpitude to me just go fix it by reading it, praises the book! A writer I had never heard of compares Van der Vliet Oloomi (heh) to Max Frisch...I can't even pronounce “Latiolais” and had never heard of her either, so I ordered up her collection of short fiction Widow: Stories and must say that I owe Van der Vliet Oloomi a huge debt of gratitude for introducing me to this terrific talent...he of the awful, misogynistic novel Montauk and the impenetrably ironic, archly “comic” I Am Not Stiller, which would cause me personally to go find this Latiolais person and belt her one if it were MY book she was insulting that way.

So the blurbs kinda-sorta made me do it. Tillman, Evenson, okay okay I'll read it I'll read it already. And I'm glad that I did, because now I'll be on the lookout for whatever Van der Vliet Oloomi comes out with next. She's got something to say. That makes her interesting to me. I hope to you, too.

But $16? I know that it's not that much money in the cosmic scheme of things, but as I'm not made of money (I appear to be made of anti-money judging by my bank balance which I don't have as I don't have enough money to keep in a bank according to the banks), I would not have made a purchase. Should I recommend that you make the purchase?

Only if $16 is less than nothing to you. Otherwise ask the library to ILL it. ( )
1 stem richardderus | Dec 16, 2012 |
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The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most often to hideous conclusions.

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