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A review by george_salis
Dra– by Stacey Levine
3.0
Draga? Dragoslava? Dragomira? Draupadi? Draupneer? Drametha? Dravini? Drakshayini? Draco? Dracula?
Whether from bureaucratic censorship or acknowledgment of an unfinished persona, the protagonist’s name is cut short throughout the entirety of this brief book. The plot is as simple as the prose: Dra— is trying to find a job, though her willingness to even get one fluctuates between determined and desperate to docile and disobedient. Wandering through a labyrinthine employment center with gymnasium bathrooms and infinite roofs, the parallels to Kafka are obvious, but I also was put in mind of The Little Prince, because during her claustrophobic and docked odyssey, Dra— encounters various broken adults stuck in their own absurd purgatories, and they too have a kind of planetary isolation. One of the final adults Dra— comes across is a child studying to be a nurse, a parental paradox that, like the dead-inside obsession of finding a meaningless job for the sake of finding a meaningless job, is the result of a capitalist society.
Speaking of purgatories, I’ve been encountering more than a few books with this time-strangulated, repetitive tic lately, similar yet distinctive bardos including The Song of Percival Peacock, Spanking the Maid, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters, and some of the stories in David Vardeman’s An Angel of Sodom. Vardeman’s spirit is also heavily in the vein of the Kafkaesque but his prose is a notch or two more accomplished than Levine’s. Dra— has an avalanche of adverbs and I recall someone saying once that if you want to make your character sound insane, riddle their speech with adverbs, although in this case the narrative is third person. And but so I gave Levine beneficial doubt about this…artistic choice of such uglily repeating adverbs, yet a couple of sentences were truly overburdened by them and most of the time they negatively drew attention to the prose and by the end of it I was sickly seeing them. Here are the adverbs from a single page (keep in mind the pages are small and with sizeable font): “powerfully” “closely” “enjoyably” “quietly” “nearly” “mechanically” “crookedly” “generally” “only” “anxiously” “loudly” and another “loudly”
Rather than a short novel, this is a long story, monophonic as it is, and even early on I was thinking, maybe she’d end up becoming a maid, allowing me to mentally stitch this story to Coover’s Spanking the Maid, another short novel that’s in truth a long story, and then the coincidence of coming across this sentence: “…Dra— mentioned flirtingly that once, long ago, she had labored as a maid.”
Overall, the absurd surrealism in this little book is subtle, tame even, and the prose is safe and, unsatisfyingly, the ending of Dra— is just an abrupt sto—
Whether from bureaucratic censorship or acknowledgment of an unfinished persona, the protagonist’s name is cut short throughout the entirety of this brief book. The plot is as simple as the prose: Dra— is trying to find a job, though her willingness to even get one fluctuates between determined and desperate to docile and disobedient. Wandering through a labyrinthine employment center with gymnasium bathrooms and infinite roofs, the parallels to Kafka are obvious, but I also was put in mind of The Little Prince, because during her claustrophobic and docked odyssey, Dra— encounters various broken adults stuck in their own absurd purgatories, and they too have a kind of planetary isolation. One of the final adults Dra— comes across is a child studying to be a nurse, a parental paradox that, like the dead-inside obsession of finding a meaningless job for the sake of finding a meaningless job, is the result of a capitalist society.
Speaking of purgatories, I’ve been encountering more than a few books with this time-strangulated, repetitive tic lately, similar yet distinctive bardos including The Song of Percival Peacock, Spanking the Maid, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters, and some of the stories in David Vardeman’s An Angel of Sodom. Vardeman’s spirit is also heavily in the vein of the Kafkaesque but his prose is a notch or two more accomplished than Levine’s. Dra— has an avalanche of adverbs and I recall someone saying once that if you want to make your character sound insane, riddle their speech with adverbs, although in this case the narrative is third person. And but so I gave Levine beneficial doubt about this…artistic choice of such uglily repeating adverbs, yet a couple of sentences were truly overburdened by them and most of the time they negatively drew attention to the prose and by the end of it I was sickly seeing them. Here are the adverbs from a single page (keep in mind the pages are small and with sizeable font): “powerfully” “closely” “enjoyably” “quietly” “nearly” “mechanically” “crookedly” “generally” “only” “anxiously” “loudly” and another “loudly”
Rather than a short novel, this is a long story, monophonic as it is, and even early on I was thinking, maybe she’d end up becoming a maid, allowing me to mentally stitch this story to Coover’s Spanking the Maid, another short novel that’s in truth a long story, and then the coincidence of coming across this sentence: “…Dra— mentioned flirtingly that once, long ago, she had labored as a maid.”
Overall, the absurd surrealism in this little book is subtle, tame even, and the prose is safe and, unsatisfyingly, the ending of Dra— is just an abrupt sto—