Hymns To Millionaires

179 PAGES, TWISTED SPOON PRESS

Time is consciousness. Time is identity. Time is who an "I" is, and Time is everything you want it to be. Canadian-born and Poland-based writer Soren Gauger evidently wants Time to be the sole character and narrator of his first full-length collection of short fiction, Hymns to Millionaires. To be sure, characters appear in these 11 stories, individuals with names and at least a hope at a history and a tomorrow: men who love women, men who love home, men who encounter foreignness, philosophy and games.

Their tales are told by a maniacally arrested, manipulated, wrested-from-disaster and parodied present, which is merely the meeting-point of any-if not all-possible pasts and futures. Call it the Eternal Return of fiction, and Nietzsche might not have disagreed. While this disjointed narrative approach might sound high and rarified, precious and post, it works and works well. Hymns is less an encyclopedia of structuralist or post-structuralist narrative devices than it is an adumbration of the fragmented individual who can't tell if he's coming or going, a man or a waiter or a rodent, a philosopher or just a misanthrope and maybe, in the end, he just doesn't want to. Doesn't care.

Of course, there are precedents. The influence of Danilo Kis is evident in the playful irony of the language and the clipped and sometimes circular forms of the narratives; Witold Gombrowicz also joins in the Hymns' chorus with a dark joy that unites in some of the stories with a French rigor reminiscent of early Harry Matthews, Roussel and other members of the Oulipo group. The registers of all these writers-and the European literatures they lived in-mingle in the purgatory of Gauger's prose to form a style that ranges from the cartoonified to the archaic in an attempt to disorient the complacent reader from fictional traditions and historical schools and to orient him instead toward a temporal no man's land. A place where carnies and counts, bowties and Zen tearooms, airplanes and 17th-century astronomy exist as much as they relate to one another in a mad and maddening dash through as many modes of being as any I can ever hope to be.