David Kuhnlein. Die Closer To Me. Merigold Independent. 2023. 171 pages.
Die Closer To Me is a slim novella but a considerably large jigsaw puzzle that needs to be reread to see in greater detail where the pieces interlock. A novella-in-stories, as the back cover reads, the book is a literary sci-fi tale comprised of thirteen short stories that have tantalizing overlaps. Blink and you might miss the slivers of the Venn diagrams where one story interfaces with another. This is not to suggest this is a design flaw; rather, it is a spring-loaded mechanism which unleashes its potential energy and sends the reader back to the beginning of the book to put it all back together again.
Plot-wise, it’s a little unclear — chopped into chunks as it is — but the central mass of the story seems to concern another planet named Süskind which has existed unseen in our solar system and which has become home for a vast experimental home base for people with disabilities. Indeed, medical ailments and their treatments form the background scrim against which the story is told. Or untold. Narrative canvases are painted and arranged into triptychs or tetraptychs (?) that may not be delivered in sequential order. Like an artwork not meant to be taken in in a linear fashion, the stories allude to one another through revealed names, bags of drugs, Buddhist texts, hyper-developed senses of smell, photographs, motorized wheelchairs, and other incidental details and clues with interrelated matrices that don’t vex the reader (at least they did not me) but give a pleasurable teasing sensation. It’s a book to be reread and taken apart and fitted back together for fun.
The prose style of the book should be mentioned as on first reading (there will be more than one) it is the real star of the show which upstages everything else, including plot and character. Not that those are lacking. But Kuhnlein has shown himself to be a poet and a skilled weaver of lyrical, surprising linguistic units. Much care was put into paragraphs such as this description of an Earth-bound psyop to re-scramble domesticated dogs for nefarious purposes (it has to do with Süskind, I promise):
“Spontaneity is regarded with suspicion. The result of a universal love based on abstract principles is meaningless since any extreme contains its opposite. Too much love becomes hate. Project House Dog didn’t anticipate that dogs would become cognizant of what they’d lost, or what might happen when they did. After a while, eunuchs thank those who sever them from time-consuming and pointless arousal. Imagine the potency of a reverse orgasm spilling backwards against the sense organs, bittersweetness increasing by the bite. Lying with a proper muse can rebuild an inner banquet in minutes. By way of encrypted audio files hidden in DOG TV videos on YouTube, dogs were reprogrammed with their original fertility and virility, as well as their predatory instincts. These dog-friendly messages slipped under the radar, unheard by human ears, spraying across a sky of satellites, scrambling themselves into domesticated tissue.”
Dogs activated by YouTube videos as if Manchurian candidates or sentient masks in Halloween III: Season of the Witch are just some of the fiendish creations in Kuhnlein’s novel. Homicidal bounty hunters, psychopathic anesthesiologists aboard interplanetary spacecraft making jaunts to the disability planet, dangerous insects, Buddhist cults — all are found there and yet they seem to transcend genre fetters as we might imagine them and are instead written about with delicacy and inner penetration. The literary/genre divide is straddled and, in many instances, smashed as thoroughly as a marble bust by an iconoclast, if only to have the pieces reconfigured into some new pattern that retains some allusive hints of the old: it is sci-fi, with the trappings and atmospherics but the speculation and imagination are taken into fresh directions.
It’s dark, it’s cyberpunk, it’s as fleshy as Cronenberg’s most outlandish charcuterie board. It’s alive, it’s menacing, but in addition to that it’s sensitive and human writing. It’s a spiritual act to go among these broken people and glitching relationships and to reflect that in the distant future Buddhist concerns — the freeing of material from disappointment and suffering — will still be on people’s lips. The natural order of things is probed, lanced, massaged, and bombarded with mutagens under Kuhnlein’s pen.
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