Customer Reviews

Adrift in a Vanishing City

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'd never heard of this book or the author until I got a tip by e-mail. Once you read the preface it's not hard to figure out why. The major houses turned it down although one editor called it "hot-house writing-lyrical, Joycean, experimental." This book was a little too much for their conventional, market-minded tastes. As a Kerouac connisseur whose read just about all of Jack's books, I couldn't resist checking out a contemporary writer cast out by the mainstream. The first time I read "Adrift in a Vanishing City" I was stunned. Almost as soon as I turned the last page I went back to the first and the second time through I stood back with the same amazement but a lot more understanding.

While most of the reviews dwell on the ethereal beauty of Czyz's writing, it's dream-like qualities, it's mythical feel and the collage of imagery that layer the narrative as if he were trying to use words to recreate the memory of a `small-time city' in Kansas, they seem to miss the gritty side. The characters include the town drunk, the town idiot, an ex-convict whose lines are as funny as they are obscene, a half-hearted Country Western singer who spends all of the money he hustles or earns on travel fare, a heroine addict in Paris, an Oxford-educated old man living in a squalid hotel in Mexico City and the town insomniac whose main occupation seems to be walking the streets in the early morning hours.

The writing itself, when it's not burrowing worm holes in our complacent points of view, is often concrete enough you could pave a street with it as when Czyz writes, "A light turns red in quiet enough to hear the metallic click." Or, "...the still-life of beer bottles (glossed with yellow light) and ashtray with crushed white butts (like tiny untended bones) on the table in Farley's Tavern ..." or "...I am no better off than a dead leaf, a discarded snapshot curling at the corners, swept end over end down deserted streets, the edges of cities even continents apart always the same near dawn-scattered bird twitters, shadows turning their slow pirouette into brick and stone, the same cold blue-of-drowned lips appearing in the sky ..."

When you get to the last story, a just about perfect recreation of Old Testament jargon, you'll at first be confused, wondering what this story, which apparently occurred thousands of years ago in ancient Palestine has to do with a prairie crooner and his drinking buddies. But by the time you figure it out, you also realize that the drift in these stories isn't just continental. It isn't just `galaxies sliding sideways' or drifting from lover to lover or even the drift of centuries, but has to do with another dimension entirely. Czyz is hooked in, just like Ginsberg and Kerouac were back in the fifties. "Adrift in a Vanishing City" is going to be an underground classic and in 10 years critics will be amazed that Czyz, who seems to have produced nothing in the two years since, labored in obscurity. Whatever you do, don't leave this page without buying it. And get your friends to buy it. That's how the underground works.

Someone suggested that I read Mr. Czyz's book. I got a hold of him and asked Mr. Czyz to autograph his book for me. He wrote, "Thanks for taking a chance". There is no chance to be taken here ladies and gentlemen, this is a sure bet.

The reader is taken on a dreamlike jouney through American country and exotic locals accompanied by unforgettable characters that will linger in the memory long after many great protagonists and accompanying players of lauded novels - both old and new - have been retired to the recesses of the mind. Mr. Czyz closes a sentence better than most novelists windup a chapter. Eat it up, taste it, over and over, again and again. Adrift in a Vanishing City will never disappear in the minds and hearts of readers who do as Mr. Czyz suggests and "Take a Chance". I did and i am sure glad of it. Mr. Czyz...thanks for the magic moments.

As its title promises, "Adrift in a Vanishing City" is a boldly beautiful and original collection of interwoven pieces, that defies conventional classification. Its beauty, an admixture of loveliness and mystery, of sensuality and spirituality, is of the kind commonly described as "haunting". It stirs up a part of your subconscious and allows it to float to the surface where it lingers and gives that pleasure mixed with pain which is the peculiar quality of dreams, of myth and especially of memory.

Each piece evokes a different character's point of view, fusing exterior and interior landscapes, crossing continents and consciences. It is all subtlely bound together by the narrative thread of the love between Zee Gee and Blue Jean Baby Queen. If you liked "The Sound and the Fury" you will love "Adrift".

The work is so metaphorically dense, the power of suggestion so rich, that you go back and reread whole passages just to savor the sensations they evoke.

This book may never be a "best-seller" (however much it deserves to be): no glib story-telling here, no facile sentimentality. While a well-written, plot-driven, conventional page-turner may provide a wonderfully pleasurable escape, "Adrift in a Vanishing City" pulls you into another level of consciousness that is just as compelling but deeper and more enduring.

Wilder Penfield, a turn-of-the-century neurosurgeon, called the mind the "undiscovered country." Mr Czyz, a fellow cartographer of the interior world, appears intent on mapping the province we call "memory."

In this binding of loosely-connected short stories, he blends cartography and introspection, facts as concrete as blood and philosophy abstract as dreams to delineate the bounds of the vanishing city. Is it Paris? Cairo? Pittsburg, Kansas? Lyndhurst, New Jersey? Or just that Erewhon that lurks in our hippocampi, triggering on the proper stimuli to drown us in rivers of nostalgia?

The stories follow the wanderings of Zirque Granges, lover, rover, and adventurer; and they trace out the web of personalities and cities he maps. As Delany points out in his prefatory note, there is precious little here of economy, of the politic, or the practical; set adrift from these moorings, what is left is the psychological and a touch of the picaresque - a ticket for a journey into mind, if one is like-minded.

I recommend this book without reservation, as a diverting and enthusiastic first foray by a young and slightly non-traditional writer.

"There is something of Virginia Woolf's toxic perfume, the tincture of bemused sadness, the glorying in the jewel-tones of the half-healed bruise, the thing that--in being left one-quarter undone--is therefore promising forever.
"The writer is in love with difficulty. The writer is forced to buy many magazine subscriptions that will never produce even the first month's issue. And yet this fiction is always listening, constantly forgiving, in love with the material world and it home-made, self-defensive talk-dat-talk genius.
"Behind the flash, there waits a patience.
"Beyond technique, we feel a wise heart, expecting little while hoping for everything. We find someone making, as all true artists do, a great deal from a little of everything.
"The seasick rodeo of `Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Queen' [the first story in Adrift in a Vanishing City] recalls a country and western ballad when you're newly drunk enough to hear it plain--without snobbism, without irony, without the upstaging tooth of self-pity. This tale recalls the very second with the Pain and the Bourbon go on a first-name basis, when the Pain and the Bourbon, buddies suddenly, start not just talking, but telling and telling unto that accidental byproduct and salvation we call Singing.
Here is a song to the weird sweetness behind loving the wrong person perfectly."
--Allan Gurganus, from the citation for the 1994 (Pirate's Alley) Faulkner Prize for Short Story

Read it. Loved it. Non-Linear. Imaginative. If that's your brand of vodka, run, don't walk, and get a copy...found mine on Amazon. I have been reading Vincent Czyz compositions since High School, they were unique and entertaining then. And no, I was not a teacher but a fellow student. I look forward to the release of his next work.

Stories are gardens. A harvest of what a person has to say. A.V.C. asks, What is the hare to your fox? Some writers will have this chase follow precise stepping stones through the literary landscape. Vincent Czyz is not one of those writers. He wants the reader to forget the cobble path all together; reminding me fondly of works like House Made Of Dawn by N. S. Momaday. Each writes in non-linear ways to draw the reader into the experience of the moment. Disconcerting to some, but not so for the readers who fancy themselves explorers. One reader, reliant on her own sense of direction, may find herself called to the lush wording in Czyz's book; another may ponder characters and their flaws and find himself sympathizing with the lesser of us and the lesser in us. The energetic reader with a symbolic guidebook in one hand, a myth compass in the other and a heart full of jazz will take notice of writing that bears fruits after it flowers. What is written is not only for the sake of being dashing and colorful but like flowers also symbolizes things greater than their beauty. If you are in the mood for a curious exploration into the historical, psychological, & mythological told in the vernacular of the bedroom and the barroom, chase this hare...

Dear Mr. Czyz:

I read your book and it is fantastic truly, if I could work this keyboard I'd add the correct fantastic symbols, I hope it will suffice to describe my reading it: I'm lounging around having no expectations of it being any good at all **sorry** after ten minutes I was unable to put it down, in 15 minutes my jaw was dropping, sometimes I'd just be on that temporal cruise and a line would stick and I found myself laughing out loud **rather loud** and for a long time slapping the ol' leg, sometimes I'd be nodding my head as if in agreement yep, yep that's the way it is ... sometimes crying (just a lil bit I'm not a baby), truly thank you for writing it, please write more ... keep up the marvelous work and I disagree with the editor who turned down your book, I think the world is ready for it.

If you have ever listend to a Beethoven sympathy or danced through the prose of James Joyce, or were mesmerized by the eye candy of Kirchner or Munch you will relive your joy with Adrift in a Vanishing City.

Mr. Czyz transports you into a realm of color and musical words that rise far about subject/context. This is truly the poetry of prose.

Mr. Czyz is a true intellectual.

Vincent....hurry up. give us more.

'Adrift in a Vanishing City' certainly has a lot going for it. The prose is fabulous, at times haunting, drawing you into a world that isn't always pleasant but is always engaging. I read this some years back and just recently was stimulated to open its pages once more. And I'm so glad I did. Adrift is written in a style you don't easily find in modern writers, its prose deep, lyrical, moving. What makes this collection of great value is that these stories won't fail to strike a chord and live with you long after you place this, lovingly, on your shelf. Highly recommended.