The most unlikely life of a most unsightly man. Marc Estrin discovers that another writer's novel-THE NOSE- not only has spawned a bizarre cult among the nation's youth but also is based on the extraordinary life of a real person-an outcast named Alexei Pigov. Estrin searches Alexei out and ask him to provide annotations to THE NOSE. Alexei says that-although the events of the novel might, for the most part, be real-the purported reasons for them are all damnable lies. On the left-hand page of The Annotated Nose we read THE NOSE itself, and take in its beautifully unsettling illustrations by Delia Robinson. On the right-hand page we follow Alexei's complaints-always surprising and often farreaching. The layers in Estrin's remarkable comic book are as multiple, eclectric, and outrageous as the sequence of mask Alexei wears to hide his face from the world over the caroming trajectory of hie most unlikely life. The Annotated Nose is at once Marc Estrin's most playful and most ambitious work to date.
Marc Estrin is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont.
OR
Marc Estrin's world line approximates a cross between a fungal mycelium and a Rube Goldberg device. Biologist, theater director, EMT, Unitarian minister, physician assistant, puppeteer, political activist, college professor, cellist and conductor, he is baffling, even unto himself.
OR, Alternative:
Marc Estrin was hired to teach theater at Goddard College, but in this departmentless utopia, wound up also teaching music, writing, Finnegans Wake, math, physics, medical self-help and "crazy courses" like Philosophy for Dishwashers, an audio-based lecture/discussion series to sweeten the life of cafeteria volunteers. Such are the fruits of liberal education.
OR, Even more alternative:
Marc Estrin grew up in a small apartment so full of books you had to walk sideways in the hall. Of these, he read not one -- till age sixteen, when he gave up his literary virginity to Franz Kafka: The Trial was his introduction to the larger life. This explains much. A mediocre student in high school, he was teased by his father into reading The Magic Mountain during the summer before college. Epiphany! The book was for him a topo-map of western thought and culture. With Mann as his guide, he sailed through college and grad schools, making a Hegelian leap out of graduate science into the richer, if iffier area of the arts. The Vietnam war and Bertolt Brecht were his siren callers into political activity, and his professional theater work dissipated into organizing, college teaching and communal living. When these ceased to put food on the table, he reached back into a past life to study and practice medicine. With the computer came the possibility of writing without retyping -- a stimulus sufficient to have resulted in his current crop of manuscripts, published and unpublished.
