Kamby Bolongo Mean River, Robert Lopez’s hypnotic second novel, is the story of a young man whofinds himself confined and under observation, the subject of seemingly pointless tests. His only link to the outside world is a telephone that will not dial out. During the occasional calls he receives, usually wrong numbers, the narrator remembers his former life growing up in Injury, Alaska with his Mother, an often unemployed single parent, and his older brother, Charlie, a sometime boxer, sometime actor. Throughout the course of this extraordinary novel, the unwilling captive draws his life-story in stickfigures on the walls. From the difficulty of his birth, to his sickly childhood, to adventures with his brother, the narrator depicts his crazy life, which is at once fascinating and heartbreaking. The one memory that haunts him is that of watching a movie about slaves on television and how that one slave, the one for whom Kamby Bolongo Mean River meant freedom, would never relinquish the idea of returning home. Darkly hilarious with a crushing emotional impact, Kamby Bolongo Mean River is a brilliant study of familial bonds and trauma, isolation and captivity, hope and hopelessness.
“Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.”—Sam Lipsyte,author ofHome Land
“In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Calmative’ and Gordon Lish’s Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez’s new novel gets under your skin and latches on.”—Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain
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Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World, a novel from Calamari Press. His fiction and poetry has appeared in dozens of journals, including; Bomb, The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Blackbird, Nerve, etc. He teaches at The New School in New York City.
Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and a collection of stories, Asunder. He has taught at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University and is a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Fiction.
I was immediately pulled into the narrative of this story, and became more intrigued as the story unfolded. As one of the earlier reviewers already mentioned, the narrator is somewhat "unreliable," which is the brilliance of this story. The narrator seems to be coming from each reality AS he is currently inhabiting it, and how he WISHES it to be. I found myself SO SYMPATHETIC to the narrator by the end of the story, and felt the author, Robert Lopez, really IMMERSED US into the mind, soul and psyche of the narrator's Experience, Wishes, Fears, and Desperate Desires, and the narrator's Loss of and Identification with his Family, Charlie and Mother, and his struggle to Survive within those circumstances and Just Be.
Bravo! I look forward to reading MORE of Robert Lopez's work!
100% original novel from Rob Lopez. All I can say is go out, get it and read it. You will not be disappointed. Rob is writing incredible stuff with a completely unique style that no other author is coming remotely close to matching.
I really liked this one and the ejoyment becomes cumulative as you go along and progressively more information is revealed by the very disturbed and unreliable narrator.
I liked it a bit less than Lopez's first book, "Part of the World", however because the earlier work seems more original while the newer one shows maybe too much indebtedness to Gordon Lish.
Can't wait to see what Lopez comes up with next time around.
