Customer Reviews

Still Life in Motion

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Brijbasi doesn't miss a thing. He knows how many eyelashes the waitress from Tuesday's lunch has. And he will tell you. And you will believe him.

Still Life In Motion is relentless high art. It's the literary equivalent of a bullet that's learned to turn corners. Brijbasi's wordplay, and use of language and form are at once expert and completely mad-but mad the way Finnegan's Wake was mad, or Paul Bowles, or William Burroughs. It's an invigorating madness. It's almost a new form of writing. It's almost cubist. But it is, without doubt, an excellent and relentless work of art.

There is simply nobody else writing like Brijbasi in the world today, as far as one can tell. His is a unique and miraculous talent to spin surreal stories that are at once as laugh-out-loud funny as a Woody Allen spiel, and as haunting and luminous as a painting by Balthus. Almost any of the pieces could be read as a prose poem. Every page in the book holds something wonderful, that I might name 'essence of question' - the type of inspired writing that positively refreshes the brain and sets its higher powers of thought racing. Dazzling, hilarious, daring, uncompromising, and he makes it all seem so easy. If you like Bunuel films, Chagall paintings, books by John Berger, and laughing your head off - you'll love this. Guaranteed.

This is a group of very short stories, practically vignettes, on a variety of subjects.

A husband discovers that his wife is a shoplifter. A man walks into a hospital, asking for a refill on brain, or a new one, then discovers that he likes playing dead. Another piece consists of excerpts from unwritten novels. In a room across the street is a large, blue balloon that seems to float on its own. A married couple are living in a apartment with a picture of a tiger on the wall, which turns into a love-letter affair between a man named Stanislau Verbinsky and a woman named Elizabeth. After years of work, a man introduces a new punctuation mark called the rhetorical question mark. Imagine a pair of play-by-play announcers watching an author typing at a keyboard.

Those who like "modern" writing, where stories are told in broad strokes, with little or no background information, will enjoy these stories. On the other hand, those who like their fiction with character development, storyline, climax and all those English Literature terms, should consider looking elsewhere.