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The Life of Bartholomew G.
Vive le Franz
Bartholomew G. sometimes feels more like a fictitious character than a human being. A chronic disappointment to his medical doctor father, the central character in Ernest Hekkanen's 35th book, The Life of Bartholomew G (New Orphic, $18), is a lowly ESL teacher who has legally changed his name from Bartholomew Gustafson to echo the Kafkaesque character known as K.
Having received his B.A. from Simon Fraser University in the late '60s, the chronically self-analytical 'Mewgi' has increasingly identified with Franz Kafka, the subject of his chronically unfinished thesis. When told he couldn't legally adopt the single letter G. for a surname, first he altered his last name to Ge, then made the 'e' smaller and smaller until it finally became a period."I've come to think it isn't good enough to simply study Kafka,"; he tells a friend. "In a manner of speaking, to better know him, one must become the man.";
Bartholomew is a self-elected defender of the great writer against the arrogance and stupidity of other intellectuals and assorted nincompoops. During a three-hour period of G's life, while he prepares to go to work at his part-time job at the Avant Gardener, he stews in his litany of humiliations, frustrations and fears.
Alienated from his drug-addicted son and a feminist ex-wife who has long since surpassed him in academe, our pathetic anti-hero remains obsessed with the physical minutae of his body and his tiny Kitsilano apartment while clinging to sexual memories of an absent Finnish girlfriend. His brilliant sister, from whom he is forced to borrow money, likes to send greeting cards portraying him in demeaning situations--and now she is coming to the Avant Gardener to take his photo in his shop assistant attire.
That's the gist of Hekkanen's disturbing and amusing portrait of an obsessive wise man who stumbles through life like a fool. Bartholomew G. jumps back and forth between self-loathing to self-aggrandizement like a literary hybrid of Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman. "He was no longer capable of concentrating with the single-mindedness of a cat about to pounce on a mouse," Hekannen writes. "All the intervening years had resulted in his mind becoming slack. A windbag. A flaccid bladder."
This short and frequently brilliant novel is an exaggeration of how we all could feel if we dared to dwell upon every tiny prick of mental injury and desire. Like a traffic accident, we can't help but look.
1-894842-06-5
Bartholomew G. sometimes feels more like a fictitious character than a human being. A chronic disappointment to his medical doctor father, the central character in Ernest Hekkanen's 35th book, The Life of Bartholomew G (New Orphic, $18), is a lowly ESL teacher who has legally changed his name from Bartholomew Gustafson to echo the Kafkaesque character known as K.
Having received his B.A. from Simon Fraser University in the late '60s, the chronically self-analytical 'Mewgi' has increasingly identified with Franz Kafka, the subject of his chronically unfinished thesis. When told he couldn't legally adopt the single letter G. for a surname, first he altered his last name to Ge, then made the 'e' smaller and smaller until it finally became a period."I've come to think it isn't good enough to simply study Kafka,"; he tells a friend. "In a manner of speaking, to better know him, one must become the man.";
Bartholomew is a self-elected defender of the great writer against the arrogance and stupidity of other intellectuals and assorted nincompoops. During a three-hour period of G's life, while he prepares to go to work at his part-time job at the Avant Gardener, he stews in his litany of humiliations, frustrations and fears.
Alienated from his drug-addicted son and a feminist ex-wife who has long since surpassed him in academe, our pathetic anti-hero remains obsessed with the physical minutae of his body and his tiny Kitsilano apartment while clinging to sexual memories of an absent Finnish girlfriend. His brilliant sister, from whom he is forced to borrow money, likes to send greeting cards portraying him in demeaning situations--and now she is coming to the Avant Gardener to take his photo in his shop assistant attire.
That's the gist of Hekkanen's disturbing and amusing portrait of an obsessive wise man who stumbles through life like a fool. Bartholomew G. jumps back and forth between self-loathing to self-aggrandizement like a literary hybrid of Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman. "He was no longer capable of concentrating with the single-mindedness of a cat about to pounce on a mouse," Hekannen writes. "All the intervening years had resulted in his mind becoming slack. A windbag. A flaccid bladder."
This short and frequently brilliant novel is an exaggeration of how we all could feel if we dared to dwell upon every tiny prick of mental injury and desire. Like a traffic accident, we can't help but look.
1-894842-06-5
Submitted on June 28, 2005 in By David.
