"I am Kye of the underbelly region." This line from Lukas Tomin's recently released final work gives readers an idea where the novel's namesake is taking us. Seamy mental landscapes, seedy flats, pub booths, street scenes and soiled mattresses where the book's antihero smokes cigarettes and grapples with existential distress are a few of the places we visit via the author's schizophrenic, lyrical prose.
Like the lead character of Tomin's previous novel, Ashtrays, Kye is a self-proclaimed man out of balance, an exile living in a foreign city whose convulsive, involuted thoughts become the focus of the book's narrative.
The setting is contemporary London. The narrator, Kye, is a Czech expatriate who lives a life of alcoholism, dissolution and general purposelessness, save a part-time job dusting books in a bookshop. Plagued by a wicked case of ennui, Kye spends a lot of time being aimless in thought and deed, wondering where his next drink is coming from, and remembering more directed times - his revels in Paris, his youth in Czechoslovakia as a student demonstrator ("when policemen's batons were pointers to salvation").
The novel's loose plot consists of passages of fragmentary language pastiche interspersed with episodes imagined and actual, filtered through the narrator's distorted psychology.
Kye's mind leaps and spills like a piata, and the novel's other characters are introduced and developed according to its whims. Among the personalities are John, Kye's best friend; Denise, his partying housemate; Haila, his lovelorn Polish boss at the bookshop; Jack, the unwashed feminist; Lucy, his lover with bad breath; and his mother, whose sordid apartment Kye often visits uninvited, searching for food, liquor or understanding.
His primary obsession is with a girl he calls his "beloved" - a symbolic figure whose origin, history, relation to Kye and ultimate reality are unclear throughout, recalling Andre Breton's Nadja or Thomas Pynchon's V.
That the characters remain two-dimensional and representational works quite well in the solipsistic world of the novel. In Kye, where text becomes consciousness, the protagonist's personality, conversely, becomes a semiotic field of imaginings and symbolic markers.Edited and published posthumously, Kye has a great deal in common with Ashtrays, not least of which is the stylistic design of the book.
Avidly experimental in approach, the lines between observation and fantasy are dissolved, points of view (namely first- and third-person voice) are conflated, and the nervous drift of the narrative sweeps the reader into dislocation (readers unfamiliar with experimental fiction will need some time just to figure out what the hell is going on).
While Tomin's literary influences are modernist - most obviously Joyce and Beckett (the former in word-play and puns, the latter in moral sensibility and conceptual negative space), his voice and sense of humor are uniquely contemporary. Tomin is at his best in the fast-paced, punctuationless episodes in which live action and metaphor merge seamlessly. These passages have a vitality and wit that lighten the heavy-handed morbidity that pervades so much of the book.
And it is this ethos that ultimately weakens the novel. The intense, often poetic alienation that Kye feels ("where loneliness is great and undisturbed/like a map of a large country impossible to visit") eventually becomes too much to swallow. As readers we are asked to ride a one-track around in Kye's mind for the duration of the book, with no ironic distance from his navel-gazing inertia. There's only so much self-absorbed despairing one can voluntarily witness, and Kye's lack of will finally inspires neither empathy nor hatred - only an exasperated rolling of the eyes.
Tomin is a fine formalist whose narrative experiments are bold and intriguing. However, even given the structural looseness of an experimental novel, there is, by the book's end, a sense of the story not really coming together (even in Kye's nonliteral, metaphorical vein). One is led to question Tomin's grasp of his own project. It is unclear whether the lack of symbolic cohesiveness is due to Tomin's own organization or the after-the-fact editing, but the work ends up seeming more like a notebook of craftily related expressions than a novel. Even so, for fans of the author's previous work or for those with an interest in nontraditional writing, Kye still proves an engaging, if uneven, final offering by Lukas Tomin.
