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THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW
by Paul West
($23.00,
Voyant Publishing. ISBN 0-9665998-5-3)
Review by Tom Spurgeon
For those of us for whom Spain’s commuter bombings of 3/11/04 marked the first time we sat down and thought hard about an act of terrorism not on our own country’s soil, it became clear that a heretofore not talked about outcome of the World Trade Center destruction in 2001 is broadly felt, perniciously lingers and remains largely psychic in nature. The writer Paul West understood this instinctively, and last year tiny Voyant Publishing released the most significant piece of art to react to this world-changing event, the novel
The Immensity of the Here and Now. The criminally under-appreciated West wrote one of the better novels of the last century (one you will find on some of the more astute critical lists),
The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests. Many of the strengths that distinguished that work can be found in this latest, particularly his stop-and-smile skill with vivid sentences, sparkling gems of unique thought and phrasing in a sea of dense paragraphs.
The Immensity of the Here and Now goes deep into root reactions to the event in question, tackling troubling insights head on and bringing an almost Quixotic dedication to sort tiny moments of clarity out of the nearly impossible to grasp. It’s virtuoso work on a subject to which nearly all of us can relate even if our first reaction is to put everything in a pile and walk away. This is a brave and sometimes brilliant book.
Gil Roth’s Voyant is a small company dedicated to writers like West, Samuel Delany (they published an excellent collection of his mid-1980s letters called
1984), and newer discovery Vincent Czyz. They are a true boutique publisher, dedicated to value in art over commerce, and you could do little better in the service of diverse voices in the trade than to poke around their web site for something that strikes you worth checking out.
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