Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
MEB
|
 The Conviction & Subsequent Life of Savior Neck by
Christian
TeBordo
Find the book
on Amazon>
A philosophical fantasy? A noirish mystery? A slick
postmodern trick? I settled on a fairy
tale—if the Grimm brothers had written one about a dirty, stinky
old drunk. Savior Neck
reads like something penned by the love child of Samuel Beckett and
Dorothy parker.
Jerome Ludwig, Chicago Reader
TeBordo's novel works because every cruel trick the
narrator plays is eventually turned
back upon him. The joke—awful and sometimes hard to laugh at—is on everyone. What
makes it possible to take is a dedication to linguistic
play that draws its inspiration as much
from Kafka as it does from vaudevillian tomfoolery: "As
Savior Neck awoke the next morning
from the same dream he found himself transformed in his bed
into a human being of average
size." Repetitions abound, literary allusions land like
anvils on the sidewalk, and a passionate
denial of the possibility of momentum (the first and last
sections of the novel proper are both
entitled "Point A') itself becomes a kind of momentum, a
pair of feet pedaling wildly over the
abyss. The novel's unyielding humor and lunatic logic make
the inevitable fall well worth taking.
Rain Taxi
Now, nobody
really wants to hang around a dead guy, as witnessed by the awful
reactions people have to his offensive odor, apparently one
of the reasons that when
we're flash-forwarded into the future, Mr. Neck is a
stumblebum drunk who lives
above one of Discord's lower-end drinking establishments,
the same one inhabited
most days by his unloving father. Kirkus
Reviews
The
novel walks an unsteady line between fantasy and reality, while
also veering
erratically in perspective from first to second to third
person. Like Carter Scholz
or George Saunders, TeBordo mines absurdist
territory... Publishers Weekly
A searingly
intelligent first
novel that declares its odd originality in every sentence.
Christian Tebordo shows
that it is possible to be, simultaneously, a wise old
soul and a crazed young
terror. George Saunders
For
existentialism, death is the insurmountable condition
that gives life both its meaning
and its finitude. TeBordo's fiction, on the
other hand, offers us a book that begins with a
man who is fully conscious of
the fact he is dead but who continues to live on anyway,
surrounded by a cast
of types that seem like refugees from the grittiest, funniest Coen
Brothers
movies. The Conviction &
Subsequent Life of Savior
Neck is about the
absurdity
of both existence and non-existence; it is an exploration
of responsibility,
ethics, and
aesthetics that is at once funny and frightening. This is a
smart
and surprising first novel.
Brian Evenson
Christian
TeBordo's novel is relentlessly
astonishing. It's absurd without being grotesque.
It's
funny without being
silly. It's original without being pretentious—so original that it's
hard
for
me to describe the level of reality at which it operates except as that
of its
own
absorbingly nutty invention. The book is, I should add, absolutely and
compulsively
readable. Harry Mathews
Christian
TeBordo
Christian TeBordo was
born in
Albany, New York. He earned a BA from
Bard College and an MFA from
Syracuse University
where he was a fellow in creative writing. His fiction
has appeared in 3rd Bed, Reinventing
the World and 9th
Letter. He and his wife Kathryn, a choreographer, live
in Philadelphia.
|