Double Truth on the Second Level: 3 Novellas
David Alexander
Triumvirate Publications
5.0star
1 reviewreport
Ebook
300
Pages
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About this ebook
ROBERT HUNTER (Grateful Dead Songwriter and Lyricist): "Alexander is a modern de Maupassant with a Kafkian sense of linearity, a Borgesque bent for the uncanny, and a unique pile of resources to draw on. …His stories transcend interpersonal morality and ethics in a way calculated to elicit the pure subjectivity of the characters, without judgment. Unlike Dostoyevski's Raskolnikov, there is no redemption offered to readers demanding moral resolution. Poe's The Tell-tale Heart and much of Lovecraft's work come closest to what he does. Kafka gets the intellectual setup but doesn't develop the emotional intensity. [Alexander's] work is very unique."
SAN FRANCISCO SALVO: "David Alexander sets strong and resourceful characters into settings that are simultaneously familiar and bizarre. His stories are everyone's, at least everyone that is paying attention to the continual apocalypse of life and relationship in the 21st century.
In Haywire Car Alarm Deep In September Night Alexander carries the vision of modern life to hallucinogenic heights and answers the dilemma of dream and reality: Each are so vitally important to the person experiencing them that the question of reality becomes secondary. What is most important in life is common to both: an urge to penetrate the mystery, to be socially effective, to solve, to writhe in pleasure and terror. In the waking and dreaming states, the observant mind finds that each informs the other, each provides insight to the other domain, each provides a possible solution to the mind that desperately attempts to contain them both.
As a critic, I feel compelled to complain about some failure of quality of the work that I criticize. However, I can find little to complain about. Alexander's characters are developed clearly through their actions. None of them spend much time complaining about their situation but instead face it squarely, dynamically, peering into the mystery, clearly seeing its details actively played out in visual and audio cues, and trying to interpret and solve. That they so often end in defeat in spite of their strengths, alludes to the awesome mass of the problem that we all face."
FREDERICK BARTHELME (EDITOR IN CHIEF, MISSISSIPPI REVIEW): "There are few young story writers working today more vibrant, innovative and exciting than David Alexander. His stories jump off the page in fits of sensory attack, spiritual complication, emotional trouble. I don't know where he came from, but I know where he's going -- to the front rank of American storytellers."
SAN FRANCISCO SALVO: "David Alexander sets strong and resourceful characters into settings that are simultaneously familiar and bizarre. His stories are everyone's, at least everyone that is paying attention to the continual apocalypse of life and relationship in the 21st century.
In Haywire Car Alarm Deep In September Night Alexander carries the vision of modern life to hallucinogenic heights and answers the dilemma of dream and reality: Each are so vitally important to the person experiencing them that the question of reality becomes secondary. What is most important in life is common to both: an urge to penetrate the mystery, to be socially effective, to solve, to writhe in pleasure and terror. In the waking and dreaming states, the observant mind finds that each informs the other, each provides insight to the other domain, each provides a possible solution to the mind that desperately attempts to contain them both.
As a critic, I feel compelled to complain about some failure of quality of the work that I criticize. However, I can find little to complain about. Alexander's characters are developed clearly through their actions. None of them spend much time complaining about their situation but instead face it squarely, dynamically, peering into the mystery, clearly seeing its details actively played out in visual and audio cues, and trying to interpret and solve. That they so often end in defeat in spite of their strengths, alludes to the awesome mass of the problem that we all face."
FREDERICK BARTHELME (EDITOR IN CHIEF, MISSISSIPPI REVIEW): "There are few young story writers working today more vibrant, innovative and exciting than David Alexander. His stories jump off the page in fits of sensory attack, spiritual complication, emotional trouble. I don't know where he came from, but I know where he's going -- to the front rank of American storytellers."
Ratings and reviews
5.0
1 review
Thor Magnusen
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January 12, 2021
This edition was readable, as the attempts by editors to render the text in a more contemporary format did work fairly well for me. I find the stories in the collection imaginative as well as impressive in what I'd call very accurate projections of altered reality states both internally and out there in the world. Maybe more importantly, the messages in those pages got through clearly. Inspiration is sometimes hard to find today, but I did find it here in the form of three ingeniously written novellas. Thumbs up for this somewhat scary but totally enjoyable suite of short novels by David Alexander.
1 person found this review helpful
About the author
Author David Alexander ranks among the greatest American writers; a storyteller who cuts straight to the nerve with the cold efficiency, deadly skill and calculated yet dread artistry of a surgeon's scalpel, Alexander here, as always, is simply stunning.
His brilliant novelette, Double Truth on the Second Level, confirms Alexander's place as the most celebrated prose stylist since Hemingway.
Perhaps as importantly, David Alexander here gives us one of those rare accomplishments by an author whose narrative skills are clearly at their peak and can sustain an ambitious plot that ranges around the world with complex interconnections, much like the daring young man on the trapeze who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.
Author David Alexander is one of contemporary world literature's most original voices and Double Truth on the Second Level is an example of why this is so.
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