Strappado
No longer in print.
“Witty, sexy, and perceptive, Karl Jirgens' fiction emerges from the tradition of Voltaire, Breton, and Marquez. His voice maintains the precision and pluck of a flamenco rhythm and ranges from the 'pataphysical impossibilities of Alfred Jarry to the juxtapositional strategies of hypertext. Weaving the common day with the mystic, Jirgens combines morning coffee and the cutting of lawns with prehistoric events, atrocities in Siberia, and inter-dimensional travel to parallel universes. Encounters with insane chess masters, nuclear physicists and spirit beings occur during hikes in the park or at the end of the driveway.”
—Brian Shein (Quill & Quire)
What critics say...
“a highly talented writer wrestling with highly complex material”
—Kevin Connolly (on Strappado). Mondo Hunkamooga.
“Jirgens mixes the mundane and fantastic, the conceptual and the anecdotal”
—John Oughton (on Strappado) Now.
“in these days of bland, commercial, almost corporate fiction, it is a welcome breath of reality.”
—Brian Shein (on Strappado) Quill & Quire
“Rampike editor, Karl Jirgens has constructed stories in which a trip to the bank, a visit or a phone call act as a catalyst triggering a reaction that leads the reader into a postmodern version of the Twilight Zone.”
—Charles Mandel (on Strappado) The Globe and Mail.
“stretches and tugs language and experience”
—Lorraine Johnson (on Strappado) Books in Canada.
Excerpt from the book:
“He begins to listen to what everything around him is beginning to telegraph to him. Electric waves fill his ears. He decides to take a shower. After a while he steps out of the shower, his foot touches the ground, not the factory-discount phony-marble tile of his bathroom, but the dog-shit concrete sidewalk outside of the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly. Fuming traffic continues its chaotic flow. People stop, stare. He is confused, stark naked, he steps back and his foot sinks into green grass atop a hill in front of the Temple of Athena by the Acropolis of Athens, a ghost of a breeze shifts a lock of his hair, it is night, the wings of a screech owl, carve the air overhead. He blinks and suddenly finds himself within the cube of a mighty Russian official’s carriage. He peers meditatively into the mists rising from the prospect, he is riding higher and higher, the entire surface of the planet seems to be embraced by blackish gray cubes of houses, the entire earth, prospect bound intersects infinity on a rectilinear principle through her cosmic rotation.”