Seize The Canal Expressed By Lee Rourke Distributed As Interactive EBook

novel is allegedly about boredom, I think boredom is when you dont like what youre doing, you want to do something else.
But the protagonist of this novel sits on a bench near the Grand Union canal doing nothing all day and is quite content.
Thats more zen meditation than boredom, The tale isnt about boredom, its about violence, The hero meets with a disturbed young woman and local teenage gang who drag him out of his stupor and into something much worse, because a story about someone sitting looking at a canal would be a nice idea for a tumblr, but not a novel.


The descriptive detail is so exact that I wonder if in writing the book, Rourke just sat in the spot he describes and noted down everything that happened.
I might go down there to

see if there are any Canalian fangirls and boys on the same bench, reading the book.
A miraculous study in inspiring boredom, And the books weight and gravity, as our gongoozler stares at the real canal over the edge of the iron bridge but staring at what in it or on it Yes, a canal does have a sort of estuary: a basin.
Wenlock Basin now become Wenlock Edge, The Boeingbanking above. The ultimate windinghole.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.

Above is one of my observations at the time of the review, Raw and bleak but beautifully so, Sad and quiet mixed with a jolt or two of random violence, To me it sort of felt like a mix of sitelinkThe Stranger and sitelinkConcrete Island or sitelinkCrash, but told from the unique POV of a post/postLondon Bombings male millennial Londoner.
From my post here: sitelink comvenice. htm:

If you stop to consider anything long enough, even boredom, you should be able to find interesting connections lurking beneath the otherwise banal surface.
When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you, or whatever it was that Nietzsche said.
Thing is, Rourke gives up staring into the canal after the first few pages, Shit happens in the book amp he loses sight of the initial boring premise, Which perhaps is the pointif you embrace boredom, shit will happen, Boredom is only boredom if you are afraid of being bored, And boredom is in the eyes of the beholder, This claim that the novel is about boredom allows Rourke to deflect all criticism because he could just say that was his intent.
Yes, it's a novel. It says so on the cover, I don't understand why sometimes novels need to declare themselves as suchis it to keep people from confusing it for something else The book is published by Melville House, known to me primarily as Tao Lin's publisher.
And I guess there's some similarities with Tao, as well as with Shane Jones, who blurbed the book.
The book was shortlisted for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize, which is no surprise considering Rourke writes for The Guardian.


It's the kind of book you'd expect a book critic to write, He's obviously wellread amp connected amp able to draw on a lot of writer's before him.
Besides the comparison to Beckett, at first i felt like it was being set up like Crime amp Punishment.
And there's the obvious nod to Tom McCarthy, though to compare the two belittles McCarthy, The stark dialogue reminded me a bit of David Mamet or Harold Pinter, though Rourke does this annoying thing where he'll just have a character repeat the same thing over amp over at one point a woman asks him "Do you like the canal then"times in a rowi can't imagine that happening in real life or on stage without someone slapping her afteror.
The Guardian blurb on the back of the book am i the only one who notices these blatant conflict of interests says: Leading light of the selfstyled OffBeat generation, Rourke stakes his claim as heir apparent to greats such as Ballard, Joyce or Houellebecq.
Joyce, Houellebecq Whitey, please. Maybe that's what he er i mean 'The Guardian,' means by 'selfstyled'Rourke is trying to style himself after these fine folks, Ballard, yeah, sure you can see where he tries to mimic Ballard with some success, In fact, there's a part where his female love interest runs over a stranger in her car in a justforthehellofit Ballardian way with a Camus twist.
The object of his desire also has a fetish for suicide bombers, Those extraordinary young men. I often dream about them, their brown skin, I speak to them in my dreams, I caress them in my dreams, I fantasize about them during the day, she says.
Ballard amp others can get away with writing about sick antisocial things, but when Rourke tries to mimic him, it comes off as forced amp not believable not to mention racist.
It's like how some comedians can go on a warped racist rant on stage because they are confident in their delivery or they are somehow justified amp don't question themselves.
It's not a talent everyone is born with,

Lee Rourke's use of repetition here is truly remarkable and at times poetic: the canal itself the swans the helicopters the teenage gang the office buildingthe way that he handles each of these images as they grow gradually more complex and intertwined throughout the novel allow the reader to see a governing structural shift from the narrator's passive relation to the outside world to a much more active one.


The Canal is a novel about boredom, and yet it is far from boring.
In many ways, this is a chamber drama, and Rourke handles the claustrophobic narrative skillfully and even cinematicallyall the more so as this is his first novel, meaning we have major talent on our hands here.
The way that boredom is intertwined with so many thingslove, terrorism, confession, violenceand is also the root cause of these things is explored with a deft eye toward social critique as well as an unrelenting view of how these external forces shape our own inner psychological states.
The Canal is also very much concerned with how isolated modern life causes us to feel, how fractured and fragmented we all are, how subservient to technology and machines, and how this prevents us from forging deeper emotional bonds with others.
This book is like sort of like Office Space the movie meets sitelinkThe Stranger by Camus.
. . and it was fantastic. Beautiful writing, thoughtful musings, and seriously ontheedgeofyourseat suspense, . . about boredom : About time, space, living, being, feeling, and doing or not doing, Really fantastic!

As usual, how I got the book and and where I read it impacted my reading experience.
Although it doesn't take place in Amsterdam, I thought it appropriate that I bought it there.
And the way I read it was interesting, too almost entirely on the tram while I was halfoblivious and halfaware of my surroundings and the flow of people getting on and off.
Finally, this read has reminded me how wonderful it is to find an unknown to me book at a used bookstore, to be pulled in without any expectations, and to end up loving it.
I must look into this author more, The problem with this book is not the boredom it's the plot, The book is based around an interesting premise a man quits his job to sit by a canal and embrace boredom only to have his plans interrupted by the repeat visits of a woman.
Not surprisingly drama ensues.

The violence is confronting but on its own not a problem, Rather it's the narrating character's interaction with it that causes frustration, Faced with an extreme act of violence, he pays little attention to it, All of this would be forgivable with a good ending, but I suspect many readers will find the The Canal's final pages both cliché and unsatisfying.


The book is mercifully short and the early chapters are well worth a read shame about the rest.
The Canal is different and challenging in a positive way, I thought Lee Rouke evoked clear visual scenes that played out to your imagination really well.
To explain where this book goes is difficult, for me it is an observation, creative thought provoking book.
The book challenges boredom in an unusual way, leading you to the premise that boredom has gifts if you embrace it and notice.
I could identify with the local community he talked about in the book the good, bad, beautiful and the ugly.
My only gripe would be I felt it needed a defining surprise to liven it up and give some polarity to the theme running through the book.
This book is well worth reading though it's a clever book, The cover said this was a precorrected copy, and not to quote, but here goes:

".
. . "

That's a fairly common conversational exchange in this slim volume, in which the silences exchanged are putatively as meaningful, or moreso, than the typical conversations in which we fill each another's ears with the tiresome cacophony of tedious miscellany with which we try to hide from ourselves the boring essential mediocrity of existence.
Or something like that.

I should have been warned by the publisher's plug comparing Rourke to such "greats" as Joyce, and perhaps this somewhat disqualifies me as a competent reviewer when I admit that I found Ulysses "the greatest novel of theth century" utterly unreadable and without merit.
That the text opens with a quote from Heidegger seals the deal: this is a tale about subtext, in which nothing means what it says, crudely corporeal players become allusions to existential abstractions, and everything is used as an inadequate anthropogenized communicative device for the deeply felt but hidden mystery of nothing.
Et cetera.

The story here I reveal my crass and boorish dependency on such artificial and limiting strictures as plot, character, theme involves an unnamed man who chooses to forgo the normal distractions of workaday life and instead sit on a bench overlooking a dirty and neglected canal, observing the swans and coots and reflecting on the woefully unappreciated and uniquely potent joys of: boredom.
That's right, he sits there thinking for pages on end about just what a wonderful concept boredom can be: running his tranquil mental tongue over its many textures, crevasses, and unexplored aisles.


Oh, well there are some other bits, A woman is involved there usually is, I find, Today's yobbish youth are found both vulgar and unrefined, The universe, in the many tricks and turns it plays on us, is unfair and unremorseful.
Modern life is gray, and technology, . . well now. The typical message at this point would be the Luddite aphorism that technology robs us of our essential, primal, animalistic raw humanity, that we have lost our souls to these gleaming machines.
This book at least charted an unusual course here, suggesting that the machines are in fact the only thing of value, that we might find our highest actualization in fully sublimating ourselves to them finding nirvana within the illusion, as it were.
And some bits about conventional morality being a delusion, causeless murder being the ultimate expression of freedom, the usual stuff that Heidegger's apologists prefer to sweep under the rug.
I was waiting for a bit about a forest, but apparently here the forest was disguised as a canal.
Clever.

Did anything happen in the end Did we learn anything from this mercifully: brief discourse on the transcendent joys of deliberate nonaction, the frailty of human intercourse, and the dangers of talking to strangers

I don't know, I was watching the ducks.


Two: one for making me think hard to find meaning in this nonstory that I failed does not devalue the attempt, and one for at least being short.
.