Hovering World [Paperback]

Peter Dube has, in HOVERING WORLD, written one of those books that stands out head and shoulders from the rest of the pack. Ignore, if you can, that grim cover etching; after awhile in fact you'll be waving it around, a point of pride that you are carrying something so determinedly non-stylish. I tried for nearly six months to work out why the naked man with the sword and the, whatever it is, mitre or something? Why the man in the brass vessel had his eyes blacked out, as though he were on TV's COPS. But I never did figure out and I leave it to you! Perhaps the publishers, DC Books/Livres DC, are hinting that the terrifying battle between privacy and surveillance, anonymity and exhibitionism, has been going on for centuries? All these thoughts will drift across your mind, like tumbleweeds across the runway at Tucson Airport, as you find yourself lost in Dube's wholly beautiful and strange narrative, the North American equivalent of something Robert Walser might have written if he did his writing in a towel in a busy Swiss bathhouse.

Well, what's it all about? Julian, a young man of delicate sensibilities, spends 24 hours doing all the sorts of things Jack Bauer doesn't have time to--visiting with friends, preparing for a party, meeting with neighbors, just being a flaneur on the mysterious, numinous streets of an unnamed Canadian city. Julian's friends are artists, bohemians, theorists, provocateurs, urban decadents. That's this world, but another world presses in at all angles, and it's hard to tell whether it's the world of the angels or the world of humans that's gaining a foothold. Early on in the novel, Julian gets a package "addressed to him in an elegant, if somewhat spidery handwriting." Two mysterious photographs slip from the envelope each one a beacon of a special kind of existential horror. The purpose and meaning of these shots become clearer by book's end, but mystery envelops Julian as he progresses from place to place. Dube describes things, ordinary things, to make them seem off-kilter, so that even the gel Julian uses in his hair seems a grotesque totem.

Julian's consciousness is Baudelairean in its experience of living in the city, and moving through its multiple contradictions and confusions. The original French of Baudelaire's "Litanies de Satan" moves through his head, through his pen, as the day turns into night and things really get steamy. He ditches a party to go to an afterhours sex club, and I was right there, believe me. After some initial ballsqueezing skirmishes he meets the man referred to only as "the One." And believe me, by the end of this section you will be drained of everything worth living for, and yet frantically happy, as though you were a castaway clinging on a raft's back, eyes closed, counting the waves moving beneath you.

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