Delirium, by Douglas Cooper
An architect spends his life building impossibly tall, impossibly inhuman skyscrapers with hidden chambers to lock out the ravages of time and identity, only to end his life in obsession and murder. A teenage runaway turns prostitute and subway dancer. A biography is written. A biography is burned. A biography is revealed for all to see, and it turns out to be an older story than any of us expected.
The title of of this novella is well-chosen. You have been warned, but the title does not identify the effect of the following text.
Douglas Cooper is a Canadian writer of considerable gifts. This is his second novel. I devoured the slim volume in a day, carried along by prose that carriers the cadences of certainty that characterize fevered dreams. “One upon a time in an age undistinguished,” runs a typical line in the middle of the text. Listen to yourself as you read it. It has a ferocious lyric logic of its own; a sensibility that carries you past the quick cuts, breaks in the narrative timescheme, the impossibly-significant names, and the Biblical allusions.
This is a skillful romp. This is post-Ondaatje…without the Gilgamesh. This is the kind of writing that makes creative writing professors faint with envy. The novella exists within its own language and voice, and closing the covers is a little bit like waking up with the certain knowledge that something important had been gained…if only it could be grasped and communicated before is dissipates.
Call it: elusive dreaming.