Mike Corrao - You are holding a living organism. Gut Text feels fear, pain, and desire. Within, you will follow four distinct personas as they form on the page, each seeking to transcend the limitations of their existence as they speak to you directly.

Mike Corrao, Gut Text, 11:11 Press, 2019.
download
http://www.mikecorrao.com/
https://twitter.com/shmikeshmorrao


You are holding a living organism. Gut Text feels fear, pain, and desire. Within, you will follow four distinct personas as they form on the page, each seeking to transcend the limitations of their existence as they speak to you directly. In his newest release, Mike Corrao has created a challenging and unsettling exploration of identity, and the ways we see it manifest in the physical world.
Each persona carries with it a similar desire, but a different means of striving towards it. Slowly, the text begins to move, begins to change, correct its mistakes, and adjust to its restrictive ontology. Gut Text is not only alive, it is growing and learning. Witness the text creating itself, a parthenogenetic conception.


Contemporary literature generally aims to make the reader’s job easy, at least insofar as it pertains to the pure act of reading. Experimental literature often challenges that, creating scenarios where the reader’s job can be quite difficult, not just to engage in understanding a text, but to engage in purely sensible reading of a text. Thankfully, Mike Corrao’s experimental novel Gut Text treads a careful line that asks the right amount of the reader without ever lurching into unreadable opacity.
Set up as a series of four unique entities (named “nn”, “yy”, “ff”, and “vv”), the plot, if you can call it that, revolves around these four entities grappling with themselves as textual beings and the implication of such for their existential status. The book is challenging and provocative in the ways it forces the reader to upend preconceived notions about the kind of relations an author has to a text, a text has with its author, and the ultimate relationship the text is able to form with the reader. The four entities communicate directly with the reader and they are not just removed from Corrao as author per se, they are actively antagonistic toward him, as they seek to exist separate from and independent of any lingering attachment to a creator. Thus, Gut Text becomes a fascinating experiment in how a work of art comes to live and breathe on its own.
Four Entities
As mentioned previously, this book asks a lot of the reader in following not just its text, but the visual interstices that break up the work that act as scintillating counterpoints to sections of extended text. I hesitate to call this a visual novel, but it’s true that its visual components do equal lifting with the text to create something more than text alone might do.
The book progresses through its four entities, each getting a self-contained space to talk and dance about in language that gives nothing away and requires constant scrutiny in the act of making meaning. Each entity references a previously read entity until they begin to read like a kind of evolution, as if nn were morphing into yy as the book progresses and so on, providing what might be termed a sort of character development, however odd and abstracted that conceit feels in such a novel.
Literary Scat
Part of nn’s section devolves into what might properly be termed literary scat on the theme of “text”. nn says, “text of the author who doesn’t matter. text of the author’s desire not to matter.” Certainly this type of relation of text to author has been explored previously, but the way Corrao visions his text from something he undeniably wrote into something that I almost believe spawned itself from some biological soup makes Gut Text feel like a landmark in the realm of experimental fiction, the kind of thing serious experimental writers will need to interact with at some point in their own development.
Later, yy says, “This narrative is a labyrinth.” And “I do not look like a collage. I look like a human being (language).” Here, Corrao reduces the human form to language, which is a critical factor in elevating humans above lower species. He also acknowledges the infinity in any text and the infinite relationships a text is able to have with those outside of it. It is these moments of brilliant lucidity that separate this text from other experimental work that ask much of the reader but offer little in return.
Conclusion
The book accelerates, seeming to devolve in straightforward sensibility as it nears a conclusion before colliding with a last statement on authorial creation and a text’s response to that imposition that is far too effective on its own to ruin in a review. It’s rare that I come across a book that I feel might be used to define a genre or capture the ethos of a movement in original ways. But in considering the landscape of experimental fiction, that is exactly what Gut Text accomplishes.
- https://afterthepause.com/2019/02/28/review-of-gut-text-mike-corrao/





Vi Khi Nao: In an interview with Orson’s Publishing, you said, “Film and fiction are very different beasts.” When I read Gut Text, I thought they were of the same medium, although the process of making them might be obscenely different from one another. Your Gut Text is a black and white film. You said in that interview also that, “the most important difference between fiction and film is collaboration.” But wouldn’t you say, your actors and collaborators “ff”, “vv”, etc could be offended by this dismissal? I would.
Mike Corrao: I do think my opinions have changed since that interview. When calling the two mediums different beasts, what I meant was more in regards to process. With film I’m speaking with my cinematographer and co-director about what we want to say and how we want it to look—taking everyone’s taste into account. Whereas with fiction, I’m sitting alone on my laptop over very long periods of time. Influences are less direct. I do think that the writing, especially in the case of Gut Text, influences itself. “ff”, “vv”, etc all feel completely separate from me. And they certainly feel in control of their own segments of the text. I do like this label of Gut Text as a black and white film a lot. I wanted the book to have a much more physical presence than my last project. I wanted it to feel like it couldn’t be adapted into any other medium, like it was only capable of existing in its current form.
VKN: My favorite part of reading your work is the scrolling aspect of it. And, arriving to the fattest period. And the biggest “ff.” And the apiary population and repopulation of the repetitive word “text” bearing resemblance to Islamic art or tiling or architecture, etc. How sinful, playful, artistically overlapping-y were you when you layered with such textual suffocation? How many times did you layer the y’s? Do you count? Your text does seem to believe in this kind of alphabetical amnesia or suffocation, but do you? It reminds me of stacking the human body, as if words are bodies, ontological beings, realmy things, being buried/gassed by the genocide of profusion.
MC: I like the use of the word ‘architecture’ here. With Gut Text being so focused on its relation to the organism, its attempts at becoming, I needed the text to have this spatial quality. It needed to knowingly exist in the physical world. I never want the reader to forget that they’re holding this corporeal object. Moments like the fattest period (which is fatter than any period that Microsoft would let me make normally) or the layered “text” of ff, felt ritualistic during their construction. Like I was very delicately organizing these ceremonial elements. Or building a stone altar. Because I don’t have any good image-making software, it was always such a pain to create the visual elements of the text, and because of that, each layer or oddity was very particular. I can’t tell you how many y’s there are, but I can tell you that they are layered upon themselves six times by the final iteration. Or that there are four layers of text in the ff tiles.
VKN: What is the best way to marry your words to time? In other words, how time-based should we read your Gut Text? And, if so, how many minutes would you allot your audience? Readers?
MC: Because I work in both writing and filmmaking, I’ve been very interested in creating projects that can be read or watched in a single sitting. I don’t necessarily think that this is a must. But I do like the idea that time is felt in a very direct way. It allows a very interesting kind of variety in the reader’s experience. Like Gut Text might feel long because you’ve been sitting for two hours straight reading a book, or it might feel fast because you read it in short spurts, or because each subject tends to accelerate.
VKN: Gut Text wants language to be not read/almost skimmed for the experience, skimmed to see the film roll of its linguistic being into reelness. Should we skim? Do you want us to skim? To see how far “nn” is willing to be a coward for our sake?
MC: Yes, skim! Of course I’m thrilled if someone reads every single word, but it is not completely necessary for you to do so. What is on the page is the entirety of these beings. It is every part of their existence. Everything in “yy” is everything that yy is. I think skimming can allow for this very frantic and exciting kind of flow. It allows the reader to grab onto what draws their eye. It allows each entity to embody what you have noticed about them. And as you say, skimming will allow nn to accelerate and really display their cowardice.
VKN: When I read your book, I try to tell myself not to get ahead. It’s almost like reading a mystery novel (you didn’t intend it to be this way, I know), but this novel has no linear mystery. Its clue is in the ontological gesture/misfire of being clueless or embodying cluelessness. Do you feel that the more one gets clueless (awareness through intuition) about Gut Text, the better one’s reading/viewing/listening experience with it?
MC: It depends on the desire of the reader. Selfishly I want to say, “Don’t look into anything. Buy the book and let it do what it will do.” But I know people will go on the store page and read the description or see what certain people have said about the contents. I think what I would like is for people to read this book without knowing what nn, yy, ff, or vv want to do. I think the experience is best if you learn each desire (and each attempt to move closer to that desire) in the moment. Remain clueless and let the text tell you itself what it wants you to know or witness.
VKN: Go away, marketing content, you seem to say, yes? Speaking of contentlessness, when I read Gut Text, it sounds like ambient noise or furniture music, with the volume turned completely down. Do you listen to music when you write, Mike? Your Gut Text also reminds me of the ambient direction of Godard’s Alphaville. Which leads me to ask, what is your least favorite film and why?
MC: Oh definitely. I like this view. As the reader, you are very much a witness to these entities. Although I tend to listen to much more abrasive music while I work. For Gut Text I jumped between this Blaise Siwula album titled Past the Potatoes and Sun Ra’s Fireside Chat with Lucifer. Both are avant-jazz records. I tend to look for hysteria-inducing music. I want to write in this state where I feel paranoid and frantic. Like what’s being written needs to be extracted from my body. There’s certainly some Alphaville influence in there as well. That mid to late 60s Godard. My least favorite film… I really hated Deadpool. It’s so smug and arrogant in how it breaks the fourth wall. It holds onto that very generic superhero plot, but thinks that it’s above other movies of the genre because every couple of minutes it will turn to the camera and say, ‘Yeah this is a film!” This isn’t to say that I don’t want movies to break the fourth wall, rather I’d like them to begin without the pretense of having one. I want the art that does not pull you into this fantasy world.
VKN: Was it difficult to switch mode from a dialogue-gy based novel to this more visually philosophical being, Gut Text? Or did you start Gut Text before you wrote Man, Oh Man? How linearly is your literary production?
MC: I wrote Man, Oh Man in early 2016, and I wrote Gut Text this last August. The book that I have coming out this November was started in 2015 and finished in 2017. So there’s been a lot of fluctuation in what comes out when. There was a much slower escalation from Man, Oh Man to Gut Text than what might be suggested by the release dates. The move from the Beckett-esque style of the first book to the text-object position of the second book was very natural and unplanned. It has a lot to do with the kind of books that I read now compared to then. I used to mostly read dead authors (Angela Carter, Beckett, Burroughs, etc.). Now most of the reading material is from the last five years or so. A lot of it coming from small presses.
VKN: You are a millennial, yes, Mike? How many words do you think would have to be stacked one on top of the other to sink the Titanic? When I read your book, I thought, if this book wasn’t designed to be read in one sitting, he could easily sink the Titanic if he didn’t stop with the layering. For an indirect instance, the gigantic period felt like the heaviest anchor/canon at sea.
MC: Yeah, I’m twenty-two right now, I think I might be one of the last couple of years for ‘millennial’. I’ve always tried to keep my books somewhat short. I don’t think any of them (published or unpublished) have gone over 35,000 words. It’s been a good way for me to keep my thoughts concise and purposeful. As you say, I think Gut Text could have been massive, but I don’t think that would have worked properly. The flow would have been too slow. I think one of the important aspects of these entities is how quickly they try to reorient themselves. Once they are conceived, they almost immediately try to change their ontologies.
VKN: If you view your Gut Text as ontological, if one of your characters was moved ontologically to commit suicide, which entity would that be? And, why? Quoting you, since “nn wants to become nothing”—would that suicidalist be nn then?
MC: I would certainly consider nn to be a suicidalist. I think, unlike the others, they find this existence irredeemably torturous and rather than trying to become the organism, they see the void as a more reasonable alternative. They still attempt to change, but just in a different direction. This is also why, when they are later brought up by ff and vv, their name is crossed out. It is evidence of nn’s choice to no longer exist, and proof of either their success or failure.
VKN: If you were forced to choose one intersection: the intersection between film and book, film and art, thought and text, being and text, nonbeing and text, materiality and immateriality, desire and nonbeing, music fluency and absence of noise, which one would you choose?
MC: For Gut Text, I think it would be being and text, with this fascination that each entity has towards their position as text, and how they can go about changing that (whether by becoming nothing or by becoming organism). And this intersection fits my fascination as the author as well. I wanted to explore text as an object. And what that object might do or attempt to do when give autonomy.
VKN: Both of the presses that published you seem to publish, currently, only male authors. Which leads me to ask, how many brothers do you have? What is the compositional structure of your siblings, if any. Genderwise.
MC: I’ve noticed this as well, and I’m hoping that it doesn’t remain this way for long. I have an older brother and an older sister. Both incredibly different from myself.
VKN: What kind of doors do you hope others would close in opening your work/books/films? If you are not “made with a hammer” (p.146), are you a hammer?
MC: With my books, I’m hoping that I can encourage people to engage with more unconventional literature, and encourage them to engage with more complex and bizarre ideas. When writing, I tend to approach my books more as essay than fiction. I want to work my way through ideas/concepts that have bored their way into my skull. With the film work, because I’m having to incorporate another artist’s project, the goal tends to vary from project to project. Although, like with the books, we’ve wanted to introduce people to stranger and stranger work, with the hopes that they might see it and be inspired to create their own work without necessarily worrying about what films are supposed to do or look like. I think I am made with a hammer as well. As the text is manipulated by my hand, I think I am deeply influenced by what I read/watch/listen to.
VKN: Of the five super-short films I watched on your website, which one is the closest (ontologically speaking) to your heart? And, what was the source of your inspiration for it? What are you hoping to achieve with your films? Are your aspirations similar to your books?
MC: I think How To Stay Warm might be closest to my heart. We made it as part of this Vimeo competition called “5×5” where the films submitted must consist of 5 shots that are 5 seconds each. They do it every couple of months I think. The theme of this one was “Summertime” or something like that. At the time, I was living in a shitty apartment with no air conditioning, it was like 90 degrees every day. I was completely miserable. So Rob (my filmmaking partner) brought this competition to my attention and we started talking about different ways we could represent our exhaustion, and eventually it led to creating this very plastic representation. The subject has incredibly smooth skin. The backgrounds are clean, solid, and pastel. I think with film, my interest has been in creating this very clear distinction between what is cinematic and what is real. Like with my writing, I don’t want to pull the viewer into a diegesis. I want them to always be aware that they are interacting with something. Although it does differ from Gut Text, because there is no physical object; there is nothing in their hands.
VKN: Your Gut Text draws its gravitational force from repetition, which I also noticed in all of your five films. What do you think is the best way to make repetition not boring? Should repetition turn itself into narrative materials to keep itself alive on the page? In film? If being alive isn’t important for it, what is the best way for repetition to be dead, to die?
MC: With repetitive structures, my goal has been for it to inform the content. I do not want to create visual elements whose only use is that they are appealing to look at. In the case of Gut Text, this has much to do with how the entities think and feel. It’s about the progression of their desires. I don’t know if I would say that repetition must be narrative, but I do think that it must be applicable to the project of the book. I think repetition finds its most interesting death in excess. Something like Mike Kleine’s Lonely Men Club is steeped in excess. It’s a machine-assisted novel and each page has a very similar structure. And in that, Kleine creates a very beautiful and rhythmic flue. You skim, you lock onto certain phrases. I think this is the best way that I’ve seen repetition die.
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/mike-corrao-in-conversation-with-vi-khi-nao/






Q: Gut Text is your second novel and the only thing it has in common with Man, Oh Man is that it’s not your typical novel. Before we jump into the text, I want to begin with the background of the book. What were your influences while crafting Gut Text?
A: I was reading A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari [A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (French: Mille plateaux)] at the time. I love how incomprehensible it is. It’s cultural theory written with the desire to be more than just informative. The first paragraph of the book talks about how it’s radical that the authors chose to write the book under their own names. A lot of very bizarre terms pop up that are really interesting to latch onto. Like the “body without organs”. This is mainly supposed to be about the fluidity of the body, but sounds incredibly gory out of context. So, I think most of my work involves taking these things out of context and using them in ways that they definitely weren’t intended to be used. What else was I reading? I think it might have been Lonely Men Club—the Mike Kleine book—which has this very simplistic and straightforward sentence structure. Like, I owe this much money to Blockbuster or the sky is this color or I pray to this god. There’s just this mass of data that I find so engaging. As if I’m being provided with every bit of possible information.


































Q: The imagery in your books are… vivid. Where did that come from?

A: It kind of comes from everywhere. I feel like all of the imagery is this collage of fake memories and misremembered phrases. Mutated versions of things I’ve encountered and then misremembered when they resurfaced.
Q: There are so many references in this book. Was it your intention for people to pick up on them?A: Not necessarily. They’re there if you notice them, and they’ll of course add something, but I don’t want them to limit the experience of the reader. You can understand this book without having read the same books or watched the same movies as me.Q: So, it’s not cryptography…








A: No. It’s just another potential layer for the reader to encounter. There’s the potential to be like oh he’s talking about BwO [Body without Organs] or he’s referencing Wolf Man’s case or Bolaño’s “alley of larches” from Antwerp—you can see what sources I’m pulling from, but there’s not necessarily a need to. There’s no course list. Of course the book is still weird, but you just have to approach with the right mindset.  


Q: This reminds me of an interview you did where you called Man, Oh Man a fictional essay?A: I think I called it essayistic fiction? Or.. fiction written as if it was an essay? Theory fiction. Along those lines.
Q: Right, because not only are you playing with format, but you are mashing writing forms. How would you describe Gut Text?
A: I think it’s a similar boat to the last project. I don’t tend to work in a narrative space, so the progression is different. There tends to be this theoretical or ideological aspect pushing the book forward. I get bored so easily. It’s hard for me to latch onto plot—seeing a template laid out makes me lose my interest, it’s like filling out a form. So I think that’s what’s led me to these more unorthodox styles. Let’s say if Man, Oh Man is an essay about pseudo intellectualism, Gut Text is an essay about the ontology of the text, the state of the book as a physical object.
Q: I think this book is a lot of fun, so you likewise keep your audience interested as well. On the back of the book, the first sentence is: you are holding a living organism.
A: Yeah, I think books are often tasked with making you forget that you’re holding a physical object in your hands. Like you’re supposed to get lost in the diegesis and be more focused on what each character is doing. But I don’t want to do that. I want you to always be aware of the thing that you’re holding. You can’t escape the fact that each character is a part of the book. They are the set of pages on which they are written. I don’t want to move past the text’s status as an object.
Q: You also have a physical dimension. You have breathing, expansion, the desire to disappear… They are three-dimensional.A: Because the text is the only thing (because there is no fabricated setting or these representations of people), you’re seeing everything that Gut Text contains. So, with ff, every facet of their consciousness is visible to you. It’s there. It’s on the page. And there’s nothing beyond that.
Q: You said Gut Text is about the ontology of a book, it’s sounding like it is really about the phenomenology of a book.A
: It’s object slouching towards subject. They all desire to transcend their role as text, but because they are limited by their medium, they can’t explore this other existence.
Q: That’s fascinating. We have our limitations as humans. We want to go backwards and forwards in time, but to the text, we are gods. So when they want to be their best selves, they want to be an emanation of us.
A: Yes, it was fun to think of this while writing the book. The character of Au is intended as this kind of stand in for the author (au short for author). And their speech often comes across as prophetic to the others simply because of the vast difference in their perspectives.
Q: The text wants to be more, and that’s the heart of absurdism. This desire to be the thing that we idolize and the realization that we can’t. And yet, continuing. The characters want to be more and realize they can’t be more and we see it all.
A: It was important to give these characters a mutated version of human desire. It’s not the desire to have this encounter with another body, but the desire to have a body in the first place. They strive for this biological status. To shift into another mode of existence. But with their limitations, this shift is very difficult, if not impossible. So their desires begin to change. nn wants to become nothing, yy wants to become large, etc. Realistically the book cannot become biological. I could write down ‘nn becomes a person’ but then the text stops being itself. It starts to show instead of act. It becomes representational rather than mimetic.
Q: This isn’t a typical novel. It doesn’t follow the Joseph Campbell story arch of the Hero’s Journey and that’s one of the reasons we like it so much, which is also why we started 11:11 Press, because so many books are just telling the same story over and over and over and we think the world needs new stories. But new stories are hard to classify and the group of writers you’re lumped together with doesn’t have a name. It’s the Inside the Castle group, notable John Trefry and Mike Kleine and the online lit zines that are publishing this type of experimental writing: Occulum, X-R-A-Y… could you talk about this emerging community?
A: Vi Khi Nao, Shane Jesse Christmass, Candice Wuehle, German Sierra, Elytron Frass. Minor Literature[s] and Always Crashing. They all have a very unique counter to the typical commercial book. And I can’t speak for any of them, but the way that I’ve been approaching my work has had a very anti-capitalist intent. Narrative arcs are reminiscent of the puritan work ethic, this idea that you find success or satisfaction through labor and accomplishment. That kind of economic climbing, pulling up by your bootstraps. Whereas a lot these recent experimental projects are more liken to Karl Schoonover’s idea of the wastrel. This figure meandering through the landscape with no progress or achievement. It’s often associated with slow cinema, but I think it works here as well.
Q: It seems as though you view resolution as decadence.
A: I love that word. I’ve been slipping it into everyday conversation. Referring to shit as decadent. I love it. But yes. I don’t want endings. I want movement, but not from point A to point B, just movement within a space. If that makes sense. I kind of talked about this recently in a review of mine I wrote about John Trefry’s new novel, Apparitions of the Living, where I talk about the labor of that book. It’s not the labor of progression, but of constructing the imagery of a scene. It’s a book that knows that words aren’t inherently present on the page. They must be written, they must be constructed. And I think that’s been a big part of this experimental thing, too, is knowing that the stuff on the page doesn’t just exist, you have to build the book yourself.
Q: What I thought was interesting about your review was that you chose to write it in these segments. Kind of like how the book was written.
A: Yeah (laughs). That was kind of self-indulgent on my part. I repurposed some of the vocabulary he used (bricabrac, cataplasm, mien, etc.) and used it in the review to talk about the qualities of the book. There was a good tweet I saw, I can’t remember who posted it, but it went along the lines of: if you don’t think your reviews are your art, then you’re doing a bad job. So I’ve tried to treat these reviews as another part of my bibliography. I don’t want them to be these dispassionate attempts at networking or whatever bullshit. I want them to be equally as important as my fiction / poetry.
Q: Reviews are complicated, there’s a lot of politics behind the politics...
A: I’m always ambivalent about bad reviews as a concept--at least in the small press community. Like if the work is problematic, if it’s racist, homophobic, transphobic, that’s a reason. That’s valid. But if it’s just a matter of me thinking your prose is shit, then why bother? I’ve only been writing reviews for books that I enjoy. My philosophy has been to request review copies for books that work in an unconventional space and say something that I think is interesting. Maybe the right way to put it is that I approach these reviews as more ekphrastic and critical. I’m going to talk about facets of the text that did something unconventional or that have an interesting ideology tied to them--i.e. certain representations of duration or urban modernity or whatever else.
Q: You can definitely see these values in your work. It’s not often that abstract is made accessible. What’s more, in the process of doing this you didn’t alienate too many people - a difficult task within the genre.
A: Thank you. The jump from Man, Oh Man! is so unexpected. You don’t pick up Gut Text after reading Man, Oh Man! and think, ahh yes, this is what I expected to come next. So, I’m happy the reaction isn’t: Mike’s gone crazy; but instead: this is a solid project that was put together purposefully.
https://www.1111press.com/blog/interview-w-mike-corrao





Mike Corrao, Man, Oh Man, Orson's Publishing, 2018.
http://www.mikecorrao.com/
Read Excerpt


Two patrons appear in a dim cafe one day. How they've arrived, where they've come from, and why they're there at all, they have no idea. What they do know is that they hate one another.
So they smoke. They tinker. They talk about art. They talk about waiting. They talk about talking. They talk about talking about talking. They talk about the strange messages coming through the radio. They talk about the even stranger guests who arrive, only to disappear a moment later. And as they fall deeper and deeper into this hysteria, what's uncovered might just make these two unlikely protagonists the most human of us all.
Mike Corrao has with Man, Oh Man masterly crafted a humorous yet insightful experiment that'll have you questioning how you've always approached novels.






Corrao has perfected the rhythm of the irreal text. It's very much philosophy. But then it’s also a lot French Literature. There’s the smoking of cigarettes. Conversations cut short by banal-like descriptors. Most of the time tho, there's just a lot of inhaling of smoke and the novel being (very) aware it is a novel.
The story does not become more surreal. It begins irreal. In a pseudo-telepathic way, Carrao effectively trains the reader to anticipate that which cannot be anticipated. You'll begin reading with a few questions. And then you'll end with even more questions. This is all perfect.
I do not know what the cigarettes stand for in this book. And I do not know if the two men (Man and Oh Man) are human. What I do know is that a certain rhythm exists. The last time I experienced such a rhythm, it was during my viewing of the very excellent film My Dinner with Andre (1981). You become lost in the irreal and accept it for what it is, even if you do not completely understand what it is trying to tell you.
Samuel Beckett, at one point, makes an appearance. Samuel Beckett appears as an entity on a table. The fact that Samuel Beckett makes an appearance and appears as an entity on a table (and says absolutely nothing) says a lot. Man Oh Man knows what it is, and it is saying, “I know what I am. And I know that you think you know what I am. But I am telling you I am really not what you think I am. I am something else.”
Certainly a tonne to think about it. Five out of five, basically. - Mike Kline
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show?id=2413744404