5/6/19

Steve Weiner - a nightmarish, hallucinogenic quest novel. It crackles with a strange, hypnotic energy. Mixing Catholic mysticism, the brutal reality of the Canadian physical, psychic and cultural landscape, the novel defies description. It is reminiscent of the strange bildungsromans of Hesse, Genet, and Kafka

Image result for Steve Weiner, The Museum of Love,
Steve Weiner, The Museum of Love,  Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
read it at Google Books
 
This story traces the journey of a young French Canadian across the top of North America. It is a darkly magical world through which Jean-Michel travels, a blend of brutality and the supernatural, black humour and tenderness, with intrusions of the surreal.


Jean-Michel Verhaeren, an adolescent in a depressed French-Canadian town on the shores of Lake Superior, is the protagonist of this bizarre but impressive first novel. Jean's father is an unemployed prison guard; his mother, a morphine addict who has divine visions, is a janitor at a nursing home; and his brother, Ignace, is well on his way to becoming a saint. The Verhaerens are truly a strange lot--and Jean is as strange as any of them. He's the leader of a gang of not-quite-hoodlums, an obsessive when it comes to the subject of death and a fellow whose sexual orientation, as a friend puts it, is to ``butter his bread on both sides.'' When Jean burns down a wing of his Catholic school, he's sent to the reformatory, where the British boys beat and abuse him. Weiner's prose is lucid and startling, and he avoids the fey, New Age tendencies of many practitioners of magic realism, instead forging an industrial, fire-and-brimstone variety whose surreal imagery is spare and shocking. But the novel is relentless in its bleakness, and the mix of disparate elements--spirits taking flight as birds, contrasted with the grim Acadian setting--proves not to be as felicitous as one would expect. - Publishers Weekly

A hellish journey--through a heartland of 50's America bizarrely transformed as if by a series of lightning flashes--is undertaken by a youth too calculating to be innocent yet a victim worthy of pity: a savagely stark debut by Vancouver-based Weiner. Summary inadequately represents such a tale steeped in bile and bitterness, but the plot's main elements are similar, featuring death and visions of decay to palpable excess. The boy, Jean-Michel Verhaeren, lives in crumbling St. Croix on the frigid north shore of Canada's Georgian Bay. His father is a sadistic prison guard, his mother an ex-convent girl with a tenuous grip on reality, his brother Ignace an albino with a religious bent. Jean, one leg stunted, has a place among these misbegotten, but he bears the additional burden of being effeminate. He attracts admirers only to drive them to suicide through his fickleness, while his father is arraigned for fatally abusing a black inmate. Jean goes to reform school for arson, but is released; he then runs away to the US after being a party to Ignace's drowning, beginning a series of adventures that leads him steadily southward. He keeps the company of Albanians, bums, blacks, the zealous, and the lame, hearing their stories, and visits surreal museums of orphans, love, and death. Along the way, he reunites briefly with his parents, watching his father die in Missouri and his mother dissolve into the Caribbean, before founding his own museum in Haiti, where nÇgritude, so vital to his family's fortunes, can be properly pondered. Compelling in its singleness of purpose--to touch corruption in all its guises--this also reaches the dark, despairing heart of the American dream in a way that few other recent stories have. - Kirkus Reviews

Like the whimsical/ repulsive image from a Brothers Quay film that graces the cover, The Museum of Love is a nightmarish, hallucinogenic quest novel. It crackles with a strange, hypnotic energy. Mixing Catholic mysticism, the brutal reality of the Canadian physical, psychic and cultural landscape, the novel defies description. It is reminiscent of the strange bildungsromans of Hesse, Genet, and Kafka. In an era of PC, cookie-cutter fiction, The Museum of Love  is deliberate, surrealist and elusive. The protagonist is homosexual, but you won’t find a “feel-good” resolution. And Weiner’s black, bleak humor and startling imagery raises the book above any simple explaination. Having the logic of a dream, the tension of a suspense novel, horror strong enough make Stephen King look like a wimp, and the depth of Joyce is hard to pull off. Adapted from my Amazon review in 1996
craiglaurancegidney.com/2013/07/06/books-i-wish-id-written-the-museum-of-love-by-steve-weiner/


THE ONLY thing that's simple about The Museum of Love is the writing. 'I was Jean-Michel Verhaeren. I was Catholic. I was 12 years old and wore a red and black hunting jacket. My hair was brushed up in front. I had a speech impediment.' But the picture the writing creates is rather more blurred. By way of stylistic orientation, try to imagine Gunter Grass, Jeanette Winterson and Jack Kerouac convening at a computer keyboard to spin a fantastical yarn about death, gender and down-and-outs on the great American road: 'The Tin Drum Sexes the Cherry on the Road'. Any help?
Weiner studied writing at the University of California and moved on to film animation. The Museum of Love may be a work of fiction, but one artistically closer to the latter discipline than the former. Weiner throws in all the basic ingredients of the rites-of-passage first novel: boy feels alienated from incomprehensible parents, boy can't get the right girl, boy runs away in search of the good life. It's the side order that sets it apart: boy has hallucinations, boy has boyfriends, boy is on good terms with death; possibly, boy is death.

The book starts off weirdly, and then gets weirder. Jean-Michel is growing up in a French-Canadian backwater on the shore of Lake Superior. In St Croix, where the presence of a priest and a prison would seem to indicate some sort of conventional moral code, it's not just the native Americans that are out of the ordinary.
Jean-Michel's father is a psychotic prison officer who hoards murder weapons, his mother a pretty, devout fruitcake, his brother an albino cripple. Our hero, with a speech impediment, a feminine manner and a tendency to go in for tonsil-hockey with his own sex, is the normal one. The problem is that his partners all commit suicide.

Understandably upset by this, and by the oppressive oddness of his parents, Jean-Michel takes to the road and tries out different lives. 'I was an Ojibway,' he says at the beginning of one chapter, 'I became a sailor' in another.
Pretty soon, though, he's back with his parents, who commit him to a reform school, and he only escapes by conferring sexual favours on a visiting colonel from the French Foreign Legion. No sooner is he back than he unwittingly urges his brother Ignace to drown himself, and then he's off again on a pan-continental odyssey in which he becomes a hobo, a derelict, a Negro, etc. On his travels he discovers that if he thought he had it bad, the social orphans he comes across, all of whom get the chance to tell their story, have got it worse.
Wherever he fetches up he visits the local museum, each one dedicated to death or suicide or religion or love. They confirm that life is a grim, phantasmagoric affair. The road also teaches him that you can't escape your parents, who somehow follow him around North Ameria. In the last chapter Jean-Michel becomes a prison guard, like his dead father before him.
As will by now be obvious, The Museum of Love defies summary. It is formulaic but also makes free with the constrictions of time, and it commutes between reality and a whole bunch of other-worldly scenarios. Blurb writers usually reach for the usual adjectival suspects, 'magical', 'surreal', 'dark'; but other words they could usefully have chosen might include 'baffling', 'preposterous' and 'smart-arsed'. Jean-Michel is a deranged reworking of a venerable literary figure - a kind of Everymadman. As with most demented outcasts you need to be superhumanly patient to want to keep him company. - Jasper Rees


I dreamed I rose on an ostrich of white plumes and wore a Chinese gown embroidered with my sins. The clouds parted and I flew into a corridor of pyramids and obelisks. I sailed over the Nile of death. At the base of the Sudan mountains alter boys swung censers billowing smoke. A bishop interrogated me. I refused contrition. I fell. The air became dark, darker. I sank into St. Croix. ---The Museum of Love A passage in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers describes the torture of two Jesuit priests in 1649 by the Iroquois. Among other ordeals they are baptized with boiling water and given back a piece of their own rhetoric ". . . We baptize you, they laughed, that you may be happy in heaven. You told us that the more one suffers on earth, the happier he is in heaven." The incident is apparently found in old French Canadian schoolbooks. It could easily have been one of the lessons that Jean-Michael Verhaern, principle narrator of The Museum of Love, was forced to learn. The lesson could have gone so deep into Jean-Michael's consciousness that the sad and pathetic history of his family, his town, and all those around him became testimony for sainthood.
Jean is the son of a Swallowfield Prison guard who keeps a black museum of murder instruments, and an expelled nun who has frequent fits of hysteria and epilepsy. Jean runs a gang called les beuveurs: "The beuveurs played tru-madame, and sans egal and the Procuresse. I spread my cards: La Morte, Le Cadavre and the Prince Etranger." A new member is admitted to the gang after providing a fantastic and impossible confession. Jean slams down his fist and announces: he is admitted, because he told us fiction as though it was truth!
The histories begin in St. Croix, on Lake Superior. A town of "2535 people, two coal mines, a bowling alley, five churches and thirteen taverns." The town is segregated into Catholic, Protestant and Ojibway districts. Death visits them all.
Death came any time. Death came in corpse-sized bags the Ojibways unloaded from Norwegian freighters. Death came from the United States and was trucked to the towns of the north shore. When we heard the foghorns we crossed ourselves because we knew that le bon Dieu had washed his hands of somebody.
Death was in Rutherford Meadows, fixing a harrow. One could carry bags of meal to the barn and fall dead like the Basque boy Billy Sher. You could be reading the Diocesan Newsletter like Edmond Pic even in a portable toilet and die of a runaway truck. Death drove the newly-wed's boat, collecting flowers and money. Death beat the tambourine behind the Lamb of God. Death was a champion at la bataille. He beat the bowlegged priest Father Gregors, who died of lake fever in the spring.
Death hid in cupboards and dived out of steeples. He jumped from manholes and crouched in the ovens of the baker Freddy Granbouche. Death made no appointments. He walked into the Rutherford hospital any time like he owned the place.
The histories are often colloquial, like news imparted across the kitchen table. They have the visceral strength of a close account, as if they were told by the last surviving member of a family, conceding how each of the others had died.
Jean's life continues and is transformed by travel. The museums of Religion, Death, Suicide, and Negritude are each visited along the way. He becomes crippled and his physical appearance mutates as he descends a ladder of suffering. But the tone of his autobiographical narrative never wavers, even when the stories come out of the mouths of others: I was a sailor. I was an orphan. I was an Ojibway. I went insane. I was a hobo. I was a derelict. I was a Negro. I was a prison guard. Always the tone is nihilist black. Every site on the map that Jean Verhaern visits pushes back the cartography of failure, desperation, cruelty.
Yet the book is beautiful. Weiner's writing is exquisite and crafted to the point of brilliance. There is lyricism in suffering. There is a rare adoration growing through the cracks and fissures of wrecked human destiny. Jean-Michael sings with the voice of an angel with its throat cut. The book has a kind of sensual madness about it that is all pervasive, making the passages move with a brutal and hallucinogenic ecstasy.
Welcome to The Museum of Love. Here one views the relics of human lives through the broken jewel cases of religion. The lighting is poor and suspicious, of the kind that might be used to illuminate penny automata, or bad vaudeville. The relics are corrupt and the exhibits dysfunctional. Dust grows and the masking tape hardens to a brittle brown. Outside, a billboard is painted in the worst and the brightest colours of holy advertising. The museum could be an orphaned circus freak show or a box cast aside by Joseph Cornell on the verge of madness.
The Museum of Love is Steve Weiner's first novel. He was born in 1947 and grew up in central Wisconsin. Later, he moved west and studied writing at the University of California. He currently lives in Vancouver where he is working on a second novel. - Tim McLaughlin
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/eppp-archive/100/202/300/newreader/newreader-final/Readers/Archive/1994Fall/museum.html


A HUMAN heart, beating on the sidewalk, warns a young boy to "watch what you're doing" as he slips it into his pocket. A Roman Catholic saint, seen in a vision, invites his supplicant: "Fly with me." Death itself turns up and sits down to a game of poker.
"Who is this guy?" his opponent asks. "He's damn good!"
No, this isn't the latest book from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but an extraordinary debut novel from a Vancouver-based writer, Steve Weiner. Set on the northern shores of Lake Superior in the 1950's, "The Museum of Love" juggles family conflict, ethnic tension and homoerotic longing, using them as fuel for its fever dream. Strangers and drifters, each more exotic than the next, collar the narrator and tell him their stories. Museums of love, death, religion and negritude are visited in an addled yet urgent quest for a sense of self.
The result is a delectably dour brand of Great Lakes magic realism, written in a prose that manages to be both terse and hallucinatory. Grimly witty, the novel's high-speed pageant of lust and loss is as painful as shrapnel, yet extraordinarily seductive and sublime. Mr. Weiner's fictional world has an affinity with the work of the writers Ben Okri and J. G. Ballard, the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and the film makers Guy Maddin and Todd Haynes. But he is, one suspects, less a disciple of these latter-day Surrealists than a kindred spirit. Employing a dream logic that taps directly into the unconscious, he pushes narrative to the outer limits of what it can do.
"The Museum of Love" does have a story of sorts, though it serves less as a framework for the book than a loom on which to weave increasingly extravagant variations. The 12-year-old narrator, Jean-Michel Verhaeren, lives in the coal-mining town of St. Croix, Ontario, with his French Canadian family. His father is a prison guard who loses his job when he tortures a black Jamaican inmate to death. Jean-Michel's mother -- "illiterate, but a fine Catholic woman" -- is given to visions and hysteria. His older brother, Ignace, eager for sainthood, studies with the Jesuits in Winnipeg.
Image result for Steve Weiner, Sweet England,
Steve Weiner, Sweet England, New Star Books, 2016.

Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post–Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence.
The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in incidental details. Replete with episodes of manic religion and delusions, the world in Sweet England is hard, dark, and dangerous. Exploitation and violence provide a steady background glow that illuminates Jack's relationship with Brenda, with whom he is living, drinking, brawling, and loving.
Weiner's London is equally a protagonist of his story. Dirty, sombre, the city is a palimpsest, the contemporary curry houses and mosques reinscribing the landscape dotted with old churches, monuments and graveyards that invoke old England's Christian saints and glorious past.
Phantasmagoric and allegorical, and told largely through dialogue, Sweet England's vision will haunt the reader long after they put down this compelling book.
Image result for Steve Weiner, Sweet England,

Steve Weiner, The Yellow Sailor, The Overlook Press, 2002.

This extraordinary novel, moodily operatic in tone and by turns hallucinatory and brilliantly detailed, follows the trajectories of four sailors and the owner of a German merchant ship, Yellow Sailor, which sets sail from Bremen in 1914. After the ship wrecks in shallow water, the men drift their separate ways, with each man's journey across a desolate wartime European landscape becoming an exploration of the failure of love, sex, religion, and friendship. Julius Bernai, owner of the ship and frankly homosexual, checks into an institute for nervous disorders and falls in love with the doctor's fiancée. Nicholas Bremml drifts: from the beds of numerous prostitutes to an oil tanker called Erwartung— Expectation—to Prague's Jewish market, where he sells magic spells. Brothers Karl and Alois are equally rudderless, and Jacek, the electrician, goes to work in the mines, where his love advice to a fourteen-year-old Polish boy precipitates a macabre murder.

Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post–Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re–enter society after a long and unexplained absence.
The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in incidental details. Replete with episodes of manic religion and delusions, the world in Sweet England is hard, dark, and dangerous. Exploitation and violence provide a steady background glow that illuminates Jack's relationship with Brenda, with whom he is living, drinking, brawling, and loving.
Weiner's London is equally a protagonist of his story. Dirty, sombre, the city is a palimpsest, the contemporary curry houses and mosques reinscribing the landscape dotted with old churches, monuments and graveyards that invoke old England's Christian saints and glorious past.
Phantasmagoric and allegorical, and told largely through dialogue, Sweet England's vision will haunt the reader long after they put down this compelling book. - www.newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=1554200555


Several German sailors wander through Europe after a shipwreck in Weiner's murky, surreal second novel (after Museum of Love), set at the beginning of WWI. The novel opens with the demise of the Yellow Sailor, a merchant ship from Bremen that runs aground in shallow water on the East Prussian coast, leaving the protagonists lost and adrift in the war-torn landscape. The primary focus falls on Nicholas Bremml, a moody 19-year-old with a sardonic, romantic streak. He drifts from woman to woman and falls in love with a prostitute while working on an oil tanker, then ends up selling magic charms on the Jewish black market before enlisting in a Czech regiment. The fate of Julius Bernai, the shady, gay owner of the ship, is no less checkered. He exploits his power over the local soldiers to maintain his position until he finally has a nervous breakdown and falls in love with a doctor's fianc‚e. Several other crewmen have similar problems rebuilding their fractured lives, most notably the ship's electrician, who becomes involved in a bizarre murder. Most of the novel follows their meanderings as they try to make sense of the grotesque parody of normal life in which they find themselves adrift, with Weiner tending toward the dreamlike and macabre in his imagery and scene construction. He pelts readers with short, staccato sentences throughout: "They had a schnapps. It was time to go. Sedez dressed. Sedez bowed. Sedez left." Many passages offer striking visuals and decadent plot twists, but there are also plenty of scenes that fail to rise above the level of vivid sketches. Bremml's disconnected story is the closest Weiner comes to a coherent subplot, and despite the potential offered by the setting and the period, some readers may find themselves bewildered by the lack of narrative coherence. - Publishers Weekly

In 1914, the German freighter Yellow Sailor, owned by Julius Bernai, sails from Hamburg. Among its crew are four men: Nicholas Bremml, Jacek Gorecki, and brothers Karl and Alois Dach. Shortly after, through mishap, the ship sinks in the Gulf of Danzig, yet they make it ashore. Thus begins the story of their interwoven journeys as they drift through a war-ravaged Europe searching for life’s purpose. The main storyline focuses on nineteen-year-old Nicholas as he wanders from prostitute to prostitute in search of love. Jacek, avoiding numerous disasters, achieves his goal of landing a job in a mine. Karl and Alois stumble from one misadventure into another, both together and separately, sometimes barely escaping with their lives. The story also weaves in the adventures of Julius, who, although avowedly homosexual, falls in love with a doctor’s fiancée after checking himself into a hospital for nervous disorders.
Weiner’s novel is dreamlike and surreal which mirrors both the physical and mental landscape of this era. At times, the narrative along with relentless staccato sentences can be jarring; still it is a fresh, if trying, examination of a hallucinatory chapter in history. - historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-yellow-sailor/


Four men meet on a merchant ship in 1914. The ship is rammed by a passenger liner. Each man falls from the sinking wreck into war-confused Prussia, wandering. Some of the men meet again. One of them meets the wealthy owner of the ship, a dandy. This, more or less, is the thin plot of The Yellow Sailor, but don't think for a moment that the book doesn't go out on a limb. With thrumming narrative rhythm, the novel offers a raw, wretched, and erotic side of life not often depicted in official culture or the polite books of Oprah's list. With a kind of impressionistic, cinematic style that makes constant quick cuts in time and place, novelist Weiner takes risks that other writers don't, or can't.
Not really about World War I, and not wholly about its four main characters either, this work dispenses with fictional conventions like detailed plot and characters who "grow" to supply the reader with a rich, disturbing vision of the world, both as it existed in the previous century and, by extrapolation, as it is now. Absent is the kind of transparent historical reportage you might expect of a novel set during wartime (cf. The Good Soldier, one more?). Instead, The Yellow Sailor (the name of the ship where the main characters, Karl, Alois, Nicholas, and Jacek meet) offers innumerable Bosch-like detail of the desperate lives of poor folk during wartime and their oddities and perversions. The book's details accrue to more than the sum of it parts; glossy, freakish cameo characters jump out of the work, then disappear into its roiling surface. The fact that a contemporary Western author chooses to set his work in hardscrabble rural Ukrainian and Bavarian villages, industrial German cities, and Polish shtetls is interesting and disjointing in itself. Somewhere, in the lines of this book's gritty imagery, Weiner seems to be telling us that no matter how much money you have or what era you live in, desperation is the basic state of affairs. Our era's weird, jumpy, entrepreneurial landscape of shopping malls, feverish marketing campaigns, and jolly-rolling sports vehicles certainly doesn't exempt us from such desperation. Weiner, who wrote the painful and dark-textured The Museum of Love (1995), takes the WWI period and sets it behind his characters, like a thick scrim. With the Great War's gore-sticky impact affecting each paragraph, he jaggedly traces the characters' movements, though there is little sense to their wanderings. The four men are neither noble heroes nor victimized underdogs: Each meet ignorance, violence, and intimacy in the world and respond clumsily, sometimes stupidly, sometimes understandably. Conversations are soaked in a liquor of dark theatric and erotic energy. Men are crowded tableside, mingling with coarse laughter, jokes, odorous food, and sensuality. "Poles, Belgians, Mecklenburgers, Pomeranians, Silesians, spoke mix-German. White slave transporters looked for factors girls. A composer from the Great Fleet strolled drunkenly into a post. Austrian schillings, English pounds, rubles, guilders, kronen, reischsmarks, and Belgian francs circulated. Alois toasted. To the Kaiser!' The Dach brothers drank. They put their arms around each other. They sang. It would be reductive to call The Yellow Sailor "gay fiction," but like The Museum of Love, its themes hover around male-male bonds. Except for one brief sex scene and other scenes involving the wealthy and openly gay ship owner, Julius Bernai, Weiner usually depicts male-male interest and desire from oblique, indirect angles. The approach is interesting and complicated, and echoes the mute way the characters apprehend their own desires. But like the world depicted here, the characters' desires are volatile and inconstant in general (gay Bernai winds up stricken with love for a woman; a Polish boy murders the young girl he woos, drags her coffin through the mountains, then joins the military). Relationships are like scantly tasted silver mirages that turn to powdered rust; characters are not knowable or predictable. But readers may feel release and liberation in sharing Weiner's aching observations and vision of life. Publishers Weekly, with its usual depth and insight, called The Yellow Sailor "murky," with a "lack of narrative coherence." Interpret this to mean the book is innovative. I was able to follow its progress and economical scenes without difficulty, and found its dense depiction of central European cultural politics fascinating. These pages almost smell of the briny esculence of Munich hotel rooms, of mossy, mildewed cabins in the Harz Mountains. The narrative's short, rolling sentences can convey a sense of emotional numbness or shock: "The market was crowded. Poles ate doughnuts. Carnival masks moved down Krakowa Street: Karawal, Death, Marzanna. A man sold a pig in a barrel of honey. A brass band played. Stall sellers yelled. 'Beautiful milk!' 'Hot ham!' 'Little buns!' An old man walked forward but leaned backward: Polish wodka. Polish paramilitary came by. 'Poland!' They yelled at the Germans. 'A free country!'" The book is built upon thick biers of dialogue, and the sound of European languages: German, Polish, Silensic, Yiddish English, French. Weiner's ear finds brutish music in shouted obscenities and insults; his timing is Swiss precision. These gifts are apparent in long dialogues that trim away all but the strongest, most muscled words, leaving the reader with verbal exchanges that are almost "pure" (a condition which, The Yellow Sailor seems to argue through its cacaphony of cultures, does not exist). Its imagery of bunkers of sweating, swearing men, stinky and violent, alongside the descriptions of the spoiled and privileged Bernai, point to the ghastly gap between wealth and poverty. The fact that Bernai breaks down at book's end from loving a woman (the fiance´e of a doctor he tries to seduce), is a wonderful choice, and expresses the enormous messiness of human experience--the fact that labels of sexuality can never adequately contain or describe our lives. Weiner also has the savvy to suggest that sexuality, for many people, is subservient to convenience, economic privilege, and the vagaries of cultural politics. Like much good fiction, The Yellow Sailor is cruel. I certainly would avoid reading it while hunkering down to a meal of rotini and sauce. Instead, read it in one long, fitful draught before bed; its pungent imagery will linger in your mind for a long time. - Stacey Levine
https://www.portlandmercury.com/books/the-yellow-sailor/Content?oid=26106

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