Sweet Snow

Sweet Snow

by Alexander J. Motyl

reviewed by Mykola Dementiuk

Much as Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago Alexander J. Motyl looks upon Soviet prisoners in his novel Sweet Snow but these prisoners are very different, since the year is 1933 and the worst enforced state famine, the Holodomer is tearing through the Ukraine while Stalin sits and smiles, smokes his cigarette and does absolutely nothing.

Four prisoners are being transported to the prison camps, a Jewish Communist from New York City, a German nobleman from Berlin, a Polish diplomat from Lwow, and Ukrainian nationalist from Vienna. But their Russian guards are notorious vodka drinkers who crash and overturn their transport truck until the guards are dead or dying, freeing the prisoners from their captives. And oh, what a freedom it is! The frozen wasteland of Siberia lies before them, an emptiness every which way they turn. Still scarred and shaken from the accident they start trudging their way back, whichever way that might be.

The description of the four surviving prisoners is grueling, even a few times this reader squirmed in revulsion from was being portrayed, lost men trying to make in back into life, if such a thing still exists.

Along their way they do come upon people, dead children holding on presumably their dead mothers, all emaciated, their bellies distended and dead of slow starvation. This is not a book for the careless, fickle reader but one who dares to look upon and learn what really went on at the time, mass organized starvation by the powers that be, the 1933 Soviet Elites.

I've read many of Motyl's books, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian and others, but never before did I read one such as this, Sweet Snow, showing him at his masterful powers as a writer.

Well done, Alexander Motyl, literary greatness is certainly yours!

Alexander Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. He is the author of five novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, and The Taste of Snow (forthcoming); his poems have appeared in Mayday, Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, Orion Headless, The Battered Suitcase, Red River Review, and New York Quarterly; his art­work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto and is on view at www.artsicle.com. Motyl teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in New York.

See review for Motyl's Flippancy click here

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My Life with Blondie, a review

My Life with Blondie

Cervena Barva Press

by Jiri Klobouk

reviewed by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

     Hey, drop everything Blondie is coming to town! That’s how Jiri Klobouk, author of My Date with Blondie, begins his comic/tragic novel about Harley Davidson, who has a thirty-three year love-infatuation with Blondie, singer/movie star and lover of his dreams, or so he thinks. Even though they’ve never met Harley now has the chance to finally come face to face with his idol, and he imagines settling down with her for the rest of their lives. But does Harley really stand a chance? And how much of this fantasy is real?

     Harley Davidson, yes, that’s his name, is a man in his fifties who has had this infatuation since his teens. Since his early days in Vienna when he first saw her picture in a movie magazine, holding onto the memory through war torn Vietnam, on to Germany where he got married (for the second time), into Portugal where Blondie lived her young years, and now eking out his life but always with the dream and vision of Blondie. Oh boy is he eager and ready for her! Even Harley’s current long time girlfriend Amanda, so he tells us, is just as eager to meet her. Still, Harley claims Amanda is upset because she lost her kitten Tiger and not because Blondie is so close nearby. Well, maybe…

     Harley is able to get his old job back at the Royal Arms Hotel, which he calls an old four story flop house but which Blondie is sure to visit, and in between Harley is faced with the daily problems of working in the hotel with his supervisors and fellow employees, who seem to have stepped out of a loony bin.

      McCarthy, owner of the hotel, comes back from Brazil and has the handyman Melvin, who cares for the hotel, build a Brazilian rain forest in the owner’s fourth floor room. Besides the gay hotel person Jacques and the chambermaid Ella the entire staff is there. And how they run the hotel, what a farce!

    Going back in time Harley was eighteen in Vienna when he got married to Ilona, an older girl whose parents had been tortured and killed by the Hungarians. Harley doesn’t care for her since he already is dreaming and waiting to meet Blondie, who he is certain he will get married to but instead he agrees with her offer of a proposal. They get married, or as another character says, Harley has a screw loose from the Vietnam War. And an old war buddy also asks, “(I)t could be a sign of some kind of mental disorder. Have you ever thought about that?”

     Harley was conceived on a Harley Davidson motorcycle as his parents went tearing around Europe at the time when the Jews were being butchered by the Nazis. And Harley finds out from an old librarian his parents were bank robbers desperate to get away from the Nazis. Harley’s life is just as messed up and confused as is the stigma he lives under, being in love with that vague chimera he has never met, Blondie.

     Still, he gets married to Ilona but after five years he separates from her and marries Helga in Frankfurt, Germany, a singer who is also a little nymphet escorted by her Canadian parents. But after they have a kid Harley leaves her but she quickly gets married to another man.

     For years Harley and his now-girlfriend Amanda have been seeing a psychiatrist, and Harley has high hopes for some kind of cure, but after falling in ‘love’ with Amanda it’s clear that she is as whacky as he is, apparently a bit of a nutcase, as one character says about him. Still they make a perfect couple except that he’s in love with the mystical Blondie, his stigma from the past.

     This is a sad/funny, moving novel. You can’t help but think about the guys you see wandering around town, living out their lives in menial jobs, with menial relationships, that is if they have any, and just existing from day to day. Well, I suppose they do have someone to love, for better or for worse. But where is their Blondie? Is she the one that away? I hope Harley finds her in his lunacy, and with a little something thrown in just to make life a tiny bit interesting, much like in the spit and vomit of this beautiful, fantastic happy novel. Hip hip hooray! Here’s to Harley, dream on!

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Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2013/Gay Erotica, 2009/Bisexual Fiction

Pleasure Trout

Pleasure Trout

by Gloria Mindak/Mindock

review by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

    When I approached this chapbook it was with a sense of trepidation after all it reminded me I had once taken a poetry class in college, Introduction to Poetry, reading the sonnets of Shakespeare, the verses of John Donne and the poetics of T.S. Eliot, and came out of it with a feeble grade of C for my efforts. I knew I would never try that again, I could never make any sense out of poetry. I shook my head and went on with my life. But over the years I did look into the words of Allen Ginsburg or the drunken works of Charles Bukowski, finding some comfort and solace therein, because they “spoke” to me unlike the others who “poetized” and never made any sense.

      So when I found out the Gloria Mindock had a new book coming out, “Pleasure Trout” I smiled and knew I was going to order it. Gloria is the founder/editor of Cervena Barva Press but I know of her from her bookstore The Lost Bookshelf, which carries a few copies of my Lambda Award winning novel “Holy Communion” amongst others in its racks. I eagerly opened her book, reading page by page, and becoming bemused, befuddled and totally lost. What the hell? Then I again read her introduction where she says, “Don’t try to understand what is written here. Just enjoy the nonsense.” Well, of course, if I had heard this thirty years ago my poetry class would come out different, it wouldn’t seem that bad at all. I laughed, because I love the language that poetry uses, the rhyme, the meter, the words, which I use daily anyway.

This baby is heaven and

this baby is something

you ain’t got

If Mindock used exclamation points her last sentence would demand it, I’m sure. That’s what I love, nonsensical poetry.

One day you feel dull

and uncharming

You are lying

Actually you are largely

undeveloped

cooked up out of

fiction

If you could write, you

would be absent on noise

Or,

My arms are a huge

stall to entangle

your pedal, your feet

If I get rough, I can

diagnose your pulsing

solitude

    

     Once you begin to stop looking for meanings, in its absence, a meaning will surely come. Just shut up and listen, I think.

Ok, so this is only a

thought, a tale, a struggle

not to cease

Hey, we have all out lives

     Thanks Gloria, who woulda thunk it, poetry appreciation this late in the game, you made a new poetry convert, that’s for sure! Love your book.

 Mick Mykola Dementiuk
http://dementiuk.weebly.com 
http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com
Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2013/Gay Erotica, 2009/Bisexual Fiction