- - - - Copyright The Vesallus Vernacular
- - - - When you break up with someone, sometimes you do crazy things. Wendell, a man whose job is writing interoffice memos, was dumped by his girlfriend (Marge). So Wendell fell in love with a lemon. This is the plot of Lemon, the novel by Lawrence Krauser, and it seems a little absurd at first, but let me explain. When you pick up the book, you notice something: the cover is strange. It looks amateurish, with a strange design and maybe a LEMON stamp here or there. That's because Krauser hand-decorated all 10,000 copies of his book in a small warehouse in Brooklyn. He had a pen, some stamps, a marker, and lots of ink. So he did every book differently, with a sketch, a stamp, or a phrase written on it. This attention to detail; to the personal; to the intimate process of looking at or holding something is like the book itself. Krauser shapes the story through his use of langauge, beginning the love affair between Wendell and the lemon slow, with the feel, the shape, the small fineness of the lemon that rests on Wendell's desk. Krauser has an immense gift for words, and he slowly brings the love affair into focus. Wendell comes to be more sane, more clear in his love than those around him. Obviously, things go bad: Wendell loses money, his apartment, his health, and alienates all around him. But the lemon is there. The purity of its presence is a source of comfort and sanity. Lawrence Krauser is a musician and a playwright. So it makes sense to say that Lemon is much like a song with Krauser's prose as sound; the light, airy, crystalline language that brings itself up, finds a rhythm, runs beautifully and swiftly—and yet turns on itself, makes changes, deviations, asides, and small stories within the story. Indeed, in Lemon, there are episodic anomolies, poetry, song, and enjambed meta-plots which give more hints of detail and love of telling a story. It's not a long book, but Krauser gives such good detail to the timing and rhythm of the words (no doubt with a playwright's sense of tension) that every page sheds the excess nothingness that many books are filled with, and gets to talking about those things that should matter to understanding the plot. Many of the minuets resemble Samuel Beckett's works, with bits of absurdity, like lemon poetry, or the person who works next to Wendell and speaks only in limericks. I love this book. It's published by good people for a relatively cheap price. The author never takes himself too seriously, or if he does, he makes a witty comment about taking oneself too seriously. Lemon is a book about love, and not about love. You learn a lot, and not just about fruits or relationships, but also about what it is to be in a world that doesn't understand you. - - - -
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