I hardly know how to describe my astonishment at coming across this beautifully designed little book, and reading the opening pages. It was like recognizing a face I'd never seen before. This book is a most ambitious, strange, funny foray into giving life to the floating undercurrents that we all feel as we go through our daily lives. Gerdes accomplishes this with techniques ranging from a sort of holy science fiction to a condition of prose that I can only call beautiful madness. Yet he isn't just playing--he's trying to remind you of how you yourself feel when you conscious mind is just barely on the verge of noticing that, let's say, the whole time you've been listening to your wife's voice, you've been equating it on some other level to a world of rivers, music, light-projections, and memories of things that did and did not happen to you. This book should be considered a travelling permit in realms that are just at your fingertips. Besides, it's damned funny!

I didn't know how to read this at first but when I stuck with it it became cooler and cooler--a really great book.

Here is a book that I wish could be mailed out to everybody who ever complained about the supposed coldness and formalism of "experimental fiction." Mr. Gerdes' novel reads like the wind--it is, after all, essentially a single, extended, dreamlike chase scene--and it does indeed have the New Fiction quality of a tremendous freedom in character (whereby any character can be whatever he at that moment seems to be to the perception of the narrator)--but it also has the soul to convey anguish. The narrator is trapped in a corner, emotionally, and even with all the exuberance of style and wing-ding plot, Gerdes never loses the purpose of his book, which is to take us into his main character's grief, and allow us to share it.

I read this after reading Projections and was surprised to find that this is really easy to read. The other one was really weird and very cool. This one is every bit as cool, but not nearly as weird. Makes me want to go visit Austin. A great story all around.

Wow! What a book! The story here is a really interesting one, and the strange typography experiments only help this work. It's very funny--it kept me laughing throughout the book. It's like the typography of Apollinaire (or the Futurists or the Concretists) being used to extend the wit of someone like Donald Barthelme. A great book. I recommend it highly to everyone interested in more than forcefed babyfood fiction. Plus this is in a beautiful edition--it's lavish. My pick for book of the year!