This experimental, challenging fiction simultaneously tenders a trenchant critique of the materialism of contemporary American society while attempting to draw the reader to the grounds of psyche, experience, and culture where mythology and spirituality originate. Like other works referring to Homer's epic, Perez's ODYSSEY has the form of a journey; except in this case, the course and the end of the journey is imprecise with the author seeking to instigate tricky and profound spiritual transformation. Landmarks and stages are not distinct in Perez's ODYSSEY strewn with imgages and allusions. There are evident geographical references however, which are also images. The text moves from The Desert of Part I to The Arctic of Part II, with corresponding imagery, incidents, and developments in each part; also, each part is divided into a number of "Plateaus" which mark the poet/narrator's progress to higher levels of consciousness and awareness. PEREZ'S WORK IS DIFF! ICULT AND BOUNTIFUL, A MIX OF SCIENCE FICTION AND POETRY, A DISTINCTIVE WORK OF PSYCHOLOGY AND IMAGINATION. --THE SMALL PRESS BOOK REVIEW

Reviews of The Odyssey: by Rolando Perez

...Work of this sort can and help liberate us from obsolete structures and strictures toward the ultimate freedom of expression that is the artist's Eden...

DAVID HOPPER ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL

...Picture the childlike innocence of Italo Calvino's early tales, ballasted by an alineation that invokes the lost souls of Beckett... JOHN STRAUSBAUGH NEW YORK PRESS

...Perez's journey is fable, but a modern one, discontinous and interactive, the connective tissues left out...The Odyssey is an original book...

JAMES GRAHAM HUNGRY MIND REVIEW

Rolando Perez is a big green fish swimming in opal waters, and this book, THE ODYSSEY (not to be confused with any of those other vacation guides), will teach you how to swim -- backwards and forwards -- simultaneously. On the other hand, it's a very dangerous book that should be kept out of the hands of the doll-makers and the kind of people who wake up before their alarms go off

The Lining Of Our Souls: Excursions Into Selected Paintings Of Edward Hopper is an impressive and memorable work by Rolando Perez whose short literary vignettes enhance a showcasing of selected paintings of American artist Edward Hopper which are reproduced in full color. Perez weaves a brief prose vignette story about each work, fleshing out motives and mysteries hidden within the canvas. The art focuses largely on ordinary people doing everyday things and living their lives, making the mundane memorable in unforgettable brush strokes. The Lining Of Our Souls is very highly recommended reading, especially for admirers of Edward Hopper's artwork and Rolando Perez's literary talents.

On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis Review by Patrick Frank ANARCHY: A Journal of Desire ON AN(ARCHY) AND SCHIZOANALYSIS by ROLANDO PEREZ (Autonomedia, POB 568, Brooklyn, NY. 11211-0568, 1990) 144pp. $10.00 paper.

A guide to personal liberation, an effort to show us how to ``recognize the many faces of fascism in everyday life,'' and to ``live as a human being independent of the morality of exclusive binary oppositions, foundations, and institutions,'' this book sets a tall task for itself. Some interesting and valuable lines of thought are picked up, but most are not carried far enough.

Perez takes as inspiration the musings of Antonin Artaud, the postmodern psychoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,and the later Nietzsche's rants. These sources are explored and quoted at some length, but without nearly enough commentary.

Perez stays entirely too close to them, skimming their seductive surfaces and jumping from one to the other in rapid- fire succession. Perez is one of the few anarchist writers who takes postmodernism seriously, and he is right to find support in Deleuze and Guattari. Their decentered, schizoid brand of analysis can be extremely helpful to Perez's vision of ``free,uncoded individuals,'' yet this overdue rapprochement with postmodern thought is only haltingly done and needs further treatment. I hope he devotes his next book to this subject.

He uses Artaud, rightly, to answer Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. This is not difficult to do if you mistrust the pomo thinkers' emphasis on the text and linguistic mediation; Artaud's primordial shrieks are a decided tonic to the pomo ``prisonhouse of language.'' Yet some postmodern ideas are oversimplified here.For example, nowhere in Barthes is ``the text now made God,'' as Perez claims; this is a flip denunciation.

Perez's analysis of the capitalist state, with its constant spectacles and appropriation of oppositional forms, is basic post-Situationist boilerplate. His program of resistance is thoroughly individualized, as he strongly believes that the revolution must first occur within each of us ``desiring-machines'' (his term, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari). This makes some sense, but I wonder if this focus on the individual, while it seems a reasonable response to the oppression of the spectacle, isn't also partly an outgrowth of the same detested society, with its shattering of the social web into an amorphous mass of self-gratifying individuals. Maybe his revolutionary individuality is only a warp-speed version of today's consumerism.

He worries about the future role of art, and hopes for the day that art will escape hierarchical authority by ``becoming a-signifying.'' What this means is nowhere clearly stated, and his examples (Cage, Bukowski, cummings, Tzara) are, again, common currency. The book concludes with a meditation on the future role of women, and Perez rounds up the usual suspects (Freud, Sartre, phallocentrism) and shoots them with many of feminism's familiar bullets. Here as elsewhere, one can hardly quarrel with this book's basic thrust; its ideas could be developed further.

On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis Rolando Perez Autonomedia $8.00 A book on recognizing and combating the fascism of everyday capitalist life. Perez gets into Neitzsche, psychology, our shared experience of pop/consumer culture and more, without making his points impossible to understand. --EXTREME BOOKS DISTRIBUTION