The Town Manager

[Nemonymous]

THE TOWN MANAGER - Carnes – Né Scar? – ends with a potential scar, ie DUSTROY TROLY branded into his chest. Echoing the ‘sabbaticals’ in PURITY, the Town Manager is a single entity perhaps but with a series of ‘ ‘ ‘wrapping’ between each version of himself, which makes it even more significant when the (self-knowingly undependable) Narrator eventually emerges from the last sabbatical as this very entity during a ‘Twin Peaks’ like coffee shop scene.
This story is overtly an extended metaphor for the Credit Crunch with a version of the Town Manager giving a ‘fiscal stimulus’ like Gordon Brown ‘saving the world’ – which makes the “He has left us” horrific. Here the stimulus creates a fairground with a Kafkaesque lavatory-complex etc. Futility and degeneration, bleeding the town with each renewal of ‘fiscal stimulus’. The dead lamp at the beginning reminds me of the cordless TV in PURITY.
Less than overtly, however, the story is the (explicit) soup the Narrator feeds us. Mayonaisse, Salami, Eraserchest? At least we can survive the Meltdown on the bare ration of words, but if we can ‘enrichen’ the words into things-in-themselves or by making them into an even greater feast of literature for ourselves by revealing ‘nonsensical’ (as well as meaningful!) assonances and accretions, then so be it. And that’s what I call pure intention.
“We have to know.”

[Nemonymous]

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection, but without my having first re-read my own real-time review of it in 2008:

THE TOWN MANAGER

"In the past, no town manager had ever been found, either alive or dead, once he had gone missing and the light in his office had been turned off."

This is the ultimate existential Tontine story but one where the Tontine's value declines or becomes more fabricated like a sideshow, as each Town Manager takes over from the previous one - creating here, at this book's publication date of 2006, an explicitly premonitory vision of the crucial 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing credit crunch (cf Leeman the Barber who later facilitated the Greek 'haircut'?)...





And CARNES the trolley driver with trolley 'CRANES'... Like a funfair contraption for impossibly pulling up impossible prizes of life and death with a clumsy leverage...
A maze of lavatories, too, with each system tapped into the next, the essential Ligottian Scatology of Eschatology -- followed by a futile search, each Town Manager starting off as a new broom, like history itself. (Have you noticed that major politicians, heads of state, film stars etc. used to be seen as icons, but today they are ordinary people, or worse...)
An entertainingly absurdist vision with a force that makes it believable and frightening like that earlier syphoning of purity with the plumbing of impurity, all ended by a potentially endless möbius strip ending of this story as a beginning that I had not noticed before. An endlessness that represents a hope - or a despair that is worsened by the very existence of that hope?

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

This is an extract from my current on-going review of the TEATRO GROTTESCO collection, but without my having first re-read my own real-time review of it in 2008: THE TOWN MANAGER "In the past, no town manager had ever been found, either alive or dead, once he had gone missing and the light in his office had been turned off." This is the ultimate existential Tontine story but one where the Tontine's value declines or becomes more fabricated like a sideshow, as each Town Manager takes over from the previous one - creating here, at this book's publication date of 2006, an explicitly premonitory vision of the crucial 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing credit crunch (cf Leeman the Barber who later facilitated the Greek 'haircut'?)... And CARNES the trolley driver with trolley 'CRANES'... Like a funfair contraption for impossibly pulling up impossible prizes of life and death with a clumsy leverage... A maze of lavatories, too, with each system tapped into the next, the essential Ligottian Scatology of Eschatology -- followed by a futile search, each Town Manager starting off as a new broom, like history itself. (Have you noticed that major politicians, heads of state, film stars etc. used to be seen as icons, but today they are ordinary people, or worse...) An entertainingly absurdist vision with a force that makes it believable and frightening like that earlier syphoning of purity with the plumbing of impurity, all ended by a potentially endless möbius strip ending of this story as a beginning that I had not noticed before. An endlessness that represents a hope - or a despair that is worsened by the very existence of that hope?

Rationale: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.ph...007#post123007