Reviews & Intros
For Hunt's Novel (noir):
The Impossibly
Coffeehouse Press 2001
To Purchase:
www.coffeehousepress.org
www.powells.com
Metroactive.com
Book Review
By Traci Vogel
September 2002
INTO ONE TINY PIECE of the heart goes the sound of a footstep in childhood, falling on the front porch. Into another piece goes the fear of death in fire. All of these divisions help us make our way, without often collapsing, beneath the sword of paranoia, through the forest of details. Unless you are Laird Hunt. Laird Hunt has written a novel, but it is less a novel in the benign sense of the word than an accumulation of permanent shadows, of still unravished mysteries and the ever-changing wine list. The narrator, a man who finds himself drafted into "the organization," receives occult commandments from above. The commandments are often only one word long. He attempts to interpret and follow them: an apt metaphor for everyday life. Friends, enemies and co-conspirators wander through like gingerbread ciphers. There is violence, and there is the quashing of epiphany--sometimes by a blow to the narrator's head. His only consolation is fine food, and the descriptions of dinners waft up from the generalized prose with a piercing and soulful eloquence. The Impossibly has no plot. It refuses. What carries the reader through is instead a buoyed, rising tone of mystery--and the narrator's odd humor. The buoy of mystery promises some resolve, but the trick here is that the narrator is just as in the dark as the reader, and so the expected downward denouement gets readjusted by early and mystifying, but shrugged-off, retirement. And yet the mystery is addictive. Here, in Hunt's beautiful, curling sentences, one feels that an answer--perhaps armed--may lurk just around the corner.
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Jeffrey DeShell
Review of Contemporary FictionOne of the joys of book reviewing is the delight of coming across a brilliant book one might not normally read; one of the difficulties is trying
to convey one’s enthusiasm without sounding too much the devotee. Put simply, Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is one of the most exciting debut novels I have ever read.
The prose is a Byzantine maze of qualifications, retractions, gaps and contradictions, detailing the life and loves of some sort of operative (spy or criminal) in some type of organization, in a number of unnamed (presumably European) locales. As the character moves from thin to fat to thin again, from young to old(er), from assignment to assignment, from daylight to darkness, the book acquires an absurd but precise energy all its own: like the shelves of the narrator’s girlfriend, full of objects that gradually become less knowable, the novel develops with a negative momentum, where the accretion of detail and language detracts from concrete knowledge. As the narrator writes, "To say anything is to complicate it" (177-178). In The Impossibly, the ambiguities are meticulously constructed, the ambivilances rigorously maintained. All this is done with the lightest touch, the surest eye.
While most Kafka comparisons are specious and stupidly overstated, Hunt’s subtle humor, sophisticated intelligence and the graceful timber of his prose place this novel firmly in the tradition of The Castle, as well as Nabokov’s The Eye and Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. This is high praise indeed, but The Impossibly is a marvelous, wonderful novel.:::::::::::::::::::
Raymond McDaniel
21 October
Shaman Drum BookstoreGenre is the obverse ghetto of literature’s steel town; it rings the neatly mapped grid of well-behaved fiction. And of all the neglected parishes of genre, detection and noir have proven the most hospitable to visitors from more pacific climes.
If you love these genres, as I do, then you might also be annoyed at the degree to which they have consistently been co-opted by upscale hangers-on
and the fanciers of frou-frou fictional boutiques. Laird Hunt’s The Impossibly is, among other things, an arsenic valentine to those books that
wear noir’s coat but refuse to inhabit its head.As Laird well understands, the original appeal of detection and mystery and crime was not the transparency of these items; it was the reverse, a way of accounting for the fact that philosophies of knowing are forever insufficient to the facts, that facts, in fact, are not our friends. The narrator of The Impossibly wallows in a super-saturated solution of facts, but this affords him no real clarity. As the originators of narrative-as-mystery knew, this condition is simultaneously funny, addictive, horrific and weird – all adjectives I find myself happy to attach to The Impossibly.
Maybe it’s the fever, but I have a fantasy of a serial cartoon based on Laird’s novel, set in a world in which the heart and brain of pitch crime and bloody love have been transplanted from their first manifestations to the modern majesty of Laird’s imagination, with no waste or want in between. The Impossibly is a wicked revenge on the hope of certainty, in which the declarative sentence is used to sinister, stuttering, self-abnegating ends.
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Bob Fuglei
7 December
University of Minnesota
2002 First Books Conference
Laird Hunt's debut novel The Impossibly, published this year by Coffee House Press, is a wonderful mixture of a literate noir detective story and an extended quirky series of mock-existential meditations. The Impossibly is about, among other things, murder victims wrapped in red duct tape, green rubber duckies, shoe polish, and accordions; starlit excursions, sharpened feather dusters, debates over egg whites versus egg yolks, and adjustable couches; men swallowing tennis balls, gladiators battling wild pigs, staplers, sunglasses, beekeepers, and cold cuts; broken legs, beautiful stuttering women, undulating streets, transparent guns, and warm flaky pastry; computers that fit in your breast pocket, robot assassins with turquoise lights and serrated pincers, affirmation, reaffirmation, and disaffirmation. Reviewers have compared The Impossibly to Stein, Beckett, Barthelme, and Kafka. It is like all of these, but it is like none of these; it is a true original. It takes place on the other side, or both sides, or no sides, of a mirror the reader has never seen before, or even thought about.
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The Impossible Dream
by Chris Hesler
from City Pages
TWIN CITIES READER
WINTER BOOKS ISSUE:
One evening, a brick sails through a man's window with a note attached:
Dear Sir,
Do not, under any circumstances
The handwriting on the note, the man observes, "seemed familiar, but also not, maybe mostly not." He resolves to obey this strange directive as best he can, while pursuing a lover who is equally enigmatic--and possibly a double agent.
So it goes in Laird Hunt's The Impossibly, a first novel that verges on either brilliance or incoherence--and possibly both. Recalling the paranoia of Thomas Pynchon, this innovative spy riddler whisks the reader into a world of amnesia and suspense, where events unfold according to the logic of a dream. Hunt's frequent touches of deadpan humor make this a noir book of laughter and forgetting...
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Reviewed by Brad Zellar
Special to the
STAR TRIBUNE:
The unnamed protagonist of Laird Hunt's debut novel, ''The Impossibly,'' is a pawn in an absurd chess game in which the contestants play by no recognizable rules. The man is some sort of operative for a giant organization of indeterminate criminal activity. It seems he has botched an assignment and is waiting for "deactivation," a process that is sure to be punitive and quite possibly deadly.
For 200 pages, Hunt sustains an atmosphere of severe disorientation, packing his story with more curious and vaguely menacing strangers than a David Lynch movie. His narrator is helpless and wholly unreliable -- a fascinating and addled combination of Inspector Clouseau and Samuel Beckett's Molloy -- and his stream of digressions and contradictions ultimately poses many more questions than it answers.
Even as the bumbling secret agent -- if in fact that is what he is -- is sucked into the violent undertow of his organization, he maintains a befuddled distance from the proceedings, devoting much of his attention to moments of the most prosaic absurdity.
Dark humor, confounding plot
Early in the novel, the narrator and a friend and apparent co-worker, John, undertake an odyssey in search of a turkey dinner. A number of frustrating, and increasingly hostile, encounters with restaurant staff are recorded in hilarious and hard-boiled detail.
"We did, finally, ... get our turkey," the narrator reports. "They had some, by chance it seemed, in the freezer. Neither of us at the end of eating it entirely believed it had been turkey, but it had been called turkey with maximum enthusiasm by the man whose head John had placed in the sink, and it had been appropriately garnished, so we didn't complain." Hunt turns the conventions of the noir novel inside out. Although frequently maddening and resolutely inscrutable, "The Impossibly" is chock-full of clues to its meanings. Beneath the layers of absurdity and contradiction, Hunt constructs a fugue-like swirl of themes, recurring characters and surreal episodes of violence and torture.
Here is how Hunt's narrator describes one such episode: "It was not a nice event -- there was a lot of white rock and then the white rock became splashed with red -- but it was diverting. At one point, after I had, more or less symbolically, taken a turn with the mallet, I remarked to another individual that what the event lacked in subtlety it made up for in vigor. Yes, it's colorful, the individual said. I feel like I've gotten some exercise. Yes, definitely, I think the upper portion of my forehead is damp. Yes, mine too. I won't dream at all tonight. Or if you do it will be pleasant. Why is that? No one knows."
"The Impossibly" is a challenging and frequently confounding novel, yet time and again its determined eccentricity of structure and refusal to offer up anything resembling a conventional plot is redeemed by its dark humor. A determined reader could probably find in Hunt's brief novel an absurd primer in epistemology and existentialism. The book's many layers and difficult questions make it an ideal candidate for an adventurous book club.
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Rob Thomas
October 5, 2001:
'The Impossibly' is confusing, wonderful:::::::::::::::::::
THE CAPITOL TIMES:
Laird Hunt's "The Impossibly" proves some difficult things.It proves that just because you love genre fiction, it doesn't mean you have to be bound by its conventions when writing it. And it proves that just because you don't fully understand something doesn't mean you can't like it.
And "The Impossibly" is a sometimes maddening book, with a narrator who at times you want to sit down on a hard-backed chair and shake a few times until he starts making some kind of sense.
But it's also incredibly funny and well-written and oddly touching, and certainly unlike anything else you've read this year.
The main character works for some kind of shadowy organization, possibly an espionage agency or some kind of organized crime syndicate, whose business involves the sending and retrieving of packages, the interrogation of witnesses, and occasionally the elimination of enemies.
The narrator's place in this world seems shaky. At one level he seems happy to please, at another he seems like he'd be better off running his bakery. He accepts a job for his employers to deliver a package, then decides not to do it. And then he changes his mind again and mails it, only to the wrong address.
In the meantime, he heads on a less-than-peaceful vacation with a mysterious woman who collects objects - staplers, hole-punchers, etc. - and another couple identified as John and Deau. As you can tell by pronouncing their names, their identity and role in the narrator's life is kept pretty murky.
When he returns, he's subjected to interrogations from his employers, and eventually, it seems, targeted for elimination himself. Ultimately, the book descends into paranoia as the narrator tries to sort out who he can and can't trust, and who has been given the assignment of killing him.
In form and tone, "The Impossibly" resembles Jonathan Lethem's recent mystery novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," in which the story was told from the point of view of a sleuth suffering from Tourette's syndrome. Similarly, the reader sees the world of "The Impossibly" through the heavy filters of the narrator's viewpoint - in fact, it seems we see more of the narrator's interior life and thoughts, with the outside world occasionally peeping in through the cracks.
His thoughts are intriguing, and also quite funny, as he tends to think and overthink even the simplest of interactions. "I am not suspicious by nature," he tell us. "In fact, I am not very much at all, I've concluded, by nature." Elsewhere, he describes walking down the street with a woman, and then suddenly being behind himself at the same time, so that when the couple veers into a restaurant, his second self keeps walking along until he falls into a ditch.
When you think of a story of a first-person narrator besieged by a world that seems out to get him, Franz Kafka's name springs immediately to mind. But Hunt's world is altogether more internal, and more amusing, than Kafka's totalitarian parallels.
It will be only the most diligent and insightful reader who finishes "The Impossibly" with every question answered. Which is fine, because it would actually be disappointing to have every loose end tied at the end of this remarkable, confusing novel. Then there'd be almost no point in going back to read it and enjoy it again.
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TIME OUT NEW YORK:
Every once in a long while, you discover a novel unlike anything else you've ever read. Laird Hunt's debut is one of them. Innovative, comic, bizarre and beautiful, The Impossibly reads as if Donald Barthelme were channeling Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Ben Marcus and reruns of Get Smart. Somewhere in a northern European city, an unnamed narrator works for an ominous concern called "the organization." When the narrator fumbles a job by putting the wrong address on a package, he is "disaffirmed." Mysteriously afflicted, he unravels lightheartedly, suffering memory lapses, clubbings and a sort of existential aphasia as he drifts through an increasingly shadowy universe flickering with potential violence and madness, where no one's identity - let alone"reality" itself - is constant. Meticulously imprecise and contradictory, The Impossibly is an extraordinary novel of interstices, non-sequiturs and not knowing - a sprightly, menaced thing.
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HARTFORD COURANT:
as dark and mysterious as its title.:::::::::::::::::::
KIRKUS REVIEWS:
.stylish, if opaque, noir.:::::::::::::::::::
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES:
The state of new fiction is as robust and diverse as ever, and exploding with character, if Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity and Laird Hunt's The Impossibly are any measure.The Impossibly is first and foremost a story rooted in character. In this case, a single character unlike any I've yet encountered.This first novel of paranoia and, in an odd way, yearning, also is probably
one of the funniest and strangest books I've read in a long while. I'll confess, I'm not entirely sure I understood it and yet I was oddly moved by it.In the end, The Impossibly is a novel of thoughts. "I was told once in a big bed in the countryside by the woman I loved that what made it always so difficult, all of it, was to be an interior in a world of exteriors," the nameless man muses. We never quite know what "it" is, and yet, of course, we do.
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PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
August 27
In fresh, inventive prose, the delightfully and maddeningly equivocal narrator of The Impossibly, Laird Hunt's first novel, indirectly relates his circuitous story. He is some sort of freelance criminal, but, by inviting the reader into select minute details of his life, the narrator keeps the specifics out of focus until, incrementally, he reveals his line of work, the danger he risks and the duplicity of nearly all his acquaintances.:::::::::::::::::::
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
August 13
"murky", "obscure", "hazy", "hallucinatory", "difficult", "frustrating","incomprehensible", "intriguing".
