Altmann's Tongue

This is a series of very dark, mostly very short, stories. They are violent and disturbing (some suggestions of incest). They focus on the perpetrators of the violence rather than the victims. It will not make you feel good. However, the stories are compelling and interesting. I feel if Edgar Allen Poe were alive today, these are the kind of stories he might have written. The approach of the author is dispassionate and cerebral. I did not understand every story the first time through, and in some I was not able to decipher what was going on even after thinking and reading parts twice. These stories are not suspenseful, but there is certainly an element of horror. But they are not really horror stories. I have not read anything like this in the past, and that is probably one reason I was drawn to the work. Altmann's Tongue is also the name of a CD with Evenson doing a reading backed by dark ambient landscapes (Brian Evenson, Xingu Hill and Tamarin, on Ant-Zen Records). I heard this, and knew I had to get the book. I was not disappointed.

I didn't realize it had been signed! Maybe I misread the description(extremely likely), but it was a wonderful surprise! Brian Evenson is one of my all time favorite authors so this book is now one of my most prized possessions. The stories in it are really great too.

This is the first book by Brian Evenson I've read, which I sought out after accidentally stumbling upon a few of his recent tales in Granta. A clinical, almost monastic curiosity of psychopathology pervades this collection, as well as a fully, cruelly formed mastery of the English language. Evenson maps the mutable landscape of inhuman extremity with the cracked internal compass of a serenely deranged pathologist, already possessed by an ingrown impatience with escalation, always beginning within the terminal stages of a mood. There are jolting pieces of wondrous beauty here, (The Evanescence of Marion le Goff being the most haunting and joyous) and moments of transcendent, Beckettian parody(Job Eats Them Raw, with the Dogs) as well as moments of malevolent beauty which flower, unbidden in all these loathsome, fascinating moods. This is a foreboding, brilliant first collection which has me pretty jazzed to seek out his later works...

I didn't like this much at all. I was frustrated by how infrequently we were given a context for the events of the stories, and I was frustrated by how undeveloped some of the ideas within remained to the reader (I'm sure they were well-developed to Evenson, but to me, they remained murky), and I was frustrated by the ugliness of the violence. His afterword explains his intentions in dealing with violence, and I can dig them, but that doesn't mean that I particularly enjoyed the book. One reviewer, in an otherwise positive review, noted that Evenson is a writer who "has trouble recognizing when enough is enough," and I'm inclined to agree with that, at least in this much earlier stage in his career. I also recently read his novel  The Open Curtain , published a good many years later, and I loved that.I enjoyed the novella, and I enjoyed "The Munich Window" a good deal, but I hated the triptych involving Bosephus and I disliked most of the shorter stories. Overall, a violent, senseless, often exhausting set of stories, with a few gems here and there.

Read it for the controversy. Ugh, it's a bad book. I gave up a few pages in because it's so bad.

One of the earliest and most famous works by Brian Evenson.Does it live up to its reputation of being so violent and depraved it got its authors kicked out of its religion. No, it doesn't. But it addresses one of Brian Evenson's thematic obsession in a unique and fascinating way: boundaries. In this case, the oldest and greatest boundaries of them all : death. Or, as Evenson puts it himself in the afterwords of his collection: the sacred and the profane.There is something so unsettling about how Brian Evenson writes, it's almost endearing. Whether it's characters who can't decipher messages that are clear as day (The Munich Window) or meaning that is constantly eluding a character's actions (Her Other Bodies). There's always something off-putting to the stories in ALTMANN'S TONGUE. Well worth reading, like all material by Brian Evenson.

I've never read anything quite like Altmann's Tongue before, although if I had to describe it, the closest I could come would be to have you imagine that Cormac McCarthy wrote a collection of Edgar Allan Poe homages, but even that doesn't quite prepare you for the psychological and physical horrors within Altmann's pages. The stories here range from half a page long to a lengthy novella, but almost uniformly, they defy easy assessment. Evenson isn't interested in easy moral judgment or even understanding the brutalities he depicts here; even so, by juxtaposing the tales together, you get a sense of what he feels about the world, the point he strives to make about violence. But, oh, what surreal and fascinating tales. From the title tale, a brief and horrific tale of a man compelled to further and further violence upon a body, to "Stung", the tale of a young boy with, shall we say, complex relationships with his parents, to "The Sanza Affair," a brilliant novella about the difficulty of ever truly understanding an event, to "The Munich Window", the closest to Poe's hysterical, damaged narrators, to Evenson's darkly funny take on the book of Job, these are strange, unnerving tales, made all the more so by their lack of context or explanation. Altmann's Tongue is not for all tastes. This is brutal, violent stuff, and it's far from easily accessible. For those with a taste for the macabre and for the literate, however, you'll find much here to admire and - dare I say it - to chew on.

Nach dem Genuß der Vertonung dieses Werks von Xingu Hill und Tamarin, war ich von einigen Zitaten so angetan, dass ich mir dieses Buch kurzerhand zulegte.In der Presse wird u. a. hervorgehoben, dass Evenson stellenweise an Poe erinnert.Leider sind diese Stellen zu selten und stetig durchsetzt von einem primitiven, vulgären Slang, was im großen und ganzen zwar zur Art der Kurzgeschichten passt, aber auch konfus und unbeholfen wirkt.Wenn der durchaus eher vergleichbare Clive Barker diese Art der Sprache als Werkzeug einsetzt, funktiert das auf einer sublimen Art und Weise eingehender, als bei Evenson. Anderseits muß man sich vor Augen halten, dass das hier wohl das Debut von Ihm darstellt und die Kurzgeschichten es wirklich in sich haben und auf morbide Art und Weise zu fesseln verstehen. Einige wie die Titelgeschichte sind völlig aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen, andere (Sanza Affair) werden sehr detailiert beschrieben. Fast alle handeln von einer Identitätskriese oder der Sinnsuche, die die Protagonisten meist mit brutaler Gewalt zu kompensieren versuchen. Die Motive reichen von religiöser Überzeugung über krankhafte Eifersucht bis hin zum reinen Überlebenswillen. In einigen Geschichten geht es auch um die Widerstandskraft des Menschen in ausweglos, katastrophalen Situationen. Die Beschreibung der voneinanader unabhängigen, verschiendenen Szenarien gelingt dem Autor sehr gut.