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On-Line Review of On-Line Impossibly
by Kevin P. Q. Phelan

The Impossibly by Laird Hunt
(serialized in bi-monthly installments in Flood: Fence Magazine's online fiction annex (http://communities.iuniverse.com/bin/circle.asp?circleid=512))
.

Right from the title, one feels gently suspended by Laird Hunt's The Impossibly. Impossibly what? With no part of speech following the adverb, the word becomes agitated, loosened from its moorings, a wandering adverb in search of a word to modify.
     Perhaps it will claim them all.
     On the surface, the first installment, "rain and sun," appears to be about surfaces: of language, of ordinary actions, of chance meetings. The story opens with the narrator, a foreigner in a city "split by a river," helping a woman pronounce several words in this never-named foreign tongue. So she can buy a stapler. And then he wanders off. To try to get the bottom of whether his washer/dryer is still covered by warranty. To have tea with a neighbor he has never met (and never encounters again.) To stare at the ceiling of his apartment and listen to the river through the walls. To buy a series of elaborate pens. Autumn passes swiftly in this way.
     It becomes apparent that these are not just surfaces being described, but articulating surfaces, where our exteriors brush up against or past each other. What lies beneath always promises to break through, and usually does, but only for a moment, a hypnotic flash of recognition that displays a tenuous connecting thread. Then it vanishes.
     The prose shivers with wonderment and unearths a strange magic hidden in the familiar. The reader is guided through a seeming dreamscape that just happens to be the world, and is carried along by a taut sense of imminence throughout. The sentences unfold like inviting mazes, digressing from or amplifying matters, or circling back in on themselves. So it is a writing that wanders as well, not with a frenetic, moth-ish restlessness, but with a confident, grand, and thoroughly welcoming flow. Like a river through a city.
     Jorge Luis Borges once told an interviewer that a writer "should be judged by the enjoyment he gives." The abundance of pleasure in reading The Impossibly will have people waiting anxiously for each installment and judging its author quite highly.

Kevin P.Q. Phelan recently moved from Brooklyn to New Orleans. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Global City Review, among others. He founded, edits and produces murmur, a literary journal devoted to conversations between young and established poets and writers. For information about how to obtain a copy, please contact KPQP@compuserve.com.

Email: KPQP@compuserve.com

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