The Brain Harvest reviewed in The Prague Post

Hey! The official Prague launch part for The Brain Harvest is Sunday, 6 May at 5:30. Taking place at Jazz Republic.

I was thrilled to learn this week that Stephan Delbos has reviewed The Brain Harvest in the Prague Post.

There's a moment at the very end of the 1982 comedy recording Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip where Pryor, in his first performance after setting himself on fire while freebasing cocaine and drinking 151-proof rum, subtly but sternly indicts the audience for making cruel jokes about him while he battled addiction and for his life. It is a profoundly deep - and profoundly sad - moment of comedic genius.

The Brain Harvest, a collection of short fiction from Prague-based writer Ken Nash, has much in common with Pryor's sly brand of wounded comedy. Lurking below many of these fantastically imaginative, often surreally humorous short stories are significant statements about society, art and the imagination.

The dominant characteristic of these stories is their brevity: Most fill only three to five pages of a small, yet handsome, edition. This has a jarring effect on the reader, never allowing him to settle into a specific setting, situation or group of characters. Indeed, after reading a number of these stories in a single sitting, the reader may wish Nash would develop one of the stories further, allowing us to see his clearly limber imagination truly stretch. On the other hand, it's difficult to become bored with a book of constantly shifting narratives and points of view.

Nash's are essentially narrative-based tales, and the narrators of these stories vary wildly, from a master basket weaver to a bookstore employee battling aggressive book club members, to a woman who is addicted to being kidnapped and held for ransom. If the cast of characters here is strange - and strangely appealing - so too are the situations in which they find themselves: a writing class to which the professor brings a time machine, a brain harvest in Mexico and a schizophrenic's visit to Mattress World are just a few examples.

The Brain Harvest
By Ken Nash
Equus Press
163 pages
Launch party
When: May 6 at 5:30
Where: Jazz Republic
Web: Equuspress.
wordpress.com

But beyond the brevity and constantly shifting narrative of these tales, what prevails is not only Nash's sure gift for spinning remarkably thick yarns in a short space, but his concern for language itself and the remarkable names we have given both the natural and the corporate worlds. Whether in his descriptions of "Cambodian Vine Rattan, Sinai Braided Sea Grass, Singapore Cane, Burmese Celery Hemp, Uyghur Cave Moss" in "Baskets" or the "dibble" that once belonged to Emily Dickinson in "The Dibble & Emily Dickinson," or "afternoons watching Korean soap operas dubbed into Cantonese, and evenings watching bootleg videos or playing high-stakes mah jong, while chain smoking Mann Si Fat cigarettes," in "The Hostage," Nash's awareness of and interest in minute particulars is by turns hilarious and evocative.

Clearly Nash has a wicked sense of humor and one that could lead an unsuspecting reader to conclude there is little under the surface of these stories. That would be an unfortunate and not altogether accurate conclusion.

One story in particular, "Maurice Utrillio," is a fine example of the profundity of which Nash is capable. It describes a few moments in an afternoon of the eponymous French artist who is best-known for his paintings of Montmartre but whose life was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. This story, at just one and a half pages, is a searing and deeply felt expression of the struggle of the artist to overcome his own demons to convey the glimpses of the absolute one finds only rarely in everyday life.

Coming upon a white wall, Maurice is struck by such a glimpse of the absolute. He realizes what he must do, and yet he is not sure if he will manage - and neither, of course, are we. "He would need to work fast. If he hurried home and got his paints, he might still capture the wall in this light and be able to reproduce its expanse and the suggested possibilities it conveyed to him at that moment. If he hurried […] If he passed the café and no one spoke his name. If the Russian waitress, Irina, did not call out to him […] If his blood stayed calm and the vision of white stayed before him and did not leave him for one moment."

Rarely has the immanent doom of a struggling artist been captured so concisely.

Nash, a mainstay of Prague's expatriate writing community, drops a few names here that will put a smile on the face of readers in the know. "The Blue Bedouins," for example, mentions current and former Prague expat writers Anthony Tognazzini, Karl Koerner, Julie Chibarro and Laura Conway. "My Roomate's Girlfriend," meanwhile, mentions Prague resident and writer Jim Freeman. If a few of these stories feel slightly like workshop exercises or pieces designed to be performed at a local open mic, however, that is probably because there are so many of them of essentially the same short length.

The Brain Harvest is an eclectic, deceptively witty collection of short fiction that represents the crystallization of one of Prague's most resourceful and imaginative English-language writers. The book's publication reflects well on Equus Press, a new publisher promoting English-language fiction from Prague.

Those in the city should not miss the chance to hear Nash read from this collection May 6 at 5:30 p.m. at Jazz Republic, where these short stories will shine in the environment in which many of them were conceived.