|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2001 ReviewsAbout the authorRead an excerpt |
Pain
In Pain, writer, editor and filmmaker Christopher Reiner offers a contemporary version of Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, retaining all the subtlety, perverse charm, and withering social commentary of the original—and even managing to sneak in the angels and devils that were his forerunner’s specialty. As with the great French poet, Reiner presents a world where bourgeois hypocrisy and emotional alienation stem more from laziness and boredom than from any active (ideological) passion. But what shocks the reader here is no longer Baudelaire’s transgressive subject matter (after all, this is the 21st century) but the discovery that screwy logic and grim nihilism can still achieve such seductive expression (after all, this is safe, rational, moralistic America). “If there’s a devil, his force is to hold us back, to convince us to resist taking part, to keep us quiet and worried.” Christopher Reiner’s stories or prose
poems—I’m not sure how to classify them—are subtle and
psychologically astute, fascinating. They draw you in with their apparent
simplicity, but it is into a conundrum, a riddle always just beyond your
understanding. They leave you wanting more—not more from them but
more like them. If Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen had
been written by an avant-garde filmmaker living in modern-day Hollywood,
what kind of text would it be? A sequence of narratives carefully covering
their own footprints? A series of jokes told skillfully enough to avoid
their own punch lines? Would it be filled with the kind of self-deflating
subversion that so skillfully fills the pages of Chris Reiner’s
Pain? “Originally, when the aliens came down, they let us
ask for specific things we wanted. But they were so depressed by what
we asked for that they made us forget it ever happened and they started
giving us what they assumed we needed. So it’s only partly their
fault that they were all wrong.” Reading Pain is like trying
not to laugh in a movie theater where everyone else is weeping. Christopher Reiner’s Pain casts
itself into the world then examines whatever has stuck to its line of
questioning. His self is a flitting hybrid, a cross between Andre´ Breton
and Garrison Keillor, taking its queasy measure in relation to the received
messages of the culture around it. “Start to see uneasy between
this person and yourself.” In Pain ‘happy’ is
not assumed to be a good thing. Reiner’s philosophical gems don’t
shine from a place of easy entitlement. Pain is a question in constant
revision and the answer, like pieces of an almost-solved puzzle, lunges
in and out of view. |
