Yeah, sure, easy for you to say, but how does one go about performing, what — upon first glance — appears to be, not simply a fool’s errand, but a hugely Sisyphean task doomed to failure [perhaps, even, likely, ridicule, though, even more likely, utter disregard by the citizenry at large] from the outset?
How, indeed?
I am somehow aware — call it a case of Jung’s “collective unconscious” or whatever — that Somerset Maugham wrote a novel titled The Razor’s Edge. I hadn’t read the book nor was I familiar with either its plot or its characters. I also recall that years ago there was a film of the same name that featured Bill Murray as the lead character, which I also had never witnessed. With this in mind, I wondered what (if anything) Karl’s latest collection of short stories had to do with Maugham’s novel, beyond the title. I decided to visit Wikipedia for a short overview and discovered that the 1944 novel tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in WWI, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life, and to deal with the apparent (or supposed) dichotomy between materialism and spirituality. Set in Chicago, Paris and India in the 1920s and ‘30s, it involves characters from sharply different worlds. It goes on to mention that the book has twice been adapted into film; first in 1946 and then in 1984. In terms of plot, it says that Maugham begins by characterising his story as not really a novel but a thinly veiled true account. He includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players.
While Karl doesn’t reveal explicitly that he is a character in his own story collection, there are obvious overlaps between him and the [nameless] chief protagonist of his stories: both are Latvian DPs [sic] whose families escaped the war/Holocaust to reside in Toronto [later, Windsor]; both are writers/editors; both are advanced martial artists who, like Darrell, “embrace the aesthetics and discipline that unite mind/body/spirit.” Unlike Darrell, though, Karl’s protagonist’s exotic peregrinations are mental and verbal, rather than physical.
Karl (or Karl’s doppleganger) accomplishes his cerebral journeys through various literary constructs. To begin, he repeats particular images or motifs throughout the stories: dreams, mirrors, tarot cards, ghosts, food, displaced persons, war and/or conflict, history, myths and fables, Eastern mysticism, martial arts, allusions and/or references to pop culture and art/intellectual icons. Secondly, he employs a writing style that appears almost adlib, or free-association-like, using these same images and motifs to effortlessly move/jump from one new topic to another.