Motorman

Moldenke #1

by David Ohle

For a long time I was scared to read Motorman . It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell. Books were not often spoken of so potently to me, as contraband, as narcotic, as ordnance. There was the whispered promise that my mind would be blown after reading Motorman. There was the assurance that once I read it I would drool with awe, writerly awe, the awe of watching a madman master at work, David Ohle, awesomely carving deep, black holes into the edifice of the English language.
—from the introduction by Ben Marcus

This dystopia is a tour de force of scabrous invention. It is also uncomfortably real. As a kid I flipped through Science News and got an unpleasant shock when I inadvertently put my finger on a close-up of a spider's mandibles. Similarly, something about Ohle's prose closes the gap between the representation of a disturbing thing and the thing itself. You feel you ought to wash your hands after touching the page. But if you think that wiping will remove the stain, consider Doing time in the French Sewers (don't ask), Moldenke learns that they supply the bakery where edible paper—"for money, for waivers, for wiping, for books"—is made. Shit is books, books are food, food is shit. The conclusion? We're in it. Deep.
—Shelley Jackson, from a review in BookForum

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Novels, Literature, The United States Of America, Novella

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

David Ohle is an American writer, novelist, and a lecturer at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. After receiving his M.A. from KU, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1975 to 1984. In 2002 he began teaching fiction writing and screenwriting as a part-time lecturer at the University of Kansas. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire, the Transatlantic Review, Paris Review, and Harper's, among other magazines.
While it remained out of print for over thirty years, his first novel Motorman (initially published in 1972) gathered a quiet cult following, was circulated through photocopies, and went on to become an influence to a generation of American writers such as Shelley Jackson and Ben Marcus.
His subsequent novels The Age of Sinatra (2004), The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013) take place in the same dystopian setting as Motorman. Ohle's fiction is often described as weird, surreal and experimental. His own influences include Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Flann O'Brien, and Raymond Roussel.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Motorman is an acid trip in a post-apocalyptic world of many artificial suns and moons where the mutants of many implanted hearts sordidly exist.
“He experienced a shortened boyhood, a small degree of youth and carelessness,” – that’s a complete biography of the main hero…

He knew that vertical activity invited dazzling exposure, and that to seek is to be sucked. He recognized loneliness as the mother of virtues and sat in her lap whenever he could. He practiced linear existence and sidewise movement, preferring the turtle to the crane, the saucer to the lamp.

And his stream of consciousness turns into a paranoid rave… And he writes and receives weirdest epistles…

Dear Doctor, I woke up to the sirens this morning with a chestful of nellies. I couldn't avoid it. I behaved accordingly. It was good to get your letter. Your patient.

And there are the weirdest and absolutely poetic culinary recipes…

Halictine bees, dried, make a hearty, bracing tea, good for the imagination. Eaten raw they leave blisters in the mouth.
The cicada killer, boiled and iced, resembles the quahog of the old days.
While the robber fly has a disturbing pungency and tends to irritate the chuffs, it does have beautiful eyes.

But whatever happens, the battle between good and evil never ceases.

[Fionnuala]

When I tried to write a review of this book, I kept wanting to make a drawing instead, and given the dream-like quality, or should I say nightmarish quality of Moldenke’s world, such a drawing would have to have a 'trompe l’oeil' feature built in as in that Escher drawing of a hand drawing itself, so I looked up Escher and found this animated version of his Relativity picture and, for those of you who’ve read Motorman, it comes with its very own jellyhead!
I couldn’t resist posting it in lieu of a review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY43EW...

[knig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ben Marcus is suitably impressed in the intro to this ‘experimental’ post-beatniky stream of something or other, and his mewling noises of approval loosely translate into a (I’m sure subconscious) emulation in the creation of in his ‘Flame Alphabet’’s Murphy, with more than a passing nod to Mr Buncy: an omnipresent morphological creature with megalomaniacal tendencies and a ‘centralised’ mode of operandi.

Theres absolutely no telling whats going on in this clusterfuck: and this type of whimsy either engages or drives you nuts. I’m not using the term ‘clusterfuck’ facetiously: its a military term, nudge nudge wink wink and herewith we have a military theme: 1971, ‘Apocalysis now’ (which features heavily here, and I’m not just referring to the surreal boat ride which Conrad started in Heart of Darkness and Brando finished off with aplomb), but in general it was that kind of era, and it birthed that type of dystopian authorships: how about le Clezio’s ‘War’? Or ‘Zanzibar’? Man, that 70’s feel: its so unmistakeable: just like ABBA and knickerbockers.

Theres this reviewer on here who likened this novella to the literary equivalent of a Pollock on paper. Which idea made me mull a hell of a lot more than Motorman. As in, can we actually have that in literary geist (apart from the Dadaists, that is). I mean, yes, Ohle is totally fucking around with plot, time-sequence, and sense data, the klieg light is skimming the periphery and object-subject ontology takes on non euclydean propotions, BUT. Is it Pollock-ian? As in a randomly strewn rhizome of a mobius-striptedness? Well, no. Ohle is very, very circular in his approach. And I truly believe this MUST be so: language induces thinking, and thinking induces (De Bono-inian) patterns: yes, I’m Whorfian about it, but any piece of writing long enough eventually makes sense: if not in the mind of the originator, then certainly in the mind of the recipient, who, as Andre Breton posits, will rearrange her mind to make sense of it. And I’m pretty sure Bertrand Russell stakes his life on it. So, no: we don’t have Pollock in lengua.

In Sherlock Holmes style, I’m parsing this out: and I don’t care if Ohle didn’t mean it: thats always irrelevant. Its the reader who OWNS the Word. Moldenke, the protag: a Norman Bates, he of the split personality. Moldenke is his escapism, Bufona is his name. This guy is evidently in the looney bin, luxuriating in post traumatic stress disorder. He’s been in a ‘War’, prior to which there was one sun, one moon, and he had one heart and two lungs. Afters....Well. Bring it on. Jelly babies, ‘bottoms’, Cock Roberta, and multiple hearts and suns. Anything onwards now will make sense only to those who have partaken of this modern Homeric odyssey: but, yeah: he killed Roberta, she of the jelly baby fame, this was somehow captured on tape, and now...he sits ensconced in the warm cocoon of a sanatorium whilst Headmaster Bunce tries to make him come to terms: ‘the tapes’, he says: and Moldenke demurs. Everyone knows his name: duuuh. Cause they are all inmates or nursing staff. And Eagleman: ho,ho, ho. And ho. I think Moldenke IS Eagleman. Or, he worked for Eagleman.
Seen in this context, this becomes a nightmarish journey into the subconscious, an exacerbated version of ‘One flew over the Cuckoos nest’, a study of madness and hoplessness: the eureka of nothingness.

Still. I needed a little more oomph.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, messy, cryptic, and totally entertaining. In Ben Marcus' intro he refers to a rumor that David Ohle worked for William Burroughs, typing out his dreams each morning. Which is a great angle on this book regardless of veracity. This is sci-fi like Naked Lunch is, mostly by shear weirdness. But Motorman is actually far more coherent, and far more capable of pulling me in and making me care where we're headed. Trapped in his appartment under uncertain terms and uncertain-ter context (something has gone wrong, everything is dying, the government replacement suns are acting up), our protagonist re-reads his letters, monitors the phone, tries to remember how he got here and how he will get out. The words themselves are sometimes unfamiliar but executed with a kind of deadpan urgency that comes out as totally natural, though clearly operated by unique logic. Tune up your hearts and get reading.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In its reflection of certain aspects of current times (e.g., human isolation and emotional numbness; preponderance of the artificial, in part to replace the natural; ignorance of history and loss of collective societal memory; self-centered nature of the power elite to the detriment of the powerless; and so much more), this still resonates as much today as it presumably did in 1972, though could stand a slight revision to include even more jellyheads. An impressive blend of horror, humor, and prescience.

[Kinga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone told me that it was the best book he has ever read. I’d never heard of it. Is it possible that this is somehow the world’s best kept secret?

‘Motorman’ was out of print for decades until a few years ago a small publisher from New York brought it back to life. Or semi-life, should I say, because they still don’t want you to know. The cover is minimalistic; except for a bizarre illustration, it only tells you the name of the book and its author, all in a very small font. The back is absolutely bare – there is no blurb, no encouraging quotes, not even the price, just the barcode and ISBN number. Essentially, every hipster’s dream.

The introduction by Ben Marcus is full of phrases like For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. And I discovered an oddly tender book that used imagination as an afterthought, however potently, as if beautiful fires on the horizon are precisely the backdrop that might restore life to our identity-quest stories and make us care again about the most elemental things.

When the expectations are this high it is easy to be disappointed. Is the best book I have ever read? Most definitely not. Although I’d agree with Ben Marcus that it is oddly tender. Neither the introduction nor the reviews will tell you what the book is about. I probably won’ tell you all that much. It’s about Moldenke who is trying to escape Bunce who keeps him a semi-prisoner. It’s all very weird and Moldenke has four sheep hearts. He has also sacrificed his feelings in the Mock War, which causes problems in his relationship with Roberta (who suffers from some punctuation-related affliction). It’s very complicated. It’s part George Orwell, part William S. Burroughs and part Stanisław Lem. Make of it what you like. I don’t want to say too much about it. Given how popular I am, I might just accidentally push the book into the mainstream and the hipsters will never forgive me.

I will leave you with a quote which is taken from Moldenke’s report when his job was to taste weird foods for Mr. Featherfighter:

“Mr. Etcetera,
My second report:
1) Both fleas and cantbarides lead to self-abuse.
2) I feel I should resign.
3) I feel. I feel. Therapy helped me.
4) I do resign.
No longer yours,
Moldenke”

Moldenke is getting his feelings back! Be careful, it might happen to you too – it might make you quit your job.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The word that came to mind when reading this book was "whimsical" which is not a word you'd associate with a dystopian novel.

This has hints of Kafka (Mohldenke's persecution by Bunce) and Dick (the artificial flora and fauna, the black humour)

Ohle's books are hard to come by, but I'll definitely be looking for others in this series

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew little about this book, other than it has a reputation of something incredibly wild, transgressive even. But I found this an easier read than Michael Cisco's work (the only author I could compare it with). I suppose you could file this under bizarro science fiction, written in a very disjointed manner. The story jumps back and forth in time, although this is one of the least puzzling parts of the reading experience. The challenging part is understanding what the heck is going. Eventually the going gets easier, but the weirdness doesn't stop.

I'm not a fan of science fiction, but I like this. The vision of the future offered here isn't clean and chrome-plated, it's rusted, rotted and dirty. It's dystopian with a pervading totalitarian surveillance. It's also absurdist to a Kafkaesque level. The protagonist seems to be desired by two competing forces, but their reasons are obscure at best and anytime he is given tasks to do they're always bizarre and nonsensical.

The world is populated with "jellyheads" (beings full of jelly that wear human disguises) who are a menace to our protagonist and are always leaking or releasing deposits of jelly. There are multiple artificial suns and moons, and one man has taken it upon himself to create one similar to the original. We're not sure if this is out of nostalgia, but it seems important because humans are no longer able to keep track of time or predict the weather. And yet no one seems to care about either.

Other weirdness: Our narrator was recruited into a "mock war" where soldiers voluntarily lose limbs and lives. He was also hired to eat insects. In short, we're thrown into a world that makes no sense, and very little is explained and we try to make sense of it. It's quite comical at times, but ultimately is a bleak, and muted portrait of the future.

My main criticism of this book is that it ends right as it seems to be heading somewhere, when all the chaos is congealing around a purpose. It's feels like Ohle simply got tired of writing. I give it four stars...but just barely.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

MOTORMAN was first published by Knopf in 1972. Then it went out of print for almost half a century. That author David Ohle’s novel was published by a mainstream press feels as impossibly possible as the dystopian world he creates in his writing. Dystopian stirs up a pot of influences, some of which season Ohle’s post-sense metropolis, but his creation is wholly his own and still wedded to our own. It feels much more like the future we’re living in today than other works that get that prophetic credit. The trials and tribulations of Moldenke, MOTORMAN’s main character, are nightmarishly banal and surrealistically hilarious. I wouldn’t call this book a page-turner, though practically speaking all physical books are, yet, once I started reading, it was hard to stop, pulled in by Ohle’s talent, a creativity that cannot be parsed but must be taken whole. It makes no sense to try and make sense of MOTORMAN, like life you should just try and enjoy the ride.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bizarre science fiction mumblings(if Beckett wrote sci fi) that is cartoonish, creepy and despairing in a comic way. It resembles a more abstract George Saunders(or Matthew Derby) or a more accessible Ben Marcus(who provides an enthusiastic intro) and would be probably be considered derivative of those writers if it hadn’t been written in 1972! So Ohle probably inspired by Beckett and Burroughs(and 60’s Avant Garde,) produced this weird child on his own and inspired a group of writers.

[M Cody McPhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thoughts on Motorman by David Ohle::::::

Authors build worlds. Some are easily comprehended by the reader. Some created worlds are obtuse and pure chaos. Sometimes there are a bit of both kinds of worlds. Where anything can happen yet there's ground under your feet.

I love these worlds.

E.G. The Third Policeman, A Voyage to Arcturus, UBIK, The Berlin Wall (David Leo Rice), How I Killed The Universal Man, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lilith, etcetera.

The ground is there while a tornado of high creativity encapsulates you.

Motorman is the essence of this style.

Moldenke, our main character, is being harassed by a mysterious yet nefarious person, Mr Bunce. He knows everything about Moldenke's life.

Moldenke has multiple hearts and one lung. His doctor, Burnheart is his only friend and wants to help him be as healthy as possible. The doctor also wants to help subvert Moldenke's nemesis Bunce. Most of their communications are through phone calls or letters.

All materials in Motorman are made from cats. A deity-like engineer, Eagleman, creates multiple suns, moons, and stars in the sky. Most substances being used aren't real. Most things in the natural world also are not real. Jobs are a purposeless abstract. Some people are balloons filled with jelly. There is a river that is all jelly. Bug taste testing is an occupation. Bug eating is normal.

Life as per usual in Texaco City, California.

This book will fuck your mind if you let it.
The atmosphere is heavy, unique, dreamlike yet vivid. The sentences are exact, manicured, designed. Not a wasted word. Motorman is nightmarish at times. At times pleasant. Mostly off kilter. Off vibes fill the narrative constantly. Nothing feels stable.

Moldenke is emotionally tortured by almost every "person" in the book. We're empathizing for the entire novel. We're not sure why Moldenke is so troubled. Why his health is so bad. He's unsatisfied. He wants everything to work out for himself. We want it to work out for him. Yet it is hard for Moldenke to care about much more than his girlfriend, Cock Roberta. A constant bombardment of the senses will do that to you.

This book is a barrage. I had to read it slowly. It is the longest 130 page novel I've ever read. I wanted to get it. I'm going to have to read it again. So much subtext. So many strange references.

This is a violent schizoid world where no one is safe except the elites. The only way to navigate this world is to emulate the evil at the top. None too different from our world in that aspect.

Motorman might give you an aneurysm.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ohle's book might have received bad press when it was orginally published in 1972..

The only virtue of this absolutely atrocious book is its brevity (Kirkus)

..but it has since gone on to become something of a cult classic in the sci-fi / dystopian fan community.
It is a type of noir/science-fiction/surreal blend. Moldenke, a man who has been rebuilt (rather like Steve Austin) after an injury in a war, operates on four sheep hearts and is without an eye. He is chasing two men; Burnheart and Eagleman. Eagleman is a mad scientist, responsible for at least one of the many moons that now circle the earth.
The style takes a bit of getting used to.
Occasional sentences stand out, though I am not sure the whole thing holds together. But it could well be that it’s not supposed to..
It is very 1970s, full of the experimentation, typical of Gilliam/Python, with plenty of toilet humour, You can almost visualise a Gilliam style animation.
Here's a clip..

Dear Moldenke,
Whether or not you have feelings for me, or feelings at all, I do have feelings about you. They increased when you compared my nipples to pencil erasers. No one has been so gentle to me.
The clouds are promising rain.
Love,
Cock Roberta.

and

That was the way with Moldenke, a brightly burning candle with a shortened wick, destined to burn low and give off gas.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know I liked books like this anymore. The introduction by Ben Markus, which I read just after finishing it, is a great survey of the book's strengths (even if it's a bit obnoxious, with its long meditation on canonization and respect as a work of literature), so I'm not sure how much of that I'd like to restate here aside from how much I enjoyed it. The prose is this perfect tightness, shot through with imagination from sentence to sentence that reminds me of In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan, or a more focused (but also more distant) Sayonara Gangsters, which a lot of people know is one of my favorite novels. I especially like the claustrophobic delicacy of the first half, though it becomes more of a spacious, surreal road novel in the second half and loses some of its emotional intensity, which made the ending trail off a bit for my taste. This was still really excellent though, and one of the most polished pieces of writing I've seen in a long time.

[Juan Fuentes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Completamente original, creadora de un ambiente irreal y poderoso, con un elenco de personajes de los que no llegamos a saber nada pero con una presencia innegable. Deja el buen sabor de una comida nueva y especiada.

https://liblit.com/david-ohle-motorman/

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction to Motorman by David Ohle, Ben Marcus says that for a long time he was scared to read it--"It's existence bothered me, and I grew leery of being artistically paralyzed by its reported high oddity and invention, its completely unexampled decimation of fiction-as-we-have-come-to-know-it." After reading the introduction I was scared to read it. Could anything live up to the hype, causing you to float into the air or render you "gummy and mute"?

Some novels you read to nostalgically revisit places you've traveled or lived. In the case of Motorman, Ohle fabricates a whole new world. I guess you could call it science fiction or speculative or futuristic, but more in a human and believable way reminiscent of Blade Runner or the worlds that George Saunders creates in his novels. Or think of Radiohead's OK Computer, but in a textual, novel form, written 15 years before. These are the emotional landscapes it invokes.

It's always amusing to read sci-fi novels from 30+ years ago--before the internet, before cell phones, before CDs, before life as we know it now--and see which depictions hold true. But like Saunder's, to Ohle it's not so much about describing geeky future gadgetry as it is the emotional disposition of futuristic societies and the predicted human interactions, a lot of which rings true in today's world. The cold detachment and alienation. The superficiality. The organ transplants (though we limit ourselves to one heart at a time, unlike Mondenke who has 4 sheep hearts to back up his failing human heart). Back when Motorman was written, this probably wouldn't been the stuff of science fiction, and in Ohle's world, such reconstructive surgery abounds, not out of necessity, but as fashion statements, or as units of emotive barter (he gets discharged from a "mock war" by volunteering for a minor fracture (subsequently inflicted to his knee by a nurse) and he throws in a "list of feelings" as a guilt-ridden after-thought, as if he is not giving enough, or as if feelings were detachable commodities that could be sacrificed for a price.

The "he" is Mondenke, the lonely and hen-pecked (yet ever-resilient) protagonist trying to eke out an existence in a bureaucratic and oppressive government controlled-world (if you have seen any of William Kentridge's movies, think Felix Teitelbaum). Mondenke receives menacing and intrusive phone calls from a Mr. Bunce, who seems to know and monitor everything of Mondenke's whereabouts or even his thoughts. Mondenke spends most of the book trying to escape Bunce and find Dr. Burnheart, his old confidant and physician, and the apparent object of his affections, Cock Roberta, whom he woos by saying her nipples are like erasers. During his escapist travels, he alludes and in at least one instance dismembers, dunce humanoid "jellyheads" who are made of jelly and speak in scrambled sentences before catching and correcting themselves. This is enough of an adventure narrative to keep you grounded and turning pages. Not that its told in a prosaic or straightforward manner--its pieced together brilliantly in the form of questionnaires, odd ephemera, frequent letters and interspersed weather reports.

After a day on the job he tries to quit, but his employer Mr. Featherfighter (a.k.a. Mr. Etcetera), who addresses Mondenke as Mr. Bufona even after Mondenke repeatedly corrects him, does not allow him to resign: "The road to Etcetera was paved with such intentions. I do not accept them as anything, much less resignation."

It was great read not just for the story it tells and the ride it takes you on, but for the richness of the language and its poetic bursts that disguise themselves within the prose. Reading Motorman may not quite induce levitation, but like Mondenke, you will ride sublimely on the ethereal and viscous jelly of Ohle's language, moved along by the river of his words.

[Emrys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having only just finished Motorman, I really have little idea as to what was actually going on in it. The world of Motorman seems to be a dark future seemingly of our own world. Rather than be ruled by a government, the world seems fairly anarchic with the majority of the power being held by capitalistic monopolies. This earth seems to have been so heavily polluted that people appear to refrain from going out of doors and instead essential menial tasks are performed by an android sort of species that are filled with jelly but wear believably human masks. If this is sounding weird, then you are getting a good feel for the book. Nothing is laid out or explained. Nothing, including names, character motivations, and other basic reader assumptions can be trusted. This feeling of confusion we get from trying to understand this Earth and the characters on it mirror what must be the general mood of the world itself.

The weather is a perfect example of this. It is accepted for the volatile mess that it is. It is created by the conflicting and devastating egos of scientists and businessmen with too much power. The weather is almost constantly broadcasted, listened to addictively by most every citizen, but they all openly accept that though the weather is potentially extremely dangerous on the daily, it is all made up. People will openly acknowledge this fact in the same breath that they acknowledge how unceasingly it determines their actions and opinions on the world.

Moldenke himself, is a man who has an emotional incapability to understand himself, though strangers seem to know him rather intimately at a glance, only to immediately deny it. At first I thought maybe he had a hidden important job, or maybe his heart surgery was a widely publicized medical innovation! But no, his jobs seem mundane to the point of being degrading, and there seem to be many others who have had surgeries equally as strange or stranger than his. Perhaps Bunce is just one step ahead of him, informing the peons on the path before Moldenke so they can be there waiting to distract and disturb him.
The falseness of all of Moldenke’s interactions with the people he runs into merge beautifully with the general falseness of the whole world. Everything from peanuts to war to his range of emotions are falsely constructed.

Parting my way though the oddness of the book, I sympathized with Moldenke. In a world of oppressive apathy, in a body that can hardly register curiosity, and never love, he is a man searching to find something better for himself, and yearning towards a woman who he is kind and soft with. In his simple complacent way, Moldenke actually does something quite brave, he risks everything to break free from monotony, to find himself a better life. If a man with three faulty sheep’s hearts, a collapsed lung, an eye infection, and a severely stunted emotional spectrum can do that for himself, then I can do it for myself too.

This would be a wonderful book to read in a class or a club. if anyone wants to discuss any aspect of it I would be excited to learn other's thoughts.

[Keith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was recommended to me as a must-read by two people whose opinions I respect, and who assured me I would love it. I did not love it. In his opening, Ben Marcus builds up the work so much that it almost seems unfair -- I'm not sure any book could live up to the wild praise that precedes this text.

I'd like to at least argue that Motorman seems like an important book, even if it's one I don't enjoy. As Marcus says, it does seem to cast a shadow over literary science-fiction, one that encapsulates everything from Brazil to The Giver. But this shadow is cast more obviously by earlier, more well-known works, with the paranoia of 1984, the mundanity and dark humor of Waiting for Godot, the body horror of Naked Lunch.

In his introduction, Marcus describes the experience of reading Motorman as something akin to touching the sublime. While there is something interesting in the scope of the book's worldbuilding efforts, for the most part its view is small, repetitive, and bleak. I don't really get it, but I'm done with it. Anyway.

[k-rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look, you're not going to like this. Don't even try. You'll pick it up, start reading, maybe get a few chapters in, at which point that itch running along your brainstem will begin to try to figure out what the hell is going on. Hesitating on the street corner, looking around, you'll feel as though you're missing something. It's like that time you were in the art museum and wandered into the contemporary section. After a few minutes you cursed yourself for paying to look at all this crap. You've been bamboozled, how can they call this art? It's just some crap vomited up on a canvas with a title. So you leave, and seriously, it's not even worth trying to explain away the money you just spent on staring at all that egregious flimflam. So please, don't read this book. It's not for you. There's a reason it disappeared for two decades after it was originally published. And by published we're talking some professor at Bumblefuck Jr. College mimeographed it for his students, then Joe Goofball spent too much money xeroxing it a few years later on a lark, and a stoner picked it up and thought it was good. It wasn't! You've been warned. Oh and the ending sucks. Five stars!!!

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect piece of writing, occupying its own cloistered space between Beckett and Burroughs... freakish and moving in equal measure.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great recommendation. So bizarre at yet also prescient. Are we living now in Moldenke world?

[Il Pech · Rating 2 out of 5]

Motorman è un libro senza genere.
È un po' di tutto, ma niente in particolare. È beckettiano nei dialoghi, c'è un po' di Burroughs (perché Ohle l'ha frequentato per anni, o perché fa figo dire così) e anche di Pynchon.

Mi piace quando in un libro tutto è indefinito; quando è il lettore a dover scegliere un senso. L'idea di essere gettato in una distopia strana senza contesto in cui tutto è disagiante e inspiegabole, come in sogni di Mevlido.

L'idea base di Motorman è intrigante e potrebbe essere l'inizio di un qualcosa ma la realizzazione sembra il tema di un adolescente.
È un castello di carte pronto a cadere, uno schizzo senza intenzioni.
L'unica cosa che conta veramente, nel libro, è l'atmosfera.
Il resto è un susseguirsi d'immagini senz'anima; flash di cose, come in Cronopios, ma non voglio nemmeno provare a giustificare questo paragone.

Moldenke ha quattro cuori di pecora ma nessuna anima, nel mondo ci sono due soli e svariate lune al posto di quelle a cui siamo abituati. Qualche dettaglio fantascientifico buttato lì senza contesto né spiegazioni e mettere k- prima di alcune parole non basta a fare un libro.

Motorman è un'opera strana e curiosa uscita in un periodo in cui la stranezza era all'ordine del giorno.*
Motorman era una tesina universitaria senza ambizioni.
È andato fuori stampa perché lo volevano leggere in 4. Il sequel è rimasto senza editori per 34 anni perché lo volevano leggere in 4. Non è di nicchia, è scadente.
Trovare del genio qui è una forzatura.

[alexggrandma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lish-edited Ben Marcus Holy Text. Its great. It has great history. Copy machine’d first editions passed in paper. Makes it sound so cool. And it is. And that Lish editing. Always fresh sentences. Great world in this too. Tenderly hilarious. Cock Roberta is the greatest name of all time and is something i would come up with and so i felt like this was written for me and with me in mind.

I wanted to live in this world. I loved how they called Moldenke “Dink”. This is a great thing and should be re-read. I want to read the sequels but fear the lack of Lish. Perhaps fooLish.

I came to this wanting something strange and hermetic and i got that. I came to this fearing something opaque. No such. Clear as day. It is a clear, funny, small screwball comedy weirdo love affair that implies a strange sci fi world.


4.5

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authors build worlds which usually contain much loving detail and an underpinning of logic. Ohle's world here is economically devised and offered with diffidence. A wonderfully creative, imaginative mind is on show here, but unlikely most the author's sense of self-satisfaction does reek and seep from between the lines. Take it or leave it, Ohle probably wouldn't be bothered either way.

He doesn't just create a physical world, he subverts our deep set sense of both time and space. "in the old days there was one sun, one moon, starlight enough, and one good heart". In the world on show here people have several implanted animal hearts to supplement their failing human ones, there are several moons and suns constructed and managed by the government with concomitant effect of the weather, although not one that the government seems in control of. There are notions of a mock war where citizens sign up for mock injuries to invalid themselves out of the war, thus cutting out the middleman of an enemy.

Protagonist Moldenke begins the novel confined to his room, able to communicate only by letter or telephone and is clearly a victim of everpresent surveillance (this book written long before the era of online surveillance). He is persuaded to try and escape and to meet up with his saviour Dr Burnheart and maybe reunite with his romantic love Cock Roberta and so undergoes a journey through a strange and vaguely threatening world. The ending is surprisingly touching and you appreciate that the book is about relationship and the struggle to discover your feelings.

[Borbality · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of what I wish the Blade Runner book was like. (I know the name I just didn't feel like typing it all out.) Weird, cool, short.

it's definitely post-modern, right in the height of it in 1971, which means it won't make a lot of sense. I mean, just look at the cover art. Awesome.

Thankfully it's not that really wordy, 1000-page Po-mo nonsense. it does even have a weird (almost) sex scene, so I guess that counts.

Really neat world, set up with just enough to let your mind fill in the blanks and keep it interesting without spelling everything out. cool dialogue and just overall spooky tone. You kind of share the paranoia felt by the main character Moldenke, and the mystery of the setting is more interesting than confusing.

I mean, you're not going to close the book when you're done, let out a deep sigh and be all, like, "that was a nice story." But it is a real short trip you'll wish you had more of, if you're into that sort of thing.

[Rachel Adiyah · Rating 1 out of 5]

FYI: If you are offended by just about ANYTHING, you probably don't want to read this book.

For about the first 2/3 of the book I enjoyed it in a darkly humorous, satirical fashion. It is experimental-surrealist-science-fiction on the edge. Then the racism started. It was sexist entirely the whole way. The racism against black people is genocidal; I was absolutely horrified. Then the main character - labeling him a "protagonist" would be jumping the gun - who has been eating insects, starts eating massive quantities of insects! I wanted to vomit.

There is some talk of this book being "meaningful", a "trip through the subconscious". You want to read a meaningful experimental-surreal-science-fiction book/novel? Read The Lathe of Heaven, read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, read Ubik; don't try to tell me that this book has any meaning other than the author on a major drug trip because there isn't any.

[Sabra Embury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chugging through the get-go, the more I tried to find sense the less there was, triple-reading lines and letters, insects as meals, trenchpants, loudspeakers broadcasting airbursts, cat cranks, banana flowers, Featherfighter opening a door.

C-minus, son. C-minus; the ski lift, brown cigars, pig hearts, sheep hearts, calf hearts, the weather report as opera, government moons. "Is that you, Bunce? Mr. Bunce?"

Eventually from a third to end autopilot gleaned the rest of the analysis, weight applied to the break to stare at random scenery with awe and furrows. "A houseboat?" Maybe. You might say that." 66]67]68] oh man. From the upper limbs a bone fell dry; snakebites took a toll.

Was that a nightmare? A vacation? Words, but not just words? An unraveling, deprogramming, make-over, conquest,

jellyheads, jellyheads, jellyheads.

[Gianni Dellea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se un personaggio della Pimpa sognasse Farenheit e lo facesse trascrivere da Kafka.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinarily strange and heartfelt.

Some of the language reminded me of the great Moderan stories, but this book is completely singular.

If you like Barthelme, I imagine this will be something you will want to read. But...Barthelme is really the only experimental author I've read so my comparison may be disregarded.

[Michael Seidel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking astounding. Will need to revisit.

[Toshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I keep asking myself how I feel or what I'm thinking about after finishing, and my mind is both still but teeming with activity below the surface.

I'm struggling to distill what this was all about and I can't help but think that Ohle is trying to get us to detach from our notion of reality. He lets us into his fictional world full of jelly and gauze, and has a way to make it feel so convincing and real that we have no choice but to begin to empathize with and humanize Moldenke. For all we know, he's just a motorman, or worse full of jelly.

I feel like we are asked, how can we completely trust both internal and external worlds, being memories as well as oral or written history. For events that we believe actually occurred, what was the "realism" of them? As in, maybe it happened, maybe not. But if we assume that it actually did, were those involved just going through with the motions or were they completely conscious? For example school is a huge mock test for life, attempting to correlate report card letters with traditional success. There's a sense that life is a loosely connected, somewhat correlated series of chronological events that we may take way too seriously.

What do I feel like I'm taking away from this experience? Ohle does an incredible job IMO of commanding simple words and sentence structures in such a way that is lighthearted, efficient, yet fresh. His word choice does not stale, thereby highlighting certain words and themes that are being driven home. Complicated language need not be required for something like this. Would I recommend this for others? Difficult to say, it depends on the individual.

Find me with a moon hat watching the 7 suns.