Beneath the Wounds

A prose experimentalist can seem divided in purpose, especially as a novelist or story writer. Many aim to dazzle or disturb, tweak or tickle more than tell a story. Sometimes this aim is the story. But absent the draw of narrative, only a certain sort of reader sticks around. I’ll confess: I’m not that sort of reader. I enjoy absurdity or philosophical musing but expect at least a hint of forward movement, conflict or change. Thankfully, in Jayson Iwen’s odd “comic mystery” Gnarly Wounds—which clearly aims to dazzle, disturb, and tickle in experimental ways—we also find story. Or rather, stories. Three novellas, meant to be linked with a fourth element—a frame story, surrounding them like the shell of a Matryoshka doll.

Iwen’s opening conceit is familiar enough: a manuscript left behind by a mysterious acquaintance—in this case a rarely encountered neighbor—has been preserved, edited down, and passed on to us by the author (Iwen). But the manuscript itself, written, we’re told, by one Nicolaus Iwinski, is far from familiar. In Iwen’s fiction, Iwinski was once a Romanian satirist and agitator silenced by Nicolae Ceausescu in the seventies. Iwinski wrote the original text of Gnarly Wounds and was ultimately killed for daring to distribute it. The work left behind doesn’t read as overly political or polemical, but we can easily buy that a tyrant like Ceausescu would have been insulted (or baffled) enough to have the author executed. The book proper, after all, opens with Ceausescu masturbating in a bathroom. We then learn that Ceausescu’s son Nicu, a famously decadent playboy, fathered the novella’s protagonist (of sorts), Nicu Jr., via pedophilic rape. To both hide and educate him, the elder Ceausescus sends Nicu Jr. to a mountain monastery to study with a demanding spiritual guide, Rana the Wise, a harsh taskmaster more fit to coach boxing or football than meditation and eternal wisdom.

This is just one of several strains filling the first part of this ambitious book (“Hell’s Canary”). We also find a small band of Romanian army deserters on a rescue mission after the Timisoara uprising of 1989; a trio of witches on a mountaintop attempting to influence desires; memories of a girlfriend’s suicide; spiritual interrogations, bawdy jokes, and an ongoing Q&A for the reader. To sum up how these parts merge into one is too tall an order to fill here and might ruin some of the fun for the reader. The temporal space is in no way constant. The direction of narrative is not always clear. The book itself resists coherence, though only, it seems on the surface. A deep structure of association and plot is present here as well (though I’m not sure I caught all that’s intended).

Despite his indulgences, Iwen appears to have control over all this. Early on, he cops to the work’s difficulty, addressing the reader: “You get confused, but it’s okay. Confusion is natural at this point.” But our confusion will not be fleeting. Luckily, there are other pleasures in the work that keep us fixed as we go. The author has a probing philosophical intelligence and offers a hundred (it seems) Zen master-ish insights or poetic phrasings that tickle, tantalize, amuse, and annoy. “She was one of those people that’re so deep they have no surface,” or “Your body is an instinctive idiot. All decisions must be religious at the root!” or “The second you think you have the answer, the question will have changed.” These are in part self-conscious references to the work itself, partly riffs of existential stand-up comedy. There’s absurd sketch comedy too. Opposing soldiers engage in intellectual combat, attempting to “overwhelm their enemy with logic.” An elephant who asks inappropriate questions to a classroom of children is decapitated by a lamb (don’t ask). A human prisoner with a head injury loses his memory every half an hour, an ongoing bit in the final section that reads like a cross...