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Bafflegab

by Stan Rogal

Almost every page in Bafflegab, Stan Rogal’s second novel, contains an allusion or citation. Orphan Annie’s “leaping lizards!” aside, most of the sources are decidedly weighty. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Stein (amongst others) are invoked as the narrator, a writer, looks to include himself in the pantheon of suffering genius. As his rejection letters accumulate, the burden of proof for his suffering is met. The case for his genius is another matter.

Rogal is a Toronto playwright, poet, and raconteur. Sections of Bafflegab were first read on CIUT-FM, a campus radio station, and both the cadence and themes of the novel owe much to the ad-libbed ranting of a campus DJ. There are rants against “social brainwashing,” musings on writing as a competition and as an extension of the body, and a very long aside on the mundane nature of the word “fuck.” In addition, Rogal has written the novel in choppy fragments – the frustrated writer’s journal entries – a format that mimics talk radio, where narrative is subordinated to an ongoing present.

Now he is Donald Barthelme spinning out a postmodern long sentence; now he is Shakespeare, challenging metaphysics by way of puns. Though Kafka receives just a passing mention, it is a Kafkaesque sense of fatality, of being brought low by the weight of history – literary or otherwise – that builds with each page. Unfortunately, what might paralyze other writers only inspires Rogal’s narrator to blather on and on. And however promiscuous and charming the use of literary masks, what shows through is a frivolous, uncertain writer, a character who remains only partially realized.

 

Reviewer: Mark Pupo

Publisher: Insomniac Press

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 164 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-895837-79-0

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2000-12

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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