“To myself, very sincerely.” That’s some sort of dedication
to open “The Dance of a Sham”, are we in for some narcissistic ramblings, 80
pages of self-indulgent rubbish? Let’s start off by revealing that “The Dance
of a Sham” is one continuous 80 page sentence, therefore forcing the reader to
become totally immersed in our protagonist’s thoughts during a single sitting.
Our story opens with our narrator telling us about his
“buddy” and the special talent this person has for story telling:
...I liked it when he started
telling stories, or just thinking out loud, he could talk like that for hours,
he’d say i know I’m a talker but i can’t help it, chatting keeps me alive, and
the reason he liked me so much was because he knew I was his best listener,
it’s true that once he got started i could have listened forever, i would have
followed him to the ends of the earth, and we’d take some fantastical paths,
I’d follow all the way, then he’d take the bit between his teeth, his phrases
came galloping along and you had to hang on tight, he’d cut his turns at an
ever more frenzied pace, I’ll tell you some hodge, then tell you some podge, i
start my stories hither and send them over thither, I didn’t let go for a
second, I was always there listening to him tirelessly, I was like that guy on
his donkey following a half-crazy knight around...
As the stream of consciousness rant continues we slowly
learn that our narrator has been in jail, that he’s been adopted, his jail time
for attempting to steal an old lady’s bag, but he didn’t snitch on his story
telling mater, who we learn had actually hit the old lady, so he gets away
scot-free
...but the surprising thing is
how the more I tell my little life story, the more memories rise to the
surface, it’s like vegetables in late summer, popping up all over the place, if
it keeps going like that I’m going to get confused because it will be too much,
but I realize I need to make an effort to organize all this, here I am
galloping though my past in every direction and pretty soon you won’t make out
head or tail of it, i was just a little kid when my dad gave me a big red top,
when it was spinning it made a shrill whistling sound, it sounded like an alarm
siren and I could play with that thing for hours, the amazing thing is you can
never tell which way the top will go, it just turns like crazy, it doesn’t
follow any law, see, it’s just a blind machine that follows its secret
instincts, this top had strange yellow pictures on it and when it was spinning,
the drawings turned into a big solid line that would grow wider or thinner
depending on the speed, then came the moment when the top started to get
twitchy on its point, you could tell the final tumble was coming and the siren
got deeper, gloomy even, I could catch it and set it spinning again before it
tumbled, but if I did, I always waited until the very last second, I let it go
right up to the brink of disaster, and the last second is the most marvellous,
it’s like when you’re out at dusk, night falls and you keep watching the
landscape, in a little while you think you can still see but actually for a
while already you haven’t been able to see a thing, you’ve gone over to the
other side without realizing and all you’re doing there is imagining the
landscape, it’s totally different....
Our tale here is the spinning top, it becomes “twitchy on
its point”, it’s a “sham”, our “buddy” after forty three pages suddenly
acquires a name, Caracala, and from them on it is a tale of instant distrust,
the story teller is a “sham”. He’s not a story teller at all, he stutters,
actually he’s a deaf mute, they were never friends, arch enemies, he ran away
when they attacked the lady, he was grateful for our narrator not snitching on
him, or they fought about it, depends what page you’re reading.
This is a story where fiction itself is ridiculed, we know
there are people who have been killed (or have they?) was our narrator involved
or is he a sham too? What is the truth, not just here on the page but in a
broader sense, you haven’t really seen the horizon, you haven’t been able to
see a thing for a while...
...some people love to be the
detonators, it’s in their blood, they can smell drama simmering from a hundred
miles away, so they come running at top speed, they come and ask if they can
help out, I don’t like those people, they’ve got a real knack from bringing a
problem into full bloom, watering it as needed, bringing the necessary
fertilizer, then when it’s grown a little, planting it in adequate soil, tying
it to a stake, clipping its side branches regularly to keep it growing straight
up towards the sky, so it grows into a particularly robust and vigorous
problem, and one day it can stand without a stake, you can’t control it
anymore, it starts mocking you, bending this way and that, making more and more
shade, like the tree you plant in front of your window without realizing, and
the room gets darker and darker, gloomier and gloomier, dampness creeps in, the
wallpaper starts blistering, every day a little more peels off, mold and fungus
starts growing in all the corners, cracks start spreading across the ceiling,
then that gardener with the green thumb for misery sits down and surveys his
work with a nasty look, sneering, beware of those people....
An interesting tale, and an easy read (even though it is
only a single sentence), the tricks of fiction and the reality from fantasy
becoming increasingly blurred as we travel further into our un-named narrator’s
story...or does he have a name, he refers to one late in the book, however is
that fantasy or fiction?
...one day I was going to be
face-to-face with my truth, all this fog swirling around my life would fade away,
my existence would be wonderfully clear, there would be no more lying...
With slight references to Cervantes “Don Quixote” (as you can see in a quote
above) and Laurence Sterne’s “The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”, do we also have homage? The
diversions, the rambling digression, continual references to “hanky-panky”,
humour and ridicule. Is our writer ridiculing the ridiculers?
...but his answers were full of
contradictions, the more he explained, the more muddled and upset he got, and
in the end he wouldn’t say another word, well from then on I lost whatever
trust I still had in him...
Do you lose all trust in the self-indulgent narrator of this
tale? You’ll have to read it yourself to figure that one out...
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