LOST
Between the Edges
By Eldon Garnet
Semiotext(e), 300 pages, $15.95
Toronto writer Eldon Garnet's second experimental novel, Lost: Between the Edges, features X, a doctoral student in the University of Toronto philosophy department, who is spurred to thwart notorious Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Zundel's infamy emerged in the 1980s, in Toronto, when he published the pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?
There is something a bit Kafkaesque about Lost, especially in terms of characterization, or lack thereof. Beyond the consonant name, and the fact that they are harassed by authority, Garnet's X and Kafka's Josef K. do have a few significant differences: Unlike Josef K., whose only crime is his very existence, X incites trouble by torching Zundel's Carlton Street "headquarters of hate." Still, both Joseph K. and X are anonymous, allegorical characters, who represent ideas rather than people.
The idea of doing something destructive to Zundel's HQ first occurs to X when members of his Anti-Racist Action group (ARA) inveigle their way into Zundel's office under the pretense of making a CBC documentary (and a documentary of the documentary) on free speech: "The prospect of this video was exciting to the entire group: a way to both discover and reveal Zundel's world of hate."
Still unsatisfied with this abstract and modern mode of critiquing Zundel, X decides to take action by way of matches and gasoline. In terms of story, what follows is X's attempt to evade police capture, his slow physical deterioration and his growing disillusionment with the act he has committed.
Interspersed with the slim chapters of the novel's action are various lengthy documents that deny the extent of the mass extermination of the European Jewish population during the Second World War. These documents include sections of Fred Leuchter's notorious gas chamber report, which Zundel commissioned in order to deny the existence of the chambers.
Structurally, this documentation serves as neo-Nazi agitprop; it's a counterpoint that fuels X's growing obsession with destroying Zundel. As well, the documents are obviously examples of the kinds of literature in Zundel's tendentious library: They are the very texts X seeks to raze, texts like Zundel's Did Six Million Really Die?
Garnet's meta-textual and inter-textual weaving of inflammatory neo-Nazi texts is, for the most part, effective in fuelling X's rage and his story. Less effective sections include documents regarding Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, which seem curiously out of place. At the end of the novel, Garnet splices in a dense section from the online Nizkor Project, excerpts from the Nuremberg Trial, and a massive interview section devoted to controversial "historian" David Irving, who stated that Hitler was disconnected from the reality of a systematic Jewish genocide.
In terms of style, the author's very clinical prose is reminiscent of Camus's and Sartre's detached manner of writing, and is pointedly unnatural. For example, like his enemies, X thinks in the didactic language of propaganda: "It has to be done, what can't be expressed in written text can be revealed in action," X tells himself on the eve of his arson.
Clearly, Garnet's book is an ideological novel and therefore cannot really be judged by the usual literary standards. Unfortunately, no one, not even po-mo experimentalists, can be excused for such an overwhelming number of spelling mistakes and punctuation problems. It is a shame Garnet's book was not edited or proofed properly, as this sloppiness undermines a complex book.
Ibi Kaslik is the author of Skinny. Her new novel, The Angel Riots, will be out next spring.
