• Novel Play
• Lance Olsen (bio)

What has always interested me about Alan Singer's singular, dynamic, and underappreciated work—which I initially encountered back in 1988 through his second novel, The Charnel Imp, about a hallucinatory prairie slaughterhouse and wooden ventriloquist's dummy that may just be that novel's real narrator—is its dedication to density, difficulty, and an avant-gothic vision. The first self-reflexive line of his latest, Play, A Novel is, "There will be no intermission." That's it exactly. Reading Singer, you know there will be no time to drift off, none to pop out to the metaphorical lobby for a tub of popcorn.

Open Play and you discover a one-page theater piece: an aristocrat with dueling pistol enters a forest clearing, raises his gun, and unaccountably shoots the manservant waiting for him. That piece, it turns out, constitutes part of an experimental off-Broadway play titled Killer Killing Killers (resonantly, KKK for short), the creation of a pompous and often unintentionally buffoonish (in a Nabokovian key) director/author named Pan Fleet. KKK consists of nothing save a relentless chain of gruesome unconnected murder scenes. Descriptions of them alternate over the course of the novel with monologues about the planning and rehearsing of Fleet's drama, intertwined with a number of sexual intrigues motivated primarily by rabid ambition, manipulation, and revenge.

This play in violent fragments, Fleet hopes, will function as a provocation for his audience in the shape of an evening filled with senseless bloodshed and death. Each bit samples a different genre, from Greek tragedy to Theater of the Absurd, and beyond. In other words, Fleet's undertaking is also about drama's history, about its underlying aesthetic and existential assumptions. By extension it—like Singer's novel—is about narrativization itself, why stories attract us, how surprise, blocked desire, and barbarism live at their center. It's not for nothing, then, that all the carnage is perpetrated by the same male actor in a host of costumes, nor that that male turns out to have been played by a female, or even perhaps a hermaphrodite, or an actor made up to look like one. The last line of the novel—"So you never know."—functions as much as thematic nucleus as an off-handed comment made by Fleet.

Fleet is both friend and patient of Dr. Todorow, a heart surgeon, whose name echoes narratologist Tzvetan Todorov's. Todorov's seminal 1970 study, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, defines the fantastic as that instant in a text when the reader experiences a hesitation about whether to read an event as the uncanny, wherein apparently supernatural phenomena have a rational explanation, or the marvelous, wherein the apparently supernatural phenomena are confirmed by the story. Fleet and Todorow often converse over dinner in an elegant restaurant, the latter recounting the surgeries he performs (those performances suggest Todorow is a kind of actor as well), the former laying out his aesthetic views. Their intersecting monologues—sometimes melodramatic, sometimes comic, always stylized—lead to a Todorovian hesitation over where the uncanny ends and the supernatural begins. A case in point: Todorow's opening depiction of his operation on a baby girl during which he claims to have released a minute, venomous white spider through a concealed pipette into his patient's heart. Did he? Didn't he? In any case, Fleet finds himself abbreviating Dr. Todorow's name to Dr. Tod—German for Dr. Death.

Todorow's vampiric wife, Sigrid, a child psychologist who embraces a method she calls Uncompassionate Care, wants to become the understudy for Siri, the female lead in Fleet's play, as well as his lover. Siri is the Norwegian diminutive of Sigrid and, as the novel continues, the two blur into each other's doppelgängers. Again, we are inhabiting Todorov's realm, lost among a narrative funhouse of mirrorings, inverted roles, exercises in irony, performances that may be real and real events which may in the end be no more than performances.

It isn't lost on the...

• 小说剧
• 兰斯·奥尔森（生物）

一直使我感兴趣的是艾伦·辛格（Alan Singer）的奇异，动态和被低估的作品，我最初是在1988年通过他的第二本小说《夏奈尔小恶魔》（The Charnel Imp）遇到的。是它对密度，难度和前卫视野的奉献。他的最新作品《小说》的第一条自我反省词是：“不会有间歇”。就是这样。读辛格，你知道没有时间漂流了，没有人突然跳到隐喻的大厅里喝一桶爆米花。

打开游戏，您会发现一页剧本：一位拿着手枪的贵族进入森林砍伐场，举起枪支，毫无责任地射杀了等待他的仆人。事实证明，该作品是百老汇实验性戏剧的一部分，名为《杀手杀手杀手》（Killer Killing Killers，简称KKK），创造了一个浮躁且常常无意中出现的讽刺小说（用纳博科夫主义的风格），名叫Pan Fleet。KK除了无情的，连绵不断的令人毛骨悚然的谋杀场面外，一切都一无所有。在小说的创作过程中，对他们的描述各不相同，其中包括有关弗利特戏剧的策划和演练的独白，还有一些主要是由疯狂的野心，操纵和报复引起的性骚扰。

弗列特希望，这部剧集充满暴力碎片，将以一个充满无意义的流血和死亡的夜晚的形式对他的观众起到挑衅的作用。从希腊的悲剧到荒诞的剧院，等等，每一位都采样出不同的体裁。换句话说，舰队的事业还涉及戏剧的历史，其潜在的美学和存在假设。像辛格的小说一样，它的延伸是关于叙事本身，故事为什么吸引我们，惊奇，受阻的欲望和野蛮生活在他们的中心。那么，并非所有的屠杀都是由同一位男演员穿着许多服装来进行的，也不是由那位男演员扮演的是女性，甚至是雌雄同体的演员，或者是由男演员组成的演员。看起来像一个。小说的最后一行-“所以你永远不知道。”

舰队既是心脏病外科医师Todorow博士的朋友，又是患者的患者。Todorow博士的名字呼应了叙事学家Tzvetan Todorov的名字。托多罗夫（Todorov）1970年的开创性研究《奇幻：文学体裁的结构性研究》将奇妙的事物定义为文本中的瞬间，即读者对是否将事件读为不可思议的事物感到犹豫，其中明显的超自然现象具有理性的解释，或者奇妙的现象（其中奇特的超自然现象已被故事证实）。弗利特（Fleet）和托多罗（Todorow）经常在一家优雅的餐厅里吃晚饭，后者则讲述了他所进行的手术（这些表演表明托多罗也是一种演员），前者展示了他的美学观点。他们相互交织的独白-有时是戏剧性的，有时是喜剧的，总是风格化的-导致托多罗夫对犹豫的结尾和超自然的开始的犹豫。一个恰当的例子：托多罗（Todorow）开头描述了他对一名女婴的手术，在此期间他声称已经释放了一分钟，有毒的白色蜘蛛通过隐藏的移液器进入患者的心脏。是吗 不是吗 无论如何，Fleet都会将Todorow博士的名字缩写为Tod博士（德语为Dr. Death）。

托多罗的吸血鬼妻子西格里德（Sigrid）是一名儿童心理学家，她接受一种被称为“无情关怀”的方法，她希望成为弗里特剧中的女主角西里（Siri）和他的情人的替身。Siri是挪威语中Sigrid的缩影，并且随着小说的继续，两者相互融合成彼此的混血儿。再次，我们居住在托多罗夫的境界中，迷失在叙事性的镜像之家，倒置的角色，讽刺的练习，可能是真实的表演以及最终可能不只是表演的真实事件中。

它不会在...上丢失