The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I first discovered the work of Kharms about fifteen or sixteen years ago. I grabbed a copy of the volume Incidences off the library shelf on impulse. It turned out to be an incredible book of ultra-short stories, dramatic shards and weird non-fiction pieces, pure Absurdism without any mitigating factors, individual prose fragments that make no sense on their own but when are regarded together with others of their kind seem to possess a certain profundity. Or rather, they echo and amplify each other (and sometimes distort or undermine each other too) to a point that is both beyond sense and yet somehow perfectly inevitable (and thus almost logical).

Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, Kharms seemed to anticipate the use of postmodernist fragmentation while simultaneously looking back at the grand tradition of Russian writing. His work often feels like a deeply odd hybrid between Kafka and Barthelme. His recurring themes achieve an awful, hilarious resonance as the book progresses... Old women falling out of windows, bricks falling on the heads of pedestrians, random accidents, disintegrating men...

My own modest offering, Trivialities, is a genuine homage to the author, a manifestation of my admiration in fictive terms for the offbeat speculations and fantastical tragicomedies of Kharms' microfictions.