| Title | : | Gone Tomorrow (High Risk Books) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1852423366 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781852423360 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 252 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1993 |
Gone Tomorrow (High Risk Books) Reviews
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"We arrived in Cartagena. Palms lined the sidewalks, fronds half-brown from dessication. A glass-and-steel cakebox palace, its flag-lined plaza adrool with fountains, floated on the black water of the marina. Human figures crowded the esplanade, which had the look of a perpetual carnival. There were wagons selling boiled peanuts and ices, wheeled steam tables, people in straw hats and sandwich boards hawking lottery tickets, balloons, grotesquely fat women working the crowd with trays of smashed coconuts and sliced papaya balanced on their heads, refugees from a Botero paiinting."
Much of Gone Tomorrow is set in this sweltering city on the northern coast of Colombia.
My first acquaintance with Gary Indiana was back in the 1980s when the New York City East Village art scene exploded with defiant, hopped up energy. I read the author's collection of short stories, Scar Tissue, and was impressed with the power of the language and his ability to create vivid scenes and a sense of impending doom. And, of course, there was the sex - in one story a gorgeous hunk of a gay man is held captive as a sex slave and in another we read the memorable lines: "That night I fucked Candy Jones for something like three hours. My nuts ached the whole next day and I couldn't get her out of my mind."
More recently I’ve been reading Gary Indiana’s book reviews to serve as models for my own reviewing. His observations are shrewd and sharp, expressed in such colorful turn of phrase I can almost see his words sizzle on the page. For example, reviewing Red Lights by Georges Simenon: “He also practices a radical economy of language using almost no adjectives or adverbs – his white space is more expressive than much of Hemingway and all of Raymond Carver. I suspect it’s because he didn’t fetishize the search for the perfect, starling word, a cause of literary acne that runs rampant in the work of writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. He thought the approximate word was quite good enough. Looking for the perfect one would have slowed him down.”
Also Garry Indiana essays which can be biting and caustic in the extreme. This from a piece on Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show: “He has always been there in his network time slot, embalmed in a dense magma of reassuring mediocrity, mugging behind his desk as if to guarantee the faceless millions that they, too, can repeat the same absurd gestures day after day, year after year, without an unbearable amount of suffering.”
I include these quotes as prelude to provide a sense of the radical, anti-mainstream nature of Gary Indiana’s writing, especially when it comes to his critique of art and culture. Although he has well over a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction to his credit, you will be hard pressed to find any references or webpage featuring his work. This guy is as far removed from Facebook and The New York Times as humanly possible. There were those few years back in the 1980s when he was an art critic for The Village Voice in order to eat and pay the rent but his real desire was to write novels.
Gone Tomorrow is Gary Indiana’s second novel recently republished by Seven Stories Press and based on Gary’s experience as an actor in German director Dieter Schidor’s 1985 film Cold in Columbia. The novel’s unnamed first-person narrator shares much with the author – he’s gay, he’s thirty-four, he’s both an actor and a writer.
There’s some action on and off the film set in Cartagena; actually, the paramount action turns out to be all the film people overindulging in booze and a mountain of the Columbian national product along with an entire list of other recreational substances. But the real juice of the novel is the Gary Indiana-like narrator’s searing critical eye taking in all the people and places in and around the film set. On Alex Garvo: “What disturbed me even more was something willfully unreal about him. Something incredible about his “casual” outfit of jeans and pinstripe shirt. Something forced and unbelievable in the stony expressions rolling across his face as he listened to the table talk, his square jaw falling open and clamping shut like a steam shovel, while his pale gray eyes bored holes in the sodden tablecloth.”
In addition to Alex, there’s an entire lineup of ravishing, narcissistic movie queens (both male and female) – Maria, Irma, Carlotta, Valentina, Ray, Michael and the narrator’s best friend, the director of the film, Paul. What an eccentric mix of egos. However, I think it is fair to say not one of these glittering superstars suffers from psychological problems or maladies that couldn’t be addressed by twenty years of intensive psychotherapy.
The narrator’s observations and reflections also extend out to the people of Columbia and their mixing and clashing with wealthy Americans and Europeans. There is even a time when the actors take to the streets shoulder to shoulder with the natives to celebrate Cartagena carnival and the parade of contestants in the Miss Columbia beauty pageant. “”This is insane!” we all kept shouting to each other over the roar of the crowd, laughing, smiling at complete strangers, cruising people in bizarre outfits, catching the startled and delighted looks of people surrendering themselves to a manic fantasy.”
Cartagena is the longer portion of Gone Tomorrow. The last third of the novel is Part Two, seven years later back in New York and Munich, when Ray and Paul join the legions of others who have contracted AIDS. We watch the torturous stages of the disease turn life into unending excruciating pain leading to death.
I can see very clearly why this Gary Indiana novel was published as part of High Risk Books. It’s a novel on the edge but a novel well worth the read. I feel as if I have lived through those stormy cocaine-fueled 1980s all over again via the mind and heart of this nonconformist critic.
Photo of the Artist as a Young Man - American author Gary Indiana, born 1950 -
The best thing I've read all year. Edgy, punk, operatic, perverse (and perversely funny), and teetering on camp, Gary Indiana's Gone Tomorrow is full of stunning writing and brings forth the kind of AIDS-era novel that is unsentimental and doesn't insult the reader's intelligence--something that is sorely missing from today's writing (this was published in 1993). Not for the prudish reader, this book will leave you wondering 'what the fuck did I just read?' in the best way.
This novel is such a mix of genres its difficult to summarize. There's a blurb on the back that aptly conjures up the feel of Gone Tomorrow, saying, "Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day...Indiana writes with an art critic's eye for detail and a poet's ear for language."
Needless to say, I will definitely be reading more of Gary Indiana's work and major kudos to Seven Stories Press for reissuing this landmark queer novel for new readers. 5/5 -
There was a time in the late 80's-early 90's where "transgressive" literature was all the rage. Works like Ellis' American Psycho, Hell's Go Now, and Acker's Blood and Guts in High School tried to outdo themselves with depictions of depravity and degeneration. Gone Tomorrow fits right in with those books. At times it seems to be trying to shock for shock's sake (anal sex in Dachau anyone?), but overall it is a brutal response to a brutal disease (AIDS) that wiped out a generation of gay artists. The writing is masterful and poetic, even if some of the people and events make you squirm. I'm a big fan of Indiana and this is one of the best books I've read by him. It will not make you feel good at the end.
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I'm not too sure what to think about this.
The structure is unbalanced and the main section of the book (on a south American film set) feel unneeded and unhelpful once we get to the second, final and more significant section which it does little to elucidate. None of the characters are particularly likeable or even that we'll developed, either.
In terms of style and language, some of it is poetic and highly wrought - almost showy - unfortunately the author didn't seem able to sustain this throughout, leading to some actually rather bad writing at times. The reader is presented with many details and minute events that appear significant. To the book (p105), all too often "The moment seems pregnant, but pregnant with nothing".
Yet, all that being said, reading wasn't a chore and eventually delivers a fairly original take on the AIDS novel. -
Gary Indiana’s books are such sleeper hits to me like I can’t even explain what it is about his writing that gets me because it’s so understated and perfect. This book made me nauseous at several points and it is not beautiful at all. But it is tender, and it’s so honest, and so quippy and mean and dumb. I loved it. An important book when it was first published too I can imagine
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4,5
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DNF @ 40%
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Gary Indiana's novel "Gone Tomorrow" took me some time to read. I was not really enthralled by the first half, but I kept reading because some of the writing is magnificent. Through the droll first 160+ pages, there would be a sentence or paragraph or image that stuck out and proved to me that he is a fascinating writer, but the story, about making a movie in Columbia, really was not too interesting.
The second part however really makes a emotional case regarding watching friends slowly dying. There are heart wrenching descriptions of how it feels to watch someone die.
I am curious about how he chose to write this novel in a hearsay format. The narrator gathers facts through talking to friends over drinks, and some of those friends are repeating what other friends said. It makes the idea of the narrative very unreliable, but in that unreliability, the story becomes more and more emotionally charge. Throughout the hedonistic first part, I found that I really did not care at all for the characters because they were more caricatures of people, people putting on a front to be cool or whatever they assume their friends would think is cool. In the second part, the caricatures are ripped away, the fronts get killed by disease, and beneath all of the posturing, the characters are real, with real fears and emotions.
And maybe this is one of the points Gary Indiana is trying to make. Regardless of how cool you think you are, in the end, we are all the same...afraid of dying...afraid of watching people die. -
I shouldn't have read this so soon as Keith McDermott's ACQUA CALDA: more spoiled, drug-and-alcohol-addled creative types out for a self-destructive romp in a tropic clime, this time South America. Dull, tedious, and unsympathetic. Everyone, please do the reader a favor and self-destruct at home in Berlin and New York.
It is true, as other reviewers have noted, that the book improves marked as it nears its predictable conclusion, if operatically. The final paragraph is worth the wait. But by that time, you won't care about any of the characters. It's too bad, really. -
Indiana's writing in this novel is enthralling. His use of verbs is outlandish, and his descriptive tirades of cockroaches, dinner party anxieties and the body horror of illness are truly entrancing. The second and last part of the novel works more as an epilogue, with the main narrating characters grasping to come to terms with the changing world they now inhabit. A descriptive baroqueness takes over the text in an intense (for more than one reason) sexual escapade and the dreadful emotional landscape of a seemingly unavoidable plague.
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"Writes pathetically badly. A poisonous addiction to ellipses. (p.34) But see part II for a much more emotionally profound narrative. Still addicted to mixing metaphors in the most horrible way. Great plot, but too sprawling."
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Gary indiana is craaaaaaazy!
