cartoons by kit schluter - review
as the 135 to old street snakes through the little alleyways around westferry DLR and merges onto commercial road, i find myself trying to figure out where i was this past weekend and what i had been up to. the brainfog is intense. it’s another week of withdrawals, and i’m more lost than usual. the upper deck of the bus, relatively empty, shakes and vibrates with some intensity as the bus driver manoeuvres his way through erratic east london traffic. i think about what i’ll get for lunch once i’m in office. i wonder if falafel is good for my gut. i picture the woman i had seen this past weekend, but struggle to place a name to her face. among other things, i speculate if things will be alright.
suddenly, a rat emerges from the row adjacent to mine. it stares at me intensely for a minute and i think to myself, please, i don’t have time for this. it morphs into a humanoid, like that character from harry potter, cracks its spine and then knuckles, and takes the seat across the aisle. through its eyes that are a deep endless black with no pupils whatsoever it stares at me intensely and i look away, pretending to ignore it.
“squeak squeak squeak, when will you get to it, tarun?” it asks.
“back to your gutter, will you please,” i respond.
“when?”
i survey the upper deck. there’s just one more passenger who’s busy vaping in the front, completely oblivious to what’s going on. there are about 6 more stops to duke’s place, where i’m supposed to get off. i sigh and turn to the ratperson.
“can you leave me alone, please. look at that kid in the front, look. he’s vaping. it’s probably not allowed on the bus. can you please bother him?”
“when will you get to it, tarun?”
“get to WHAT, you squeaky piece of shit?!”
“all that demands your attention.” it starts to whisk. “what’s inside your heart.”
“what would a ratperson know about it?”
“the ratpeople know. you never come down, it’s always us who have to come up. we know.”
“whatever,” i sigh and look away.
“when will you get to it?”
its voice is grave and sincere but i pay no attention to it. about 3 more stops. there’s another person who’s coming up the stairs. the ratperson notices and begins morphing back into a rat again.
“just remember: there’s no middle path, tarun!” it squeaks as it continues to shrink down.
i pick it up before it can run off and throw it outside of the bus.
someday, people in this city would be grateful for my actions. a statue might also be erected in my honor once london’s finally done with the roadworks.
cartoons by kit schluter is interesting and borderline insane. i felt humbled after reading this book. not humbled in a way you would after attempting something monumental, of great literary significance1 and realising you’ve overestimated your prowess, but, well… i can’t articulate what it is properly, but i thought i knew enough about fiction, that nothing could really surprise me. that no matter how strange and eccentric things got in a book, with some amount of effort i’d be able to see the point, figure out the layered metaphors. the meanings underneath the meanings, masks beneath masks. given enough time, i had thought, no allegory was impenetrable. that things always converged to a point because there always has to be a point.
cartoons changed that. but before i get into why, what it is, briefly: it’s a collection of short stories, the writer’s “cartoons” as he describes them in the preface:
I found I could disarm a feeling if I only picked its dynamics apart into characters and let them, as they say, have at it amongst themselves. What resulted were playful scenes which staged my own questions at a remove, allowing me - now us - to watch them as a spectator. I’ve taken a liking to calling them my little ‘cartoons’.
stories vary in length: some are as short as a single paragraph, some others a few pages2. very approachable insofar as length is concerned. it’s also well written: no unnecessary flourishes commonplace in a lot of weird lit.
on to the subject matter, then. throughout my time reading this, which was during my dreadful commute to/from work, i felt a range of emotions: wonder, disgust, awe, amusement, dread, boredom. i was even vexed at certain fairly short pieces which were neither poetry nor prose and in their (intentional) attempt to be neither just read like jumbled sentences, often full of schizoid characters dropping nonsequiturs. objects and animals and humans morph and shrink and grow and die and reborn and die again and talk about all that is important and not in a tone that’s often perplexing but always hilarious. it’s not immersive, per se, but it’s definitely intriguing. you kinda want to know what these characters are up to, where their intentions lie, why they behave in their extremely strange ways. i thought about these cartoons for a while. in fact, for a book that’s fairly short (~130 pages), it took me longer to finish this than wise blood, which is almost double in length.
i tried to understand where kit’s mind was when he was writing it all. and sometimes i did, and when i did, i felt seen. take this one, for example, titled: “I AM NOT A HAPPY PERSON AND I DON’T LIKE MY FRIENDS (subtext: A CARICATURAL ESSAY ON 120 DAYS OF SODOM)”. it’s a little autofiction piece which involves:
- kit who is not a happy person and hates his friends and visits the same café everyday,
- a shoeshiner who frequents the same café, is always annoyed at the kit’s dirty shoes and hatches a plot to forcefully clean them by conspiring with the waitstaff.
- and later reveals that he just wanted to be bathed in kit’s piss.
- a waiter who has orchestrated this entire ordeal to just talk to kit about commitment issues.
all this and more takes over just a few pages. this short opened with a direct quote by sade, so i was sort of expecting the weird sexual shit. what left a deeper impression on me however was how kit was able to ground this extremely outlandish and absurd situation into something sincere. personal struggles that i found deeply relatable were captured in a manner that goes beyond the pop-psych vocabulary and understanding of commitment, attachment, and relational troubles. expressing it all instead through the absurd felt fresh in a way a lot of literary fiction hasn’t for me so far. i mean, there are probably some books i’m unable to remember at the time of writing this that probably get close, but cartoons reads like something genuinely novel.
a huge challenge in writing (particularly in literary fiction) is articulating inner states while not getting too lost in the sauce. at the same time, you want your writing to be personal enough so that it isn’t reduced to just another top shelf airport paperback. in the preface to this book, kit mentioned that a lot of this is a “personal psychological experiment”, which rings true in my reading and understanding of it. the strength of this book to me lies therefore in how strangely individual, eccentric yet well expressed, and entertaining it is. don’t get me wrong, i still don’t get most of it. that’s to do with the humbling part i mentioned in the beginning. but beyond all that, this book made me realise that there’s a ton i don’t know about the craft of fiction. it served as a reminder that i need to get out of my comfort zone and maybe experiment more. inspiration favours the bold.
do NOT give this book a try if you don’t have an active imagination and/or don’t fuck with surrealist black humour.
3/5