Glantz: An Appreciation — Tim MacGabhann
now @ 3:AM Magazine
“There are European writers who take a Buddhist scepticism and refine it against Western tradition until all that remains of the latter is a bleached, insomniac permafright that could pass — depending on the angle of light — for wisdom. Glantz by Tobias Ryan is too acute and unconsoled to settle for that …”
Incredibly grateful to Tim MacGabhann for this essay on GLANTZ, now up at 3:AM Magazine (with thanks to Andrew Gallix too).
Read the full article here.
GLANTZ will be available soon from Equus Press:
“In Glantz, Tobias Ryan delivers a claustrophobic study of inertia, conscience, and the paralytic rituals of everyday life. Set against a backdrop of shoddy bars, shoddier streets, and an even shoddier society in slow collapse, Glantz traces the movements (and stasis) of its eponymous anti-hero: a figure perpetually on the verge of speech, prayer, and confession, yet caught in a spiral of waiting, repetition, and failed transcendence. Ryan’s prose cleaves to the observational intensity of Robbe-Grillet while steeped in the noirish atmospherics of Equus Press: lives lived in suspension, in the interstices between catastrophe and routine. The novel unfolds as a series of minor scenes—meals half-eaten, prayers unspoken, notebooks left blank—where nothing seems to happen, and yet where history, violence, and memory seep into every silence. Glantz tests the novel form at its limits, interrogating how narrative itself falters when confronted with lives lived under the sign of exhaustion. Its syntax performs its subject: recursive, hesitant, attuned to the granular detail of a man staring into his own hands for meaning. A book of uncanny prescience, Glantz mirrors our own moment of crisis and stasis. It is a novel of failed routines and the stubborn residue of memory, confirming Tobias Ryan as a crucial new voice in the Equus Press constellation of poetics.”