Couch is Benjamin Parzybok’s Slacker Odyssey

Benjamin Parzybok ’s sofa is an epic poem for the indifferent , a journey to save the Earth undertaken by the post - college American shirker – for the substantive cause that there does n’t seem to be anything better to do .

Couch effortlessly evokes those uncheerful after - schoolhouse but just - before - life year of weird roommates , cramped apartments , and the annual rite of move one ’s article of furniture and stingy self-command to somewhere new . Roommates Tree , Erik , and Thom ( Bakker , in a subtle vociferation - out to the assembled nerditry ) , after their flat is unknowingly flooded by the sexuality maniacs know above them , tackle a seemingly dewy-eyed task . They need to take their vast , red , handmade sofa down to the Goodwill . Things being to grow gradually strange as the Goodwill turns them away , as everywhere starts to call on them away , and Thom and his roommates begin to think that the Couch itself has a routine of a long journey in brain .

Parzybok takes his time at the origin , letting the contingent of Thom ’s life sentence unfurl ; an unemployed computer software engineer in Portland , Thom ’s life is given a cheerless reverberance see America ’s current economic hardships . It ’s actually pick up when he finally commits himself to taking the sofa where it really want to go . In a climate where everything seems to be fall apart , bear a composition of piece of furniture through a hundred Roman mile of rainy wild is something , anyway .

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The pace is languid , without much in the room of struggle or , for the first ninety pages or so , anything even resemble a threat . Certainly , there are one or two vague suggestions that “ someone ” might require the Couch , but since it ’s pretty incomprehensible just what kind of mischief a villain could get up to with a large cherry couch — even a magic one — the terror lacks a certain immediacy . Even once the guns come out , the account is woolgathering , a slow place maintained by Parzybok ’s crisp , refined , and sometimes quite lovely writing - and a assumption so unfamiliar that it ca n’t help but set off a burning curiosity .

sofa ’s gradual transmutation from “ portrait of three slackers ” to “ expansive pursuit to save the world ” is marred a little by a sort of stumbling condescension somewhere in the middle ( when , by unbelievable opportunity , Thom et al have managed to get the Couch from Portland onto a freighter bound for Ecuador ) . It ’s a figure of speech that I ’d like to see snuff it forever : when the character “ in the know ” has to explicate to our befuddled heroes just what ’s going on , and treats the scenario like it ’s an unfathomable mystery . He assert repeatedly that “ some things make less horse sense the more they ’re explain ” – which is an abominably big jactitation for an generator , specially if he really is going to give us some account . It may be improbable that the couch is an ancient magic artefact , and it ’s certainly unconvincing that there ’s a undercover council check over humanness to protect them from it , but it ’s hardly incomprehensible . Thom ’s response to the increasingly - flakey turns his living is taking is also strangely reversed . He readily believes in the strangeness , but insists that he can barely understand it ; yet , to the reader , it ’s perfectly to understand , just wildly implausible .

Still , there ’s something magnetic about the estimation that all of humanity ’s scant - eyesight , its close - mindedness , its misery and economic crisis is tied up in just one ugly one-time couch — something that can be carted off to South America to let the remainder of us at last be gratuitous of the curse Ernst Boris Chain of history . Bad intelligence for South America , of path , but at least it ’s far away . lounge slowly falls prey to the siren song of escapism , permitting a sort of optimism about the fact that , at least in this book , there can be a felicitous ending to human history – or , at least , the promise of a happy beginning somewhere down the melody .

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It ’s not hard at all to let oneself get carried away in the surreal narrative , follow the dream - same system of logic , revel in the crystal clear prose . It ’s quite worth it to take the time and wander into the verbal description of gorgeous Andean landscapes . finally , it ’s easy to believe that a huge , socially - awkward , unemployed computer software engineer from Portland could save the universe by getting rid of his sofa . Escapism does n’t hurt once in a while , and there are worse ways to drop a faineant Sunday afternoon .

you’re able to find Couch atSmall Beer Press .

Chris Braak is editor of lit & craze / ure blogThreat Quality Press , and emperor of the moon in exile . His certification , achievement , and accolades , are too legion to list .

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