A Paean to My Red Heaven, by Lance Olsen

“Time exists so everything doesn’t happen at once.” (Einstein)

“but everything happens at once anyway.” (Olsen)

My Red Heaven could be about many things. It could be about Berlin in a time then known as "after the war to end all wars" but now known as a liminal moment between the two wars. The book could be asking how so many things could have happened to so many people in such a small piece of spacetime. It could be a linear manifestation of simultaneity.  

Puzzles abound. For instance, the colon in chapter titles. At first, I thought, “Ah ha! chapter subtitles.” But the parallelisms quickly nixed that pat solution. No, the text after the colon is more than a subtitle, more than a subsection, more than a sub-anything. It’s every bit as important as the text that comes before and so the colon becomes a kind of fulcrum. (Olsen messing with punctuation. What else do you expect from an author who's taught thousands to transcend the rules?)

So many "ah ha" moments as we spot familiar figures in these pages. There's Hitler before he was Hitler and Billy Wilder before he wrote Some Like it Hot. Joseph Goebbels ponders a manly font for his propaganda rag, der Angrieff. Hannah Arendt explains her position while Hannah Hoch explores her art. Herr Professor Doctor Hirschfeld locates 64 types of sexuality. By the time Greta Garbo swans through these pages we are only beginning to appreciate the extensive research that must have gone into this book. There’s no time to google everyone but you get the feeling that even the waiters are “real.”

Somewhere a reviewer described My Red Heaven as “experimental but accessible.”  I chafe at that, having been taught that “but” erases whatever comes before it. The book is highly experimental and  its long gorgeous sections are indeed  accessible even to those not accustomed to puzzling texts; to people like me who just want Delia the doberman to live on and on in the happy smelly present as she does until she doesn’t.

My Red Heaven's deft prose will delight, its heart-wrenching scenes will move, and its  intelligent humor will resonate in the deep space where laughter fades into insight. It's a book to keep close at hand so you can read and re-read your favorite parts. 

You’ll want this book  to be part of your life.

“Space exists so everything doesn’t happen to you." (Van Pelt)