Böcker av Rhys Trimble

This is a big joke. a 20,000 word joke to be precise. The conceit being 'remove narrative from a novel' and replace it with 'flattened versions' in the form of chapter titles that refer to narratology terminology. As a second tier, I decided to use an Oulipan lipogram-type constraint in which each chapterlet is named after a letter of the English alphabet and does not contain that letter. This is another play on absence. My hope is that the lack of narrative is filled-in by the reader, as I found when I wrote it. Clearly there are protagonists. Although not spoken of directly, there are also the affects of events having taken place. Any implication of story has been generated by chance through the cut-up of archeological reports written by Bethan Bones and other material like lists of adjectives. The lack of the meaning-creating signal of narrative, produces a kind of null, a flatline a drone from which your transcendence may be apparent. Don't forget to laugh.

This is a sequence of what I retrospectively regard as 'countersonnets', and they are composed from overheard and gathered material. They derive their shape from the floorplan of the Hergest Unit in Bangor, Gwynedd. The Hergest Unit consists of 3 octagonal buildings that are named after the poets Taliesin, Cynan and Aneurin. A number of my friends have been temporarily housed at this department of Ysbyty Gwynedd Hospital over the years.The Red Book of Hergest, which provides much of the material for this book, is a Middle Welsh text scribed by Hywel Fychan and others in the fourteenth century. It contains seminal Welsh works of literature, including 'The Mabinogion' and the poetry of 'Y Cynfeirdd' and 'Y Gogynferidd'.