Now here is an interesting ethical quandry for your honest book reviewer: Is it right to review a book that you have not read, but which you think you may have read in a dream?
Perhaps it was the late-night snack of Boursin on Triscuits. Perhaps it was having stayed up too late engrossed in the materfamilias’ harrowing death scene in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Or maybe it was the coyotes shuffling restlessly outside the French windows of my groundfloor bedroom, made heartsick by the waning of the moon, gibbering in their chthonic language. Whatever the reason, I dreamt most vividly.
In the vision I beheld a copy of Tim Dorsey’s Torpedo Juice faintly shimmering on the shelf of a strange bookstore. Because Cadillac Beach, the previous installment of the adventures of Serge Storms the happy lunatic, had provided many moments of merriment and sweet forgetfulness, I was favorably disposed to this sequel. In the time-bending manner of dreams, my reaching out for the book and having read it from cover to cover were the same action. The Dreambook version of Torpedo Juice left me with a deep feeling of comic novel satisfaction the faintest shadow of which remained with me when I awoke.
It remains with me still…
No. No, I have not read Torpedo Juice in this, the so-called “real” world. Yet I hold it out to you with my most heartfelt recommendation. I might even read it myself someday.
Torpedo Juice by Tim Dorsey
(HarperTorch, Mass Market Paperback, 382 Floridian pages)
Cadillac Beach by Tim Dorsey
(HarperTorch, Mass Market Paperback, 384 hyperactive pages)
