SULT

CANDOUR

a novel by Constantine Sult

$13.00, 124 pages (trade paperback)

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With this novel, Constantine Sult tells the story of an unnamed man rapidly dying of a nightmarish disease. Secluding himself in his apartment rooms, his only companion is his cat, Alastaire Cello, who he determines to keep unaware of his impending death.

A poetic study of isolation, anxiety and the need for compassion, CANDOUR is also a deeply felt meditation on a man's struggle to find meaning in his identity when faced with his own mortality and the idea of the eternal.

Comments From Sult

...I think I wrote Candour because I needed to convince myself that I still had a soul...

...I tried to make it as poetic and earnest a rendering as I could, though I do not know a rendering of what, exactly. I did not mean it as so much a statement about Mortality as a statement about Friendship, Fear. Love, perhaps...

...It was very important to me that Alastaire Cello, the cat, be just that –a Cat. I tried to infuse the animal character with only the traits of an animal, because to do otherwise would have made what the cat is to me something cliché, something unreal and false...

...I do feel that there is a distinct closeness between man and animals. Not just to say a closeness in how we feel about them, but that we are not so much more conscious than they are, we live more or less the same. I want always to express this in terms, though, of scaling back what it is we think people have that animals don’t. I edit down people, as opposed to adding in human traits to animals, robbing from them, in my way of looking at things, their distinctness...

...In this novel, I do this in the same way that I more or less distance and isolate consciousness and body in the human character. The cat is body and soul. The person is body and mind. The sadness in it comes, to my way of looking at things, from this longing for there, on the part of man, to not be a difference between the clearly different states...

...People isolate themselves by proposing that they are more defined by something that they cannot define. They demolish the fact that what binds them is that they are actually not defined at all in that way...

...So, it's odd in a way, as I suppose the conclusion I came to was that there are souls, we just don’t have them. They are things we can couple with, or at least interact with but that we cannot own anymore than a housepet...

THE MURDER OF LINEN

a novel by Constantine Sult

$14.00, 168 pages (trade paperback)

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Aligning the desire to create with a sense of guilt and dwelling on every impulse in the mind of a poet except those concerned with his work, Constantine Sult fashions a novel that is a stark and explicit portrait of contemporary man.

Alternating between minutely detailed physical description and the referenceless intricacies of thought, THE MURDER OF LINEN follows Wyndaul Dressage as he wanders between his job and various lovers during the course of three days, obsessing over his desire to successfully confess to a crime he has not committed and ignoring his personal obligations and pursuits.

Comments From Sult

...This was meant to be explicit, ennui laden, erotic, scathing, boring, dismal and vaguely celebratory all at the same time...

...As a novelist, I do not concern myself at all with making the exact content, events of the piece transparently representative of what I feel they are about. In fact, the more to the opposite of that the better...

...Like many of my novels About Art or About Creation, I skew those points, try to hide them under a lot of banal exposition and, especially in this book, under grime and nearly emotionless detail...

...By the time i was writing The Murder Of Linen, I had all but abandoned composing a plot ahead of time. I had gotten rid of anything except the most rudimentary structure. This novel is in three parts, but they all are stitched as seamlessly together as I had ever attempted in a work, the one picking up right where the last finished off, almost blurring the idea of distinction even further in this way...

...It was very important for me to keep in mind that Wyndaul was a poet. But, he was a poet like myself, one who had no illusions in his mind that he can compose verse, he just would (not that we see any of this in the novel) write down some words that occur to him and then not argue, always be marginally critical of them, but more feel detached than anything else, like they were something that happened like anything else happened, headaches or conversations with strange people on buses...

...It is his desire to be known for a crime he did not commit where his artistic expression can be found. I always kept in mind that he was poet when composing a passage about his, as I consider it, limp and almost pathetic nature to want to overly define, overly control something that has nothing to do with him...

...I’m always terrified when a poet decides to talk about what they say their verse means (even if I deeply admire it). This is not to say that I find poets full of themselves, usually. Quite the opposite. When they talk about their verse, though they always seem like liars to me. Not consciously. Just like people who really want to be defined in exact terms, but at the same time deal in abstraction... ...I actually don’t quite know how to say what I’m getting at. I tend to like poetry, but really dislike poets. I like Wyndaul Dressage and really dislike him, because of that...

CARTHAGO DELENDA EST

a novel by Constantine Sult

$14.00, 178 pages (trade paperback)

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CARTHAGO DELENDA EST is Constantine Sult’s most raw, violent and poetic rendering of the resistance of man to the concept of concrete identity, and of the desperate longing to find expression through only abstraction and self reference.

Ten year old runaway Dimitri Kaske lives at two train stations or in transit between them, subsisting on petty theft, spare change from commuters and free meals from various staff at station restaurants. Suffering from a severe concussion after being injured in a fight, he learns that case workers have posted his description throughout the transit system. His incoherent state leads to feelings of betrayal and intense persecution, as well as to increasingly violent acts of self abuse.

Comments From Sult

...Carthago is a guttural, yelp of a thing that is, though in an entirely different way, an exploration of the same state of being that Regard was about. It is unrefined, though, sloppy...

...Whereas a lot of the observers in my books tend to look around and become fascinated, even in an unconscious, listless sort of way, with what they see, Dimitri Kaske wants to actively repel everything, figure out a way to make it meaningless -although in a formless, incoherent, disaffected way. He wants the first thing he thinks to be correct, and for him fascination is over after these initial impressions, even if his impressions are irrefutably shown to be inaccurate...

...There was a real freedom in this novel. It is disturbing and raw, its particular melancholy has an almost frenetic, dismantling tone to it, but it always felt calm, easy, and relaxed to me...

...The difference between the inarticulate, physical harm that Dimitri seems to want to inflict on himself and the equally incoherent abuses he lays out to certain types of people in his thoughts, would not be able to mean anything, I don’t think, in any of my earlier novels. It is not until the structure of my own thinking about incidents and the flow of prose had lost its need for balance that I could express desire, need, desperation, in the way that the character of Dimitri Kaske and his interactions with the people around is able to...

...It is a very sad novel, I think. It is about someone who wants it to be obvious that he is loved, set in a world where observations don’t actually carry meaning...