Jason E. Rolfe: Life is a play, but everything is improvised

THE PUPPET-PLAY OF DOCTOR GALL.
From the original 1832 manuscript of Sebastian Haarpuder.
Translated faithfully from the original German of Doctor Gall
by Jason E. Rolfe.

"I believe the world is a stage. I believe we are mere players. I do not, however, believe in playwrights. I do not believe in scripts and rehearsals. The world is a stage, my dear readers. Life is a play, but everything is improvised."

It can be hard to specify the appeal of certain writers; we like their stories because we like their stories. Jason E. Rolfe provides an exception. I can point to the clarity of his prose, the playfulness of his wit, the endlessly-quotable sentences, but I can pin down three more qualities that make his work stand out for me.

"Ernst took himself far too seriously. He was, if I am being honest, a bit player on life’s stage. His lines were those he gave himself, and while he played his role admirably it was invariably uncredited."

Jason E. Rolfe never thinks in the ways that I do, yet no matter which pathways he follows into strange meta-textual mazes, he leaves behind footprints easy to recognize and to follow.

He works within a heritage of Absurdist fiction that rarely communicates to me, perhaps because I remain unsteeped in its history and its methods, yet he compels me to turn pages and to laugh at his puns, his jokes, his wordplay. His writing never fails to keep me reading with a smile:

"He is dressed in a fine suit. Not, I can assure you, a fine suit by my estimable, if not flamboyant standards, but fine to those of the clerical persuasion. I refer, of course, to dismally formal daywear -- a tailcoat with the front cut straight across his waist while its tails hang down in the back. It is black because he is dreadfully unimaginative. His trousers are beige because he is monotonously boring. Waistcoats, of which there are two, shirt and cravat are white because white requires no thought whatsoever, and our Stranger is unwaveringly thoughtless."

And finally, he experiments with fiction in ways that I never do; he bends time, causes personalities and identities to shift and spread, plays games with settings and voices, and all because he can. That seems to be the sole reason for his methods, and I am happy to see where the test results might lead.

"There is no singular organ, no faculty of the mind that explains the perception or the creation of beauty."

True? False? No idea. I only know that Jason E. Rolfe has written something new, that I have read it twice, that I have grinned and laughed all the way through it.