Review by Ed Cavalli, Daly City public Library
By the gods, what a book!
It is not easy to write about it. Or to even think about it. Perhaps the closest I can come is to try to describe my feelings.
Finishing the book is something like complting a long, tough hike. Dusty trails and crystal clear air; slogging through marshy meadows and floating in silent forests: blinding sunlight and cooling breezes. You think of all aspects of the trip after the return. And like it.
Inversions leads you on many trails, tracing the loss of meaning and warped consciousness inpeople's lives (inversions), and arriving at suggestions for humaization.
For the inversions are not merely mirror images, "just like the same only hte things go the other way..." but, like the mirrors in carnival Fun Houses, they also show ourselves as being bloated and extruded and grotesque. The voyager through the looking glass penetrates the grotesqueries of his inverted existence to become what is behind them - though it might perhaps have seemed easier to renounce the mirror, its grotesqueries, and his self. The effprt evidently seemed worthwhile to ALice and Lewis Carroll.
Throughout the book Alpert cites an incredible range and quantity of books, authors, philosophers, pundits, and common people. His writing is exciting to read, usually (but not allways) easy tounderstand. A random sentence seems to me to indicate the quality of his thought and expression:
Strapped to our heart attack machines, we burn out our being and create fantasies of contemntment from the leaping flames.Give your head a challenge, read Inversions. Really read it. How long has it been since you have had the chance? Here is your opportunity. Don't miss it.
- Ed Cavallini, Daly City Public Library
From Booklegger Magazine, #1, Nove - Dec, 1973
Inversions was also reviewed in Black Bart Brigade, #5, March 1973, and 100 Flowers Review
, Jan - Feb, 1971
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