Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist

The movement of the images in this book race by at an incredible speed. Lyrical, malevolent and beautiful descriptions of a city that never was, with a protagonist that is never named, selling a drug that never existed. Orange is breathtakingly surreal and yet has a strong narrative with offerings both hilarious and philisophical. Magically real, intelligent but not overly clever. Orange is a fast read with images that linger, haunt and delight. A book that surprises you with each sucessive read.

As a student of urban geography, I seek out alternative visions of cities, especially cities that are in a state of decay. Stephen Janis took me to a place in the city that I've never been before, a place I thought I'd never want to go. In this part of the city, desperate people squat in tattered apartments, the moral economy is polluted with substances that can change the horrid reality of destitution, and the cracked streets swallow up the sacred and the profane. I found myself inside the mind of a man who dwells in all the sickening beauty, although he doesn't know how he got there or why he's haunted by his father and a thick, greedy woman named Paula. In this midst of his days crushing up pills into sweet cocktails and sleeping through life, his vision and experience are veiled in mystery and pointlessness... until he meets a skeletal woman named Sarah and a professor who open his eyes to Orange. The dark hallucination bleeds into a narrative that begins to unravel the abstract nature of human experience (of the urban variety). The surrealism folds over the narrative in a tantalizing way, and Janis provides the slightest hint of irony that lends weight to the disturbing blankness of the protagonist. The climactic last pages of this book brought me through a violent, rhythmic halt that forced me to question my own self-realization and search for my soul.