Harold Rhenisch

Fiction

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for fictiion in progress click here

Carnival 2000

 

A Canadian farmer returning to the German town of his childhood relilves the dreams, stories, and terrors he experienced fifty years before. In incandescent, emotionally charged and magical prose he tells of a boy growing up wild in a fairty tale village, seeking among the ruins of society to understand love and his place in the world as a man. His world of mermaids, eelfishers, Carnival characters, witches and life-giving transformation is given to him by the quiet resistance of his mother's stories. Parallel to that is the world of pranks that he pulls with his best friend; the hidden world of a French POW he is nursing in the basement; and the crippling world of a father politically trapped into war -- of carpet bombing, strafing, the confusing journey of his sister into quite a different adulthood, the rape of his girlfriend by occupying Moroccan soldiers, and the terrble retribution enacted upon them by the French command. We watch as the enchanted town of Hansel's childhood decays into the harsh, one-dimensional town of a modern adulthood, and how by facing his memories -- and the best and worst of humanity -- with unflinching honesty, joy, grief and deep emotion, Hansel comes to tee the world with great clarity and wisdom. The result is a passionate work of unusual integration and intensity.

 

            

               
                  

               		
               
                  

                  
                  
               		
            

         

         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         

      		
   







Works
in Progress!

   

      
         

      		
      
         
Dear
         Will

         
         

         
         
Shakespeare's lover writes back.
         What's so great about this project is it gives me the
         ability to let that boy who left the farm back in 1975 to
         live on the streets and become a beatnik, the chance to
         speak about what might have been. Wild!

         
         
 

         
         
The book was sparked by the poems
         in Living Will, and by playing around with Ben Jonson's
         introduction to Shakespeare's plays. Read it
         here.

      		
      
         

      		
      
         

      		
   












   

      
         

      		
      
         
The Faust Book

         
         

         
         
From the drowning mountains above
         Salzburg, infested by devils, to the castle of the
         Archbishop and the court of Mad King Ludwig, to the gold
         mines of the Cariboo and Judge Mathew Bailie Begbie, this is
         a book of transformations, oppression, and a fight for
         freedom, told in a joyful style, that led directly to Free
         Will.

      		
      
         

      		
      
         

      		
   







for more works in progress, click
here.




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