Joshua Kent Bookman

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Close to elsewhere

Thomi (the Frenchman) is hired by his girlfriend Elisa (the American). Together they join forces to make sense of her mother’s emigration from Italy, of which Elisa knows little. So he makes most of it up. But into the mix lands Elisa's son Luca, a très electronic millennial. close to elsewhere’s syncretization with Swedish-, Italian-, and Bengali-American writings helps the characters live between historic and contemporary prejudices, but their emotions and behaviours splinter. The characters struggle as they erode into 0s and 1s. To read this book is to discover a strategy of living in the 21st century that is neither a practice of mindfulness, nor an application of data science - it’s a gizmo for using all the senses to achieve a deftness of being. It is a book for the homesick, the romantic, the ones believing that a place called home can be built and inhabited. It is a book for food lovers, travellers and the ones finding joy in the play of shadows. "Its insistence on touching without elaborating produces a great network of sounded negative space where life is but is offered up only in fleeting glances of light streaming in from high windows.” Lee Jasperse In close to elsewhere, Bookman borrows characters, narratives and feelings from existing pieces of literary fiction on migration and travelling. He is looking for the personal perspective and focuses on the human interaction with its immediate and distant environments. These fragments are syncreticised into contemporary life, where they instigate new meaning. The reader is reminded that migration is not a new phenomenon and that it affects also those that are comfortably travelling into the digital world. Featured writers: Tomas Tranströmer, Stig Dagerman, Wilhelm Moberg, Selma Lagerlöf, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Puzo, Melania Mazzucco, William Carlos Williams, Brad McQuaid.