Recently finished and reviewed. If you like your read on the surreal side of life with flourishes of driving narration and free-form poetry that teeters between light and dark, life and death, this will be an enjoyable and memorable read. Don’t miss it.
Review follows image, enjoy!
Five stars!
Thought-provoking and surrealistically gripping.
In Calibration 74, Aicher delivers a powerful offering that draws readers into a world behind the façade, to the inner workings of the mind, and a life exposed. One part musings of a mad man and two parts surrealistic-like fever dream, Calibration 74 deftly takes readers by the hand and leads them deeper down the literary rabbit hole forgoing standard storytelling.
At its start, Aicher showcases his ability to spark interest with his opening narration of a man obsessed with numbers and embroiled in a quest for a door leading to salvation, renewal, life. Within Calibration 74’s few first pages, we soon learn this will be no simple task and that our experience will be anything but typical for the novella’s duration as Aicher masterfully blends free-form poetry into the mix breaking down the barriers of outside versus inside, and the drive, the force behind a man’s moving parts.
Combining pacing that features scattered thoughts and blurry visions of both past and present experiences, Aicher allows his readers to experience the dark gritty corners of a man’s troubled and fractured mind before delivering sharp flashes of poetic justification that pulls back the curtains of meaning and encourages deeper philosophical inspection with his created revelations. As readers draw closer to Aicher’s crafted end of Calibration 74, what we know and believe versus what is imagined and false blur in expertly detailed snippets of realization that will leave many on a course of retrospection unpacking and comparing all that was offered.
At times psychologically illuminating, Aicher delivers a brave presentation on how the mind works when dealing with life, processing trauma, circumventing reality, and living with past and present conflicts. Its poetic flourishes flawlessly meld with a college course on abnormal psychology and will push and pull your mind and emotions in every direction equally. Troubling, endearing, comical, and abrupt, Aicher’s work is a giant onion consisting of layers hiding meanings hiding deeply rooted scars of clarity. With references aplenty peppering his prose throughout involving literary, musical, and cinematic offerings, Aicher’s expert foray into a world behind the eyes is broken and beautiful, raw and untouched, eroded and used.
As it reads, Calibration 74 feels like an old radio in a dark basement being manually tuned. Snippets of music fight through the static, the squelches, the talking, the silence. Readers will hear bits and pieces forming visual cues and directions in their mind only to be lead away on another course by the master of the dial until we are left with the knowledge we so desperately crave, to the ending we so rightfully deserve.
If one is searching for a run-of-the-mill simple read, Calibration 74 is very unconventional in that regard and does its best work for those looking for something different, something lasting and memorable. A feather, a knife, a heart pleading, a mind steering a body, Calibration 74 is a beautiful and broken mosaic expertly collected into a glowing tapestry once completed and viewed from afar.
Within a moving gallery of creation, every reader will interpret Aicher’s work differently, will find a connection within themselves among the jumbled art pieces of his storytelling that reflects personas both bright and damning. Weaving through man’s inner turmoil, desire, escapism, conflicts, and personal constructs set adrift among a brackish ocean of reality and fantasy, Calibration 74 will stay will you long after the final page.
Review was posted on Amazon and Goodreads, check it out! Keep reading, keep writing!
KJF
The Bearded Scribbler 