Book overview

In the corner between Geldie Burn road and the B976 lies an old phone booth used as a library. It’s behind Balmoral castle, all around just empty fields dry walls and an annoying blue sky. During the pandemic it became no man’s land, the only place where people could have an exchange of some sort. You could find the last Tom Clancy as well as a tray bake.

On July the 14th, 2020, from under a pile of Private Islands magazines I pulled out a filecase tied up with a string. It consisted in 756 A4 pages of a handwritten manuscript titled “Rotpunkt!” Rotpunkt is the red dot climbers use to mark the rock with, so other climbers know that the route could be free climbed without the use of metal aids.

I dropped two Stephen King and took the filecase home, not knowing what to expect, like a mongrel picked up from the side of the street needs a bath first before any decisions. Therefore I decided to type the manuscript into a more recognisable structure. It wasn’t about climbing. Far from understanding the meaning of the words and even farther from deciphering the language used, at first glance the entire work resembled an organised collection of irrational nonsense.

The task presented several challenges from the start. I am more an enthusiastic reader than an amateur scholar, so I can only apologise for the rudimental analysis I have managed to assemble so far. Much more work has to be done. The manuscript is a first draft, written mostly in English language by using a form of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) instead. Dysgraphia appeared to be the main obstacle, together with the individual sheets doodled over and stained with drinks or food. Dysgraphia could be the result of a neurological disorder or a brain injury, which could support the idea that the novel might be in part autobiographical.

Parts of the text result encrypted, which I have left them unchanged. Made up words are present, together with urban lingo. The format of the text itself opened up new easter eggs. For example the word “spermitioraits” in the first page of the manuscript seems just written with an arbitrary number of O’s. As a matter of fact they are sixty-one exactly. As I typed sixty-one O’s I realised that sixty-one O’s were necessary to cover the entire line. The reason being that I would allow the alignment of the adjacent lines above and under, so that an acrostic would appear on the side of the page as an invocation to Satan. And that’s how the fascination for this manuscript began. The book is surreal in its evolution, and so the plot, which I am not disclosing here because it is for the reader to free climb, trusting whoever opened that route and committing to the journey to the other side.

The substantial point of the novel is the use of the unreliable narrator. The story unfolds until the narrator’s alibi is compromised. Once discovered, the narrator finds himself trapped in the false story that was meant for the reader only. The narrator, by crossing the bridge between rhetoric and fiction finds himself in a liminal state, in between dimensions. The author (God) traps the narrator (his avatar, the devil) in the history of the reader (mankind) using the gematria confinement of a figure of speech. Theodicy is served.

Rotpunkt! still remains anonymous, in spite of my numerous trips back to the phone booth hoping to find something about the author, a clue, another filecase. Questions remain unanswered. If it was left there by a local or a passerby. If it is the genuine journal of a psychopath or a hoax by an intellectual crèche. It is irrelevant to indulge in this kind of speculations.

Hereby by invoking the article 23 of the 1989 Convention in matter of shipwrecks I have used “finders, keepers” to claim the work as mine.

Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost items, pray for my sins.