Silver

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Matthew Remski’s publisher has stated that Remski “has forsworn
literature and become a student of Tibetan Buddhism.” Not exactly
true: Remski currently writes for Word, Insomniac Press’s literary
guide for the Greater Toronto Area. Yet such a retreat would be
understandable. Remski’s novel Silver interprets 20th-century social
history by exhibiting it through the prism of his bizarre imagination.
This concept, and its execution, cannot be easily surpassed or imitated.

Remski finds real events, such as the U.S. government’s use of Nazi
skills, and takes them to absurd extremes. Since both the United States
and Nazi Germany have been cited as the highest manifestation of
capitalism, he combines the two, viewing the United States as the Third
Reich’s successor. This theory panders to those who call the
superpower “Amerika.”

The author may be anti-American, but his observations are more
whimsical than vicious. In “Bob’s Bad Day,” The Angel of Nothing
judges TV game-show host Bob Barker in a surreal version of The Price Is
Right. This section plays like a Saturday Night Live skit directed by
David Cronenberg.

Historical atrocities are nonchalantly magnified. The actual
experiments conducted by Auschwitz physician Dr. Josef Mengele were
horrible enough, but in the novel one victim’s mouth and anus are
exchanged. Fearlessness, mindlessness, or thoughtlessness? As a famous
TV talk-show host stated, “You buy the premise, you buy the bit.”

Silver’s greatest virtue is that it is the perfect book to bridge the
centuries. Unfortunately, it is too late for the publishers to exploit
this.