City Of Gustav — William Rubel

Brief, absurdist, elliptical, exaggerated - interspersed with fragments of the world's greatest sonnets - City of Gustav revisits, fictively and fantastically, Europe before modernism, the theory of relativity, and the World Wars. Gustave M. the aphorist, a tragic artist-philosopher in the tradition of Hegel and Blake, has shut himself away in his flat, devastated by the infidelity and suicide of his fiancée, Princess Rachel Blanbekin IX, a highstrung heiress blackmailed by Gustave's friend, the medical student, Lars. After twenty years, Rachel's daughter Sophia (released from a nunnery into ownership of her estate, Toursenreve) has commissioned Lars to steal from Gustave the aphorisms that, rumor has it, he has written in the mother-of-pearl diary that belonged to her as a little girl. The theft of the diary rouses Gustave into a burlesque world of anarchy, crime, and nihilism that (paper-thin) is all too transparent to the transcendent.