PRAGUE-- What is truly phenomenal about Vokali Constent's

new novel is its timing. The 90s have been an decade marked by collapsing borders and disintegrating frontiers. In Europe, countries are uniting; more people travel to more places each year; certain tongues have begun to emerge as global languages. The extension of the Internet into private spheres, the masking over of ancient tacit rivalries, even the homogenizing effect of the new mass media have all contributed toward the shrinking of the world to a palm-sized planet, or at least to the lifting of it from Atlas' shoulders to be placed as a peer by his side. And in the midst of all this, stands Red Umbrellas. The title of Constent's sixth novel is purposely deceptive, one of his most recognized characteristics. From To Meld Western and Eastern Perspectives, his first essay (published backwards), to his phantom opus, Novel 2 1/2, to his brief forays into the visual arts, Constent has always teased his enthusiasts' minds. "Reading," he once said, "has returned to its mid-life reincarnation: a pastime for the bourgeois... that, and a few duty-free airport Grishamite thrills taken to the beach. We need to challenge ourselves, keep our brain cells from being sucked into the cathode ray tubes of the television and into another Dan Rather pregnantly paused eyebrow." With Red Umbrellas, he demonstrated the universal nature of his call to arms. The words "red" and "umbrella" are the only two to appear in English, or any other known language. To say that the text is not written in a known tongue, however, is not to say that is is written in no tongue at all. The tender nuances of Constent's prose belie any accusations of gibberish or farce. Think Lewis Carroll, think Anthony Burgess, think even, of the very incarnation of the familiar, somehow excusable guile of Huckleberry Finn. Then remember: the narrative of Red Umbrellas is no dialect, nor is it slang, nor even the Finnish-derived invention of Tolkien's Elves. It is one-of-a-kind, and it is real. Turn the page. The novel's first phrase is breathtaking: "Jy red pjy azf qem rja dazf qyqatoyd nu pjy nvevj," or "He was the old man who sold memories by the beach" [my translation; the Vokali Constent Authoritative Scholar suggests, "She swept her old memories into the surf"]. It only grows lusher from there. In a phosphorescent wave of syllables and stops, we are whisked through the first chapter into the fourth. An editor's error? Hardly. On separate occasions, Constent has admitted his admiration of such mix and match authors as Cortázar and Burroughs, not to mention his penchant for the juvenile Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series. Reading of this book requires the spontaneous and unconscious absorption of an undefined language, and über-sensitivity to the texture of sound and the colors of consonants and vowels. Linear time is not an issue. Constent himself has taken reactionary criticism in stride, with published comments such as, "I have never in my life tried to swindle anyone; I have never written a fraudulent word." One might be tempted to cry irony to this, however. Throughout the late 80s and into the first years of this decade, the great majority of his efforts were concentrated upon the promulgation of the early Fraud Art movement; indeed, the title Red Umbrellas is most likely a blatant nod to the creativity and early development he experienced during this epoch in the company of other original group members. Only in 1993, when he found himself in sharp dissent with the group's suggestions for a name, did he actually leave them behind, and even then, it was with contradictory feelings. "I can only grieve for the loss of potential collaborations, criticism and advice that my parting will most likely cause me," he stated in a contemporaneous interview. "It is only the name that I cannot abide. There is so much in a name after all, and whether one thing actually becomes two upon a second christening is yet to be proven." Critics were quick to retort that this was nothing more than his little personal consultant speaking: the label "Fraud," they asserted, was not going to help a known iconoclast-- who had already intentionally and openly failed to produce a (similarly intentionally) over-hyped new novel-- market his future efforts. But Fraud, and fraud, are not the same, and for the countless time in so many years, Constent once more delivers, and he delivers big. In more than one interview, he has shyly corrected the pronunciation of a certain phrase, the stress of a multi-syllabic word, and even the own unique manner in which his punctuation is intended to be observed, interspersing such correction with witty homages to Nabokov and his spectrumed alphabet and references to Emily Dickinson's mania for dashes; yet he always maintains that the beauty of an invented language is that it exists for everyone, from the Eskimos with their many words for snow, to the British, with their many words for drunk. There is no alienation, no targeted group. In fact, it is the anti-marketing statement of the year, an observation which puts in question the harsh commentary of his more conservative scowlers. The words red and umbrella are the only two to appear in English, or any other known language. To say that the text is not written in a known tongue, however, is not to say that is it written in no tongue at all. Think Lewis Carroll, think Anthony Burgess, think even, of the very incarnation of the familiar, somehow excusable guile of Huckleberry Finn. And the truth is, he is right. The ingestion of the final crisp rounds of Red Umbrellas is the literary equivalent of the last currents of water spiraling from the tub. We watch them leave us behind, in their whirlwind of motion and transcendence of the physical limitations of our own flesh. We realize that we could never move fast enough to stop them, that our only hope is to gaze upon their clear beauty and reflect, or, delicious treat of all treats, run ourselves a second bath, or a third. Similarly, with each reading, the text is richer, the characters more vibrant, the surreal details of the vignettes that connect the dots of their lives, more symbolic. And each time, also, we are reminded that reading is a journey that involves all of the senses, all of the self, and not a simple mechanization of the eyes. Of course, the storyline, as well, for all of its ambiguity and disguise, is literally a gem. In a recently published biographical essay about Constent (The Modern Iconoclast, by Agnes Till), we are told of what appeared until the publication of Red Umbrellas, to be an insignificant event in the boyhood of the author. "On the beach with his father that day," Miss Till explains, "he was suddenly pierced by the sharpest pain his sand-smoothed foot had yet known. Upon further investigation, its source was found to be a semi-smooth piece of blue bottle glass. As the boy's father extracted it, the slightly bloodied edge caught the light of fading day, and the young author whispered to his father in amazement, 'This must be the memory stone; it didn't want me to forget where I was going.'" In light of this incident, we can clearly identify the essential human soul in the characters who populate Constent's book, as in the prose itself. We grow further attached to Jyffu, our mariner's half-remembered daughter, to her somnambulant dog Dsetl, and to the Magritte beach on which, and over which, the storyline unfolds. Or maybe we don't. Maybe we've never read of Jyffu or Dsetl in the entire history of our literate lives. Maybe we've fallen through the sifters of the dreams of a parrot-cum-bard named Zyvp, instead, who circles above the ships of many a famous poem and recounts the moments that were not deemed worthy of mention in the originals: the off-duty sailor scratching his foot in his sleep below deck, the cook and his struggles to maintain the cleanliness of his one small mirror, the seemingly trivial creakings of a given wooden board or the slippery smell of a dank discarded rope. As I've said, that's the beauty, not the fault, of Red Umbrellas. In short, what some have denounced as inanity is actually the longest step yet taken toward bridging the cultural, linguistic and geographical distances that have kept us all apart since the dawn of mankind. -Daphne Himilaya, Czech Correspondent © k-band, 1999