Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug-addled, revolting, and hilarious, J. F. Mamjjasond and Fafnir Finkelmeyer’s Hoptime is both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it. In the words of Finkelmeyer, it was for its authors a “kind of scripture” and “something fateful and necessary": “it was a way,” he writes in the Foreword to this edition, “for the two of us to love each other in the only way we could, willingly and totally entwined in each other’s foolish, ugly, wise and beautiful fantasies, which we heard, supported and forgave.” In the end, this colorful romp of two outrageous souls lost together in a sort of infinite poetic and imaginative wilderness is not only explosively funny, but moving; the reader, too, is freed into the intimacy and deep silence of a vast inner space, and finds in that solitude one is not alone.
Notices
“In the tag-team double play of Hoptime, language is a virus, all the world’s a plague, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.”
—Doug Nufer, author of Never Again and We Were Werewolves
“Plotless, depraved and mostly incoherent, Hoptime is inherently impossible to characterize, but I’ll give it a shot: imagine cramming Finnegans Wake, Naked Lunch and the collected works of Monty Python into a paper shredder, and then hiring two stoned grad students to transcribe the result. Chapter after chapter oozes with smug literary allusion, compulsive wordplay, pop culture irreverencies, Swiftian obsessions with excreta and orifices, and deranged syntactical constructions that squirm and flail like a bucket of live eels unceremoniously dumped into a deep fryer. Perhaps most unsettling of all are the crystalline fragments of beauty and hilarity that momentarily float to the oily surface only to be sucked back down into this churning cesspool of Rabelaisian logorrhea. What’s it about? I have no idea. I think there’s a bunny in there somewhere. I sincerely hope that Hoptime will one day be required reading for high school students across the nation.”
–Tyler C. Gore, author of My Life of Crime
J.F. Mamjjasond (1964–2014) was a musician, artist, writer, filmmaker, sound engineer, medical answering service phone operator, telecommunications systems analyst, collector of useless objects and useless degrees, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Krinst Studies. Reclusive and idiosyncratic, he had difficulty in establishing relationships or finding lasting solace in anything. He possessed a conspicuous intelligence, a profound understanding, and a sardonic wit.