Christian TeBordo

Once I lived next door to a woman I named The Repeater. The Repeater did what you would expect, i.e. she repeated the same sentence again and again to the unlistening ears of her cohabitants. Usually the things she repeated were banal, i.e. not worth repeating. Occasionally, however, the repetition transformed the banal into the profound, demonstrating that one can draw extraordinary blood from an ordinary stone. In these short stories TeBordo is also fond of repeating himself, but his repetitions never transcend themselves to become something new and immanently interesting.

The Awful Possibilities is the first I've read of TeBordo. Perhaps his novels are more well-crafted, but this collection reads like undisciplined idea tinkering, not ground-breaking experimental fiction. To quote TeBordo against himself: "Really he's just another cog, a whiny little cipher who manufactures impotent little apocalypses every single evening."… (mais)