On the other hand, if we don't set up reasonable aesthetic standards, and make clear judgements between work which is objectively good, and work which is poorly written, then anything goes. Ali Alizadeh's eliXir is, I'm afraid, work which falls into the poorly written category.
That it hints at a potentially evocative story and characters which might have been interesting only makes the letdown worse. The story is based around two main characters, Gemma/Jasmine, an ex-model turned cocaine addict/party girl, and Arash, a homeless, aimless poet who somehow ends up impregnating and colliding with Gemma as she jumps off a balcony, saving her life while losing his.
Other characters include Gemma's "boyfriend" Felix and a few assorted misfits and girlfriends that Arash bumps into. None of the characters are well developed, nor are any of them likeable in any way. The poetry itself is patchy, relying mostly on visual tricks such as changing fonts, ample use of caps, italics, asterisks, exclamation points, an entire page of black background with 9 words on it, thick black lines, and things like 3 lines of 16 point "CHOO CHOO" moving across the page.
These gimmicks, which are headache provoking and deliberately visually unpleasant, are not enough to distract the reader from the bad writing, which reaches its apex during a music concert by a band called the Clit Tease Twats. At this point the writing is more or less unreadable and takes on the patter of the teenaged drug-induced rambling that it is meant to convey.
Few readers would continue past this point, which is a shame for the author, as he shows that he is actually capable of writing reasonably well when he later writes a nicely balanced Ghazal (although it is not certain if this is the author's work or the translation of another poet's). Once again however, the book disintegrates into an alphabetised catalogue of Islam's wrongs, along with a grab bag of seemingly random imagery which has no relation to the rest of the story.
I once watched a comedy program on television where a poet sombrely counted to one hundred and forty to an audience of bemused people who weren't sure if this was meant to be serious or not. Alizadeh's eliXir is on a similar level. If the author sold the book as a parody of the poetic process, it just might work.
Otherwise, this is a clear example of why poets need to take their craft seriously and why we need aesthetic standards. It is hard to find meaning in this random jumble of words, and lighthearted teen lust. The final piece, "after the fall", hints at a relationship, both physical and metaphysical between Gemma and Arash.
This could have been the basis for this book, a thread holding it together, but instead, it appears that the author has smoked something and allowed whatever came out to remain, without editing. Lovers of similarly unedited chaotic writing along the lines of Kathy Acker, might just approve and find all sorts of Marxist implications in the lack of structure, meaning and overuse of fonts and typing characters. For the rest of us, this is one to steer clear of.
(Reviewed by Magdalena Ball, September 2004)
