Kharlamov's Ankle: A Utopian Fantasy

This dystopia is the political Americanada of our own present, its clang and clamour, its wasting of women and of the arts of song. Yet the novel is utopian, true to its title, even as it sheds the conventions of cApitalizatiOn and. periods to iterate ancient wisdoms of the Bible and Lao Zi and expose the literary history that informs our bankrupt Now: ie. Shakespeare's misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitisim. As dystopian politics (our everyday) sucks up a contratenor singer lured to China by the Kanadian embassy and the innocent cultural attach who invited him, the novel leaks us bits of poetry and counsel, while in its bowels the rumble of utopia rises: it is the unrelenting spasmadic energy of a group of revolutionary junkies of Montreal known as kharlamov's ankle, who work to free not just themselves but us all. They are capable where we are not, for their bags of drugs and droppers with taped needles kill the pain in them that sinks the rest of us, kill the pain and allow them to move against the state of war that is our Kapitalist present and in which we are alive but not living. It's tHem, the junkies of the aNkLe--that kommunist bone shattered in a stickled act (Russian-Canada Summit Hockey Series, 1972) that ended the post-Holocaust postwar economic dream--bobby2sneakers and curly joe, now wearing the shiny cheap suits of junior rabbis, with their childhood yarmulkes filched back out of a sock drawer, who move fearlessly against the ruler with the golden hair.--Er n Moure