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Lemon
Coincidentally, a copy of Lemon arrived at my office the day my boyfriend dumped me. The cover, stiff eggshell-colored paper, featured a hand-drawn doodle of some vaguely humanoid creature--it had an eye and feet, but it didn't much resemble a person. It definitely wasn't a lemon, although the eye was sort of lemon-shaped. Sort of. Lemon is about a guy who gets dumped by his girlfriend and finds "new love--or obsession at least--in a small, perfect, yellow fruit." Having just been dumped myself, I wasn't sure I needed any help torturing myself a little more, thinking about love, loss, heartbreak, and obsession. The book, however, is more quirky than introspective. Wendell, the main character, talks to his little lemon, watches TV with it, dines with it, and takes it to work. When stuck on a bad blind date set up by his friends (why do they do that?), he runs out to buy a substitute lemon to console himself until he gets home. Wendell revels in the minutiae of lemon history, much in the same way that a lover wants to learn everything about the life of a partner. Parts of the book are downright hilarious. Wendell's relationship with the lemon is questioned, with genuine comedic effect, by his family, friends, co-workers, boss, and even the neighborhood kook. -Do you talk to it? whispers his mother. -Yes I do. But not condescendingly. Not like to a dog. -Does it talk back to you? -Mom, it's a lemon. -Is it a talking lemon? -It speaks yes in a way to me, but not out loud. I'm not insane. The manner in which Wendell discovers the allure of the lemon is entirely plausible, at least insofar as it is plausible for one who has been dumped and feels alone to take solace in something--anything--that eases the pain. Granted, most people would join a sports team or take art classes or patronize singles bars, but Wendell happens to find joy from his lemon. The text of Lemon is an amalgam of dialogue, poetry, the poetrylike rambling thoughts of the main character, and stories about and references to lemons throughout history. I had the opportunity to meet the author, Lawrence Krauser, at a reading of Lemon. He emphasized that people should interpret the book on their own. "It's like a Rorschach," he said. Krauser didn't want to say much about principles of love or the meaning of the lemon, but he was willing to say that Marge (the dumper) wasn't Wendell's true love. "He doesn't really know attachment." Lemon began as a screenplay eight years ago. Krauser focused on the "high concept"--the idea of a guy who falls for a lemon--and continued to develop the idea into this strange and complex book. Krauser, who has taught filmmaking in the past, is now focusing on making a film based on the book. "The movie will probably be a very strange movie," he said. "I have a script, but now it's boring to me. I want to put the situation to the actors and see what happens." Krauser mentioned that Lemon had been read last year as a play in Seattle (his play, Horrible Child, was produced by Printer's Devil Theatre in 1998), and his ability to capture the absurd-yet-natural premise of the story was evident from his rather animated book reading. For years, Krauser was unable to get any company to publish his book. But Dave Eggers, creative mastermind behind McSweeney's Books, took an interest in Lemon. McSweeney's published the book and gave Krauser an unusual level of control over the whole design. So he designed his own cover, or covers, as it were. He is hand-drawing 10,000 unique covers for the initial print run of 10,000 books. Krauser said that the cover-drawing idea started off as a joke. "At first we were going to delegate 500 here, 500 there to celebrity guest-drawers, but once I started doing it, I had to do them all. It had to be pure. It's become addictive. I don't know what I'll do when it's done. Oh, yes, I do--it's been bought in three countries. I'll go there and draw covers for the first run." At least for the time being, Lemon is Krauser's obsession. Lawrence Krauser reads on Thurs March 22, 7:30 pm at the Speakeasy, 2304 Second Ave, 728-9770, free. Get there early. - - - -
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