{"id":3199,"date":"2025-06-09T11:55:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T11:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=3199"},"modified":"2025-06-09T11:55:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T11:55:00","slug":"book-review-vhs-by-chris-campanioni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=3199","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: VHS by Chris Campanioni"},"content":{"rendered":"
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VHS<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Chris Campanioni<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Literary Fiction \/ Short Stories<\/p>\n

ISBN: <\/strong>9781960988386<\/p>\n

Print Length:<\/strong> 220 pages<\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> CLASH Books<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reviewed by Victoria Lilly<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>A collage of dreamlike, visceral images\u2014an experimental arthouse movie in shifting literary form<\/strong><\/h2>\n

VHS is an eclectic patchwork of forms, styles, and formats\u2014an array of vignettes loosely tied to the narrator\u2019s experience of growing up a second-generation immigrant in the United States.<\/p>\n

The narrator\u2019s father immigrated to the United States from Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961. His mother moved from socialist Poland to America, and the two met in a toothpaste factory in the industrial zone of Long Island City. The narrator, driven by a mix of ennui and homesickness for a home he never knew, drifts from career to career, town to town, on a vaguely planned trek east to his mother\u2019s native Poland.<\/p>\n

Among those chapters with defined settings, most take place in Berlin, Germany; another prominent locale is New York City. Over the course of the collection and the narrator\u2019s journey, he shares snippets of his life\u2014events, sensations, musings\u2014and intersperses them with vignettes from the lives of his friends, lovers, acquaintances, parents, and absolute strangers.<\/p>\n

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The narrator is a great fan of the visual medium, so the microfiction-style chapters are named after movie classics, such as Only Lovers Left Alive, Total Recall, The Lives of Others, and more. The fragmented, stream of consciousness style blends the essay form with that of diary entries, letters, and poetry\u2014often within the same short chapter.<\/p>\n

Boundaries of said fragments are muddled\u2014melted down, one could say\u2014and pieced together without seams or needlework through the use of an even more dizzying array of techniques. Single-sentence paragraphs, graphically broken-up text, ellipses and enjambments, strikethroughs and caesuras, all are deftly utilized to create the stream of consciousness effect. And a stream it is, as the reader has no choice but to surrender to the meandering, confusing, language-breaking and language-loving voice of the narrator.<\/p>\n

Some stories are funny despite the overall serious and contemplative tone of the collection. One such section is \u201cVision Quest,\u201d in which the narrator obtains special newly tinted glasses which he dubs \u201cTinman Elite,\u201d<\/em><\/strong> complete with a \u201cheavy-duty double-lock \u2018High Performance Resin Case’\u201d<\/em><\/strong> with a handle on it. His students (in this chapter, the narrator is working as a college professor) remark that he looks like \u201cthe Matrix;\u201d<\/em><\/strong> the narrator muses on the nature of vision and the (dis)advantages of having one\u2019s eyes so concealed as he heads for a rave party in an East Berlin nightclub.<\/p>\n

On the other end of the spectrum are dry, grey, melancholy stories such as \u201cOnly Lovers Left Alive:\u201d a brief piece about a girl (presumably the narrator\u2019s mother) waking before dawn in a windowless room with bare walls. The girl heads to the immigration office to present her \u201cwhite card,\u201d dreading the strangeness of the new country she found herself in, bereft among the unfamiliar language and unadorned walls.<\/p>\n

As is always the case with experimental writing, summary of individual tales within VHS<\/em> is a shadow of the true depth of the text, which lies in the playful use of language (even if the author has a sometimes overbearing fondness for the use of parentheses). The immigrant experience is a theme as old as time in American literature, but Campanioni breathes fresh life into this tradition through clever turns of phrase, surprising depths of the narrator\u2019s inner life, and a steady hand with prose and genre alike.<\/p>\n

VHS<\/em> is not a rollercoaster but a contemplative train journey\u2014a shifting, colorful, and surreal landscape of cities, persons, and memories going by\u2014to bring you out of the grey dullness of everyday life.<\/p>\n

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Thank you for reading Victoria Lilly\u2019s book review of VHS <\/em>by Chris Campanioni! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.<\/p>\n

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The post Book Review: VHS by Chris Campanioni<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VHS by Chris Campanioni Genre: Literary Fiction \/ Short Stories ISBN: 9781960988386 Print Length: 220 pages Publisher: CLASH Books Amazon Bookshop Reviewed by Victoria Lilly A collage of dreamlike, visceral images\u2014an experimental arthouse movie in shifting literary form VHS is an eclectic patchwork of forms, styles, and formats\u2014an array of vignettes loosely tied to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}