The Compass of that Sea

About the Book

Set in the mountainous coast of the Arathu in the Tetrastics, The Compass of that Sea brutally subjects the reader to the traumatized, first-person perspective of its protagonist, Dado Udidi, survivor of, as Kinbote said, “a military disaster with cosmic consequences that cannot be phrased distinctly by the thick unwilling tongue.” (V. Nabokov, 1962, Pale Fire, note to Line 347.)

The world, for each of us, is constrained by our conceiving it. Through the unique rhythms of experience and perception, we are each our own bold author of season and tide that turn and pivot beneath purple vaults of sky. So implied Hamlet; and so passes today for common sociophysiological sense. Dado Udidi’s unique contribution to the field, however, (and one hopes this initiatory sally bodes an extended campaign) is to have invented, in the medium of his be(com)ing epileptic modernism, The Compass of That Sea, a set of constraints allowing us to apprehend a world typically beyond conception; to have invented an author, Michael Sean Strickland, possessing rhythmic and perceptual talents uniquely attuned to the expression of the peculiar world of his character’s experience.

K. Devi, in JSocPhys 00903 (2002)

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Gertrude Stein, How to Write

About the Author

Educated in linguistics and zoology at the University of Texas at Austin, Michael Sean Strickland is a writer who currently divides his time between Paris and Philadelphia.