“I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur” by Mathias Svalina (Reviewed by David Tomaloff)

I feel the need to preface these words with a guilty admission: I initially had concerns I might not enjoy Mathias Svalina’s I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR quite as much as I knew I wanted to. That cursory thumb-through we all do when a fresh book hits our hands raised a few questions. I wondered immediately how the repetitive scheme of “I started this one business…”would carry on and remain fresh to this all-too-easily distracted mind. Would it get too clever, too cute? Would it just fizzle out? Would its pages melt together into a slow, forgettable drone? Clearly I was somewhat dubious; I found I had nothing to fear.

I began reading this book one afternoon during an excursion to the woods. I became wholly absorbed by Svalina’s words by page eleven and found myself repeatedly going back, wanting to take in sentences for a second and third time. I read until the light finally failed me. I chose a stopping point at least three times before I stuck to one–before I could no longer see the words on the page. I resolved to pick it up the following day. Instead, I picked it up at the next possible opportunity and read it until I’d finished. Then I began again.

Published July, 2011 by Mud Luscious Press

The book is billed as a novella, which it may very well be in the beautifully disjointed way a novella branded with the Mud Luscious imprint will undoubtedly be. However, it reads quite well as a series of short pieces, each describing a unique business, its purposes and problems, and often, the key ways in which it has failed.

Svalina poetically describes one business as “a business that turned single calendar dates into haunting melodies.” He describes yet another as “a business that gave the parents of deceased children a glassful of sugar-water each morning before they left their houses.” He intends, in this particular endeavor, to show these parents that all in the world has not soured. He soon declares the business a failure, stating its most fatal shortcoming: “We could never make the sugar-water sweet enough.”

While describing the “business that released dangerous animals into quiet suburban neighborhoods,” Svalina proposes “it is difficult to look at a rhinoceros & remain proud of one’s couch.” He suggests one might hire this company “to remain quiet for long stretches every day.” In this way, many of his sentences function nearly as aphorisms, or at least feel as though they do.

In second-person narrative, Svalina goes on to describe a phone call you make to your mother late at night, during which you attempt to remember your reason for calling. You come up empty-handed and “realize you are not a man at all, not a son at all but a tiger & that the world you smell is always tainted with blood.” The author seems to suggest we are only a small amount of missed sleep away from becoming the animals we have sheltered ourselves from and, as brutal as this may seem, it is not as brutal as what we have instead become.  

Svalina balances his darker moments with clever and welcome levity. In one instance, he describes a business that would send workers to used bookstores to place enigmatic notes in books. One such note is a shopping list that reads:

citty litter

soap (not ivory)

sponges

hot dogs

vodka (3 bottles)

beer

wine, etc

TP

hot dogs

[& then lower on the page in a different handwriting]

hot dogs

As is the case with many of the titles Mud Luscious produces, I find that what I truly love about Svalina’s book is the certain something that is felt but cannot easily be described. In Gabriel Gudding’s blurb on the back of the book, he lauds I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR as “a joyful critique of a Randian, post-industrial society.” Although I cannot disagree with this statement, I find it is something much deeper that makes Svalina’s words come alive for me, which is to say this book is a living, breathing thing, mischievous as it is.

In fact, Svalina’s is just the sort of language that might tie a skeptical reader to a chair in the middle of the woods and urge him to read on into nightfall until he can no longer see the words in front of him, so that he might put them down against his will only to fiend for the moment when he can again take up those words and breathe more of them in. This book is indeed an adventure; I recommend a comfortable chair.

David Tomaloff is a writer, photographer, musician, and all around bad influence. His work has appeared in fine publications such as Mud Luscious, >kill author, Thunderclap!, HOUSEFIRE, Prick of the Spindle, DOGZPLOT, elimae, and many more. He is the author of the chapbooks, A SOFT THAT TOUCHES DOWN &REMOVES ITSELF (NAP) Olifaunt (The Red Ceilings Press),EXIT STRATEGIES (Gold Wake Press) and MESCAL NON-PALINDROME CINEMA (Ten Pages Press). He resides in the form of ones and zeros at: davidtomaloff.com.