In Eldon Garnet’s Lost
Between the Edges, a feverish intellectual, frustrated
by the failures of government, acts alone to eliminate
an infamous Holocaust denier. The protagonist,
know only as X, a renegade academic and punk intellectual,
puts his radical ideas into civil action by firebombing
the headquarters of Ernst Zundel, publisher of Did
Six Million Really Die?
With its incisive critique and use of real documentation, Lost
Between the Edges blurs the boundaries between
fact and fiction. Garnet, like Sebald before him, uses
factual documentation of dubious authenticity. But
as the novel continues, its story becomes so potent
that we find its truth lies not in the trappings of
the real but in the emotional and intellectual reality
of its expression. Garnet reveals the illusory
nature of facts, to not only show how they dazzle,
but also how they destroy.
Lost Between the Edges captures the energy and
verve of youth in revolt, fired by rage and ideas. Combining
the psychological power of Dostoyevsky's Notes from
the Underground with the raw, emotional force of Fight
Club, Garnet's book is a new classic of symbolic
warfare waged in the street and the mind.
“Garnet knows how to structure
a narrative – not only in the books he has written,
but in his visual work. His photographs are directly and
viscerally involved with the bodies of those he is photographing – with
their meat, their organs. His work … demonstrates
something that we haven’t seen before, that we are
not prepared to categorize.”
Paul Groot, Canadian Art |