Apollo Camembert is the brainchild of Eckhard Gerdes but signals a darker side to his writing than his earlier work published under his own name. Apollo Camembert’s protagonist Guy has to deal with the darkness that comes from the anti-intellectual cloud hovering over and obscuring the contemporary world. Along the way, the professor finds a couple of allies. Together they fight the status quo, but they have their own issues, too….

“Kafka meets Inspector Clouseau, and the two discover they have a lot in common. The word wizard that he is, in The Land of Lost Simulacra Eckhard Gerdes (writing as Apollo Camembert) shows us that language can be the subject of a novel as much as characters and events.” —Yuriy Tarnawsky

“Reading Eckhard Gerdes writing as Apollo Camembert is like sitting in the lap of Samuel Beckett telling stories to Eugene Ionesco trapped inside a David Lynch world. The beauty of Gerdes’ writing is its subtle simplicity of sentence structure and narrative tone that transforms banal moments into deeper truths. And every decision the narrator makes only deepens his disorientation. He becomes a Kafkesque man who cannot ever remember where he has been. The novel follows the narrator on epic journeys flooded with existential crisis after existential crisis that any new adjunct hire in academia must traverse: finding a bathroom, finding the elusive, theoretical English Department, hoping to stumble upon or discover the classroom where he is to teach the youth, teaching in only the oddest of odd classrooms, finding new ways to say the same thing in new ways, desperately on a quest for coffee. The gentle absurdity of this work is delightful. The dialogue is sharp and biting. Brilliant humor throughout: brilliant in the true sense of the word: a light shining on life’s insanities.”
—Doug Rice, author of Here Lies Memory

THE LAND OF LOST SIMULACRA
Apollo Camembert
Paperback; 252 pp., $16
979-8993244433