This absurd and brief work of fiction begins with a bubble and ends with a sheep talking about a dancing bean.
The events that occur in between tend to revolve, roughly speaking, around the bean prior to his dancing days. The bean’s journey to the mind of the talking sheep is by no means a simple one and it involves a greater realization about the vastness of the universe, the composition of all known things, and the killing of a defenseless being.
If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is. The bean, originally (and perhaps exclusively) conjured by the imagination of a story teller (who has been conjured by the author P.B. Gookenschleim of whom, judging by the “About the Author” on Amazon.com which includes a tidbit about being awarded a grant for “one zillion American dollars”, has most certainly been conjured by someone else) goes from a simple life in a small hut to the realization that he is special (or as Gookenshcleim phrases it “especial”).
The bean can make noise and do cartwheels. These activities set him apart from most of the other things around him. What the bean does not realize until later is that the universe is enormous. The universe is so enormous that it can make the sun seem small and if the sun is actually very small, what of an even smaller bean? Surely there is someone else out there doing cartwheels. Surely the bean is not actually so “especial” after all.
So begins a rather silly existential crises that touches on absurdities reminiscent of Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, only, well, much more silly. Though the bean does not encounter characters as memorable as Saint-Exupery’s, his problems are nearly as fun. Occasional episodes and phrasing may be too cutesy for some readers (the bean is described as “leedle” after all) however readers receptive to a silly tale with a serious underbelly will undoubtedly enjoy the story. It can be easy to get lost in some early pages that noodle with infinity and Earthlings, but readers willing to pursue the bean and his story will certainly come away wondering about the universe around them.
Is it possible that we too might not amount to much more than a dancing bean being discussed by a talking sheep while the universe, with its stars and its atoms and its storytellers, takes no notice? Surely there are others doing cartwheels and, quite possibly, dancing.
Reviewed by Collin Marchiando for IndieReader