Ambiguity

Ambiguity is the second novel in Frederick Mark Kramer's New York cycle, following Apostrophe/Parenthesis by a year.

The book is built around its narrator, Darko, and the metaphor of the pneuma — what Darko calls "the breath of life or the destruction of life," with the novel taking place in between. Eckhard Gerdes's editorial description puts it as the trajectory of a single breath: an opening inspiration (the breathing-in of a whole life as material), ten gymnastic paragraphs of perspiration (the breathing-through), and a final expiration at the close, with Darko taking to his bed and demanding of himself a new beginning — not the release of orgasm but a creative re-fertilization, a rebirth.

The framing device is corporeal and insistent: "Get it up!" Darko demands of himself as he lies down to rest, as if sexual energy alone could save him. It cannot. What the ten paragraphs do instead is celebrate corporeal existence as the only material the writer has.