The Land of Lost Simulacra

Apollo Camembert is the brainchild of Eckhard Gerdes butsignals 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

A REVIEW FROM LIBRARY THING:
"If Franz Kafka and Inspector Clouseau, as Yuriy Tarnawsky suggests, had collaborated on a novel while stuck inside a malfunctioning university during a decade-long ban on public education, the result will look something like The Land of Lost Simulacra. Eckhard Gerdes, writing under the playful pseudonym Apollo Camembert, delivers a razor sharp, laugh out loud satire that is equal parts existential fever dream, linguistic fireworks display, and loving homage to the power of literature itself, and the book is one of the most real and original and entertaining novels I’ve encountered. At its core, the book follows Guy, often called “Old Guy,” a newly hired lecturer arriving at the aptly named Pacible University, a once-shuttered institution re-opened under suspicious circumstances. What begins as simple road trip that ends when Guy’s car gets a flat tire and that includes the last Arthur Teacher’s Fish & Chips in America, twists into a labyrinthine odyssey through a campus that feels equal parts bureaucratic nightmare and carnival mirrors. Departments dissolve into catch-alls like cultural studies and language arts, buildings rot while staircases lead nowhere, classrooms double as spin studios, and the English Department itself seems to have disappeared into thin air replaced by the web of signage, detours, and metafictional interruptions. Along the way Gerdes/Camembert layers in puns, literary allusions (from Dante to Sukenick), and self-referential asides that blur the line between narrator, character, and the reader. The prose crackles, and one moment you’re chuckling at a gas station attendant name lxodus; the next you’re pondering the soul of humanity while Guy battles laminated sandpaper toilet paper and rogue stick insects. I recommend this read whole-heartedly. Read it with an empty mouth so that you do not spray food or drinks when you laugh, which you certainly will, at the foibles of these wacky characters."