From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight
This article is about the 2020 novel. For the franchise and its many adaptations, see Beach Surgery (disambiguation).
A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight is a 2020 novel by C. W. Smith, published by Abrachas Publishing . It is the source text of the Beach Surgery franchise. The novel is a first-person testament: its narrator, recovering from a public breakdown he calls the eruption at a conference in Shanbudia, sits at his desk in the weeks before his first child is born and tries to account for an unfinished story he has tinkered with for some eighteen years — the story of Leif and Katita.[1]
The novel carries two epigraphs:
The invisible is only what is too brightly lit.— Gerald Murnane, The Plains
You can nullify a fireball with a fireball.— the Street Fighter II manual
Structure
The embedded story, Beach Surgery, unfolds across two days divided into two halves of one day each: six chapters, three per half, four scenes per chapter. The first half is set in the coastal city of Newcastle; the second in the red interior of New South Wales. Leif begins with three injuries — he cannot walk, cannot see, and his heart is "all out of whack" — one for each chapter of a half.[1]
The two stories
Readers distinguish the frame (the narrator's own life: meeting his wife at a Street Fighter tournament, the eruption in Shanbudia) from the embedded story of Leif and Katita. The novel is complete; the embedded story is deliberately left as an outline, containing the glitch — the unresolved seam between its two halves, which "does not compute."[2]
It is this unfinishable core that the franchise endlessly attempts to complete — and that every adaptation completes differently. See Beach Surgery (disambiguation).
See also
- Katita · Leif · the beach · the cycle · the glitch
- The sound of the earth rubbing against space (the story's "white whale")
- List of adaptations
References
- ↑ Smith, C. W. A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight. Abrachas Publishing, 2020.
- ↑ "The Glitch That Will Not Compute." Surgipelago essays.