The Epiphanies of Jubu Djanx: A Speculative Book Review

The Epiphanies of Jubu Djanx is Michael Pizanti’s first novel. It recounts the life of the eponymous character who considers himself a perennial wanderer, a drop-out scholar, an aspiring, but luckless, singer, a dubious saint. Djanx’s adventures are frequent and often triggered by aberrant sensorial impressions: by something seen that feels like it has already been seen. By words heard that have a double, and usually troubling, meaning. Adding flavor to the novel's 27 chapters are a collection of colorful mental health experts, most of whom attribute Djanx's cognitive anomalies to mental illness. Our protagonist, who adopts his pseudonym during a voluntary stay on a prison yard in Represa, California, maintains the reason his mind is executing these perceptual tricks is that they are all proof of what the iconoclast philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls the Eternal Return.

Djanx’s wandering of university lecture halls in the late 80s and mid-90s, his ambulation of psychiatric hospital corridors in the first decade and a half of the 2000s, of a maximum-security penitentiary from 2015 to 2018, of Cuban, California, and New York jails, and of three continents in blind pursuit of meaning, fail to reveal the reasons for his unanswerable existence. It is only after 53 years, some of which have felt like living, others like bareboned survival, that his trajectory leads toward the worldly location, the murky milieu, where the novel’s climax transpires. 

Djanx’s vertiginous sense of dejà-vu leads him to feel both anomie and anhedonia. Despite his alliterative pseudonym, an appellation that he himself chooses and which is not forced upon him by a prison or jail gang, he feels nameless, or worse yet, incurably anonymous, and this senseless anonymity multiplies his inability to find daily activities pleasurable. Djanx wants, or perhaps feels he deserves, a respite from the limbo he resides in. This escape comes in the form of a geographic displacement and an encounter with a mysterious woman.   

Djanx hasn’t seen her in a lifetime. The girl with the Jim Morrison tattoo. Before the paths of the wanderer and the girl fuse, Djanx is haunted by premonitions, by the feeling that every pull on a cigarette is an inhalation closer to departure from his fleshy shell, and that the end only leads, in a fashion that is both agonizing and joyous, to the beginning.

Our protagonist is born at the end of the tumultuous 60s. By the end of the novel, he’s long had a fascination with the Doors, with what he calls their “proto-gothic grind music” and, most importantly, with the band’s front man. In his middle age, Djanx is struck by the fact that in his early pubescence, when he sat in his bedroom and repeatedly listened to the band’s Greatest Hits album, he unconsciously styled his hair like that of the lead singer. And in an oversized picture-portrait of him and his two siblings, a portrait his mother possesses and prizes, the wanderer sees himself at the age of 14, shirtless, in three-quarters profile and mirroring the pose Morrison strikes on the cover of the same album whose grooves were well worn by the needle of the teenage wanderer’s record player.

The girl with the Jim Morrison tattoo is not really a girl, but an adult woman. Djanx refers to her as a girl out of colloquial habit. The romantic partner he has before he meets the tattooed girl is in her early 60s, and despite her mature years, she still possesses girlish mannerisms.

Youth, like beauty, is often in the eyes of the beholder, and toward the end of the novel, at a New York mental health hospital ward he voluntarily commits himself to, Djanx swears he recognizes the eyes of the girl with the tattoo, the woman he has yet to meet, on a complete stranger. The eyes are set in the face of a hospital staff member wearing a Covid mask. The eyes are beautiful, with serpentine-colored irises. They perspicaciously pierce his own pupils and at once unnerve as well as comfort Djanx.

The girl with the Jim Morrison tattoo resides in the picturesque city of Mendoza, Argentina, a city that lies at the foot of the Andes Mountains and is shadowed by their tallest peak, the Aconcagua. Although he is of Argentine extraction, and his parents are proud Mendocinos, emigrated to the United States in pursuit of shamefully unadmitted dreams, and in search of upwardly mobile opportunities only the land of the star-spangled banner could provide, Djanx has not walked the tree-canopied avenues and precipitation gutter-lined streets of Mendoza in nearly three decades. Mendoza is Argentina’s wine country, whose vineyards vie with those of France and California in the production of the viticultural libation. Jim Morrison was known to evoke, and often compared himself to, Dionysus, Greek god of revelry and wine. To those uninitiated into the mystery of Eternal Return, these related facts are nothing but a chance occurrence, to Djanx, they are proof of all human destiny, and the fate that awaits him like a ravenous wild animal.

With his return to his parents’ natal city, Djanx revisits his future, a future that has already been his past, and wary anticipation is the phrase that best describes this pending, confounding and unavoidable visitation. For many Nietzschean psychotherapists, as for Djanx, life occurs in recurrent loops, and as I have previously mentioned, throughout his later years, Djanx is haunted by the repetition of motifs, of objects, of synchronicities and phenomena that are considered coincidental to outside observers, but ineluctable to the person who perceives the repetitive elements. In his early adolescence, about the time he is listening to the Doors’ Greatest Hits album, our protagonist’s bike is stolen by a long-haired thief brandishing a pocket knife. Although he boasts of besting blade-wielding opponents to his high school classmates, the wanderer is, at that point in his existence a liar and, even worse, a coward. Late in the novel, Djanx notices his mother keeps only inoffensive, flimsy, and small knives in her kitchen, as if she, too, is subconsciously aware that her son must ultimately once again face an assailant who will substantiate the irrational reason why she chooses not to use sharp cutting implements much larger than those used to pare fruit in her kitchen. 

Although he is not an Argentine national, it is not without a modicum of nationalist pride and a humbling sense of irony that Djanx, late in his 53^rd year, takes once again to reading the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. While a story hypothetically written by Borges could possibly argue the contrary, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It also took centuries to decay, and its vestiges still survive in the form of American Empire, an empire that Djanx believes is on the wane. He travels south, to escape the miseries he feels as a result of this lamentable fact. 

After once again carefully perusing “The South,” a disturbing tale where Borges postulates that the incomprehensible mysteries of a former mental patient’s life are resolved in a confrontation with a ruffian who challenges him to a duel at knife point, Jubu Djanx feels the nagging sense of dejà-vu that dogs him in his later years. Djanx escapes to the south, to the land where he was conceived, to a city where he suspects a girl with a portrait tattoo depicting a man known as the Lizard King likewise is also possibly curious to find meaning. 

After he finally meets her, the temporary penumbra that darkens Djanx’s existence ceases, but the permanent darkness, the one that lasts an instantaneous eternity, soon thereafter ensues. During the novel’s climax, Djanx feels fear, because fear always accompanies an exposure to the unknown. He also feels joy, the joy that comes with every wanderer’s awakening to the fact that each step they have ever taken has felt improvised, but has actually been as predetermined as the awakening which accompanies the canny sounds of birdsong at dawn.