Review:  It's not often that you read a work of an autobiographical nature and feel you've truly brushed shoulders with a fellow traveler.  More often, the sense of having become a voyeur through no fault of your own pervades.  Barring that, you may ask yourself why you should care.

Here I've just finished reading what I hope to be the FIRST seven parts (because it would be a shame if it ended there, wouldn't it?) of Romero Burruel's Empty and I find myself trying to figure out exactly who and what I've brushed shoulders with.  There is no self-importance here, only the naked desire to chronicle the weight of experience and the most significant of events from the past several years...  at least that which is significant in the eyes of the author.

Ultimately, that is the charm of this collection of stories and monologues: it is unpretentious and remarkably subjective at the same time.  The priorities, observations, and values presented here are very much of the person who wrote them down and attached them to illustration, but there is no attempt to convince the reader of their import.  This is a chronicle laid out for posterity and, ideally one can assume, also to maybe let you know as you read that someone else has been through something that mirrors your own experience - perhaps loosely, perhaps identically.

If all art is subjective and the true test of it is the ability of the observer/reader/listener to relate their own experience to it, Empty is a very successful piece of art.  Illustrated in such a way that you feel the haze of subjective memory even as Frizzelle offers his reflections on that which was.

And, like memory, sometimes the images presented are odd snapshots - like that armchair nobody was sitting in at the viewing of a recently deceased grandparent that stands out in your mind beyond all else.  

In the end, Empty stands as a remarkable piece not only for its open-ended presentation, but also because it encapsulates, rather completely, the imperfect nature of memory and how it feeds into a person's reflections and personality.  

As far as I'm concerned, any work that manages to take something that intangible and present it for my consideration can't help but impress.

Overall: 5 stars.

Alex Haas