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An amazing book! For the first half of it I kept expecting to find a key, that would translate all the concepts into those from our world . . . a 'this is really this' so that I would get a translation back to the world I knew. When I realized this was not coming, I settled into it and allowed the world to manifest itself on its own terms. It was an amazing ride. I had to read it slowly because taking it in all at once gave too much at one time, there was something lyrical and poetic that seemed...
This is the most exciting book of fiction I've read in a while. It makes me really, really happy. At the (very) start I was resistant, as it reminded me of a lot of contemporary work (poetry) in which "stuff," it seems to me, is just made "up." But as I kept reading, I realized it was much stranger, much more lovely, much more thoroughly imagined. I keep thinking of a blend of: Calvino, Lisa Robertson, and Wittgenstein. The invention is like Calvino, as is the world-building activity, and the la...
you can let the words and language here wash over you as if you are in a wondrous hot tub, having the lexemes lick at your skin and gently massage the subcutaneous tissue. Or you can begin to feel mounting paranoia of the relentless jets of bubbled water buffeting and barraging you as if trying to dissolve you entirely. depending on your temperament and predilection, this book will either offer you up its delights, or have you hurling against the wall. I can't take responsibility for this review...
Some thoughts surely...
Fuck everything. For my purposes today, this is less a nasty hyperbolic command about coitus and more of a two-word summation of a somewhat complex suite of contradictory and powerful human yearnings. A yearning to tell the Universe to go fuck itself while at the same time demand that it hold you close to its motherly bosom and make all the bad things go away. A yearning to differentiate oneself from the dull hum of the world at large, to have the throngs fall at your feet and acknowledge that y...
A subversive set of things, diagrams, words, playful sounds squeaked out of pregnant silences, ideas leaping off cliffs like lemmings, and all winding up in a hovel of unremembered foreboding. An odd feeling encumbers me throughout the perusal of this book-thing, and the fangs of demons fall from between pages blackened with geisha dribble, and the haunting silhouettes of dreams extruded through cheese graters, and the fossilized rain of embittered ghosts wafting from sizzling skylights of the m...
Most texts this outre are absorbed without a plop, why did this one make such a splash? Rather than spend a few weeks researching the historical context, let's just read the damn book again. It's all grown up now, with two decades of debate and acolytes and detractors in tow. Does anyone remember dodecaphony? It is much much older, yet to this day it will still clear a room of Music Lovers quicker than a fire alarm. Thus it is with experimental writing and Book Lovers. How do we know what we're
Ostensibly a sort of anthropological self-description from the depths of a baffling society, this is a series of mytho-scientific descriptions of mundane and maybe much-less-mundane phenomena in the most alien ways possible. Marcus has a couple tools for this. First, running against the claim that this is a culture describing itself, he has a kind of terminal outsider-confusion where everything, even normal things, are utterly unfamiliar and so described in garbled manner. (My favorite wikipedia...
Ben Marcus infuriates me. I had safely dismissed him as the type of writer I didn't enjoy, but then in the current issue of Tin House he wrote a jaw dropping, throw yourself down the stairs, amazing story; so I had to go back and give his older work another shot. I'm not quite sure what these stories are supposed to be achieving. I think they are not 'stories' per se, but just parts of a whole that is only being partly exposed in this book. Every so often there is a great line or a glimmer of an...
Reading, a process by which humans interiorize and digest words from outside sources, often found in books on which they cast their vision. The words are usually codified by means of strings of symbols of varying length which have one or more associated meanings to be discerned by high level readers from context, namely the pattern created by the flocking of other words around their intended target. A Ben Marcus exemplar is read not with the natural assumptions of a discerning reader, but with n...
