Highbrow literary fantasy! Phantasmagorical bildungsroman. Almost psychedelically vivid story running a hypnotic razor’s edge throughout between dazzlHighbrow literary fantasy! Phantasmagorical bildungsroman. Almost psychedelically vivid story running a hypnotic razor’s edge throughout between dazzling and vomit-inducing imagery. But no dialogue—not in Part 1—no social hubbub, no characters, no sex—a fascination with sex parts, yes, but no coitus or buggery, just these fleshy emblems of solitary inertness.
We are in the head of this asocial narrator barreling through his little world in Bucharest Romania from birth to early young manhood. It’s non chronological yet it isn’t fragmented. In fact, the story moves with a stunning continuity from scene to scene. Every now and then the author lets us know how old the narrator is at that moment, but this is a constantly changing, swirling through time. The use of non-chronology is masterful.
The narrator tells the story of his people, the Badislavs. The Badislavs are Bulgarians who set out from the Rhodope Valley to found the village of Țânțăraș between the Argeș and the Saba in Mutenia, România—but not before they are set upon by a graveyard’s worth of Game of Thrones-like walking dead, all jangling femurs and crying skulls and ringing clavicles and xylophone ribs and decaying flesh. The people hide in their old church which the ghouls try to burn down with a collective breath of fire. But the pious old priest circumvents the evil by calling down a semi-translucent host of angels in whose veins the ichor can be seen to flow. It’s the Old Enemy again, the Unclean One, and he still can’t hold a candle to the superior might of Grace. It’s a good fight. Those who loved Harry Potter in their youth might find this nourishing adult fare. Bear in mind, however, that it’s serious literary fiction.
We are led then into a vast interpersonal cosmology. The narrator mentions the ovaries once in his agglomeration of the micro- and macroscopic, our galactic connections to our past and future selves; usually it’s the gonads that prevail. The section is unabashedly dualistic, as all writing is a running set of oppositions, a thing being nothing without its fellow. (Zen by contrast finds dualism at the root of all human suffering.) The narrator is fascinated by the testicles; he can’t stop mentioning them. Now he’s going on about chakras and plexuses. This is usually where I get off the fantasy train. Let’s see how much longer I can bear up.
But then, perhaps the author realized his nonsensical flights were beginning to tire his reader, we return to beautiful Bucharest. A glint of light from car windshields on a blindingly hot day, the various city stinks, a flour mill whitening its own tired brick facade, textures of dirt, fabrics, masonry, flesh, clouds; his mother leaving the textile mill half deaf from the noise; a butterfly-shaped mole on her thigh remembered. Nothing is really happening just this idle walking around but it’s dazzling to read. We meet Anca who like the narrator flashes through multiple times of life, multiple ages in a few pages of this kaleidoscopic story. She is shaved and tattooed on her head at a tender age by the strange Herman. Her mother, the sign of her shitty life to come, locks her away in horror for a year or two. Then she’s caring for her grandchildren and meeting the young Mircea, the narrator, whose coming she dreamed of—foretold?—long ago.
Mircea fancies his world has been conceived on the instant out of whole cloth for his sole delectation, constructed by some god for him alone. “I move slowly along a predestined path, while all around me someone creates my existence. Yes, I was sure: my life was constructed. Second by second, a metaphysical artist invented billions of details and made captivating and exuberant scenery, iridescent surfaces beyond which was perhaps a uniform radiance, or the indescribable.” (p. 106-107) The phantasmagoria is made possible by an unrelenting welter of over-description. This is an august rhetorical device that goes back at least to Russian Formalism and is known as defamiliarization, or ostranenie, for its estranging effect on the reader.
In Part 2 the book broadens to multi-generational saga. It’s 1955 and we meet the 17-year-old Maria, Mircea’s future mother in Bucharest where she’s lived for about a year. She works with her younger sister, Vascilica, in the deafening sewing factory. They’re wretchedly poor but scrape by. They sleep in the same bed. They attend the cheaper movie houses where they’re pawed by grease monkeys. We know Romania was then part of the USSR’s Warsaw Pact, that there was little in the way of consumer goods, and diets were poor. There was no vote, just the monolithic Communist Party; it was a police state. But so far there’s no mention of the comprehensive tyranny under which the characters live. Yet this dysfunctional place is the fabulist world of the novel. Can it be considered a deep irony placing such a fabulist tale in a place of such enormous material want? Bulgakov did the same thing in The Master and Margarita. The nightclub sequence is a magic beyond my meager powers of summary; you must read it. Then the bombing of Bucharest begins; it’s April 1944, and it’s as if the author now has two times unspooling simultaneously side by side yet utterly fluid and whole.
Halfway through here’s my question. How can one sustain fabulism at this intensity for 464 pages? The author is brilliantly talented. I guess the paucity of realism is getting to me. It’s like fireworks. They’re beautiful but after five minutes you’ve seen it all. This argument is of course completely unfair. Certainly a staunch fabulist could make a similar claim about a realist novel. As Federico Fellini, largely a fabulist, once put it, I paraphrase: A work of art is only what it is. Therefore, the critic is usually wrong. Bearing that proviso in mind, I press on . . . But realism, it occurs to me, as more of the novel’s totalitarianism slowly become foregrounded—the realism of Mr. and Mrs. Nicolae Ceaușescu!—is the very cyanide from which the author seeks escape.
As soon as the author went to New Orleans—Cedric’s story—he lost me. It’s at that point that the deep narrative gumbo lost coherence and the suspense became muddled by the insistent welter of over-description. There’s not a sympathetic character in N.O. either; everyone’s a freak. As you can see, though, there’s a lot to like about the novel. I’m glad I read it, but for me it was 209 pages too long....more
Meh. While well-written this is a trifle boring, staid. I thought I was in for something outlandish. Nope. The observations here seem quite routine. IMeh. While well-written this is a trifle boring, staid. I thought I was in for something outlandish. Nope. The observations here seem quite routine. I've personally had hallucinations that were much richer and complex than those described here. I do want to read Huxley's The Doors of Perception soon. You may also wish to read Dr. Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations, which is quite wonderful....more
I bought The Three Imposters and Other Stories because Jorge Luis Borges put it in his 75-title list: "Prologues to a Personal Library" (Selected Non-I bought The Three Imposters and Other Stories because Jorge Luis Borges put it in his 75-title list: "Prologues to a Personal Library" (Selected Non-Fictions, Penguin, 2000). So far, I have finished only the title novella. It was published in 1895 in UK, so the diction has its moments of old world British punctilio, but these are certainly no worse than anything found in other prominent Victorian writers. For the most part the narrative is beautifully compressed and the action brisk. I generally do not read mysteries or stories of the occult unless they are by Edgar Allan Poe and one or two others, and reading this collection I was reminded why. For all its delights there is a weakness in the middle of the book that I found rankling. It appears in the chapter titled "Novel of the Black Seal." Despite the otherwise vivid writing there is a tendency here to display horror not through the depiction of the horrible, but by a rising hysteria and frenzy among the main characters. The reader is left wondering why everyone is so frightened. It's this one section then, the longest in the book, in which the narrative fails. A second annoying habit in this section is a relentless withholding of information. Now this is something that all writers of fiction do to keep us guessing what will happen next. But Machen is so chintzy with even the smallest particle of rationale that it's a little maddening. Whenever the text calls for him to come clean, he squirms out of doing so through some cheap device or other. This is trickery, and bad writing. But mixed with these are fine moments, especially Machen's clarity of voice and vivid detail, that satisfy deeply. So recommended with reservations....more
This is a romp. While reading it I saw somewhere that Salman Rushdie said it was a major influence for him in the writing of The Satanic Verses. I havThis is a romp. While reading it I saw somewhere that Salman Rushdie said it was a major influence for him in the writing of The Satanic Verses. I have an inkling, unconfirmed at this point, that Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino were also influenced by it. Several things about it surprise me. No doubt it's loaded with political subtext about Stalin's Russia; it was written during the years of the worst crimes of Stalin's regime. I speak here of "dekulakization," in which some 20 to 50 million people died, many succumbing to cannibalism, and the Moscow show trials so carefully dissected by Robert Conquest in his The Great Terror. But I was oblivious to any such subtext while reading this novel. What struck me was the lively picture it gives one of Moscow in the 1930s. The tenor of the city, its street life, not to mention the look of the place and the landscape surrounding it. The parks and public spaces. I had seen Moscow before in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but that was late 19th century Moscow, a provincial city parroting Parisian culture and language. I also remember--how can I forget?--the sinister Moscow of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. But here we have a Moscow bursting with life, with people enjoying their lives. Yet, it's also a Moscow that aspires to world dominance. It was that contradiction that was always foremost in my mind as I read. One wonders how Bulgakov did it? Turning out this fabulist masterpiece in the midst of such craziness, such instability. But all that aside the book is finally unlike anything I have ever read before. Description is really the book's strength: action and imagery. There's no plot to speak of. (You can look elsewhere in these reviews for a description of the storyline.) It's character driven. And it never flags. An absolutely astonishing book.
I'm no great fan of Science Fiction, but this novel transcends the genre. It has a corker of a plot, which I won't spoil here. The only thing I was noI'm no great fan of Science Fiction, but this novel transcends the genre. It has a corker of a plot, which I won't spoil here. The only thing I was not crazy about was the way Priest uses dialog throughout to relay a lot of exposition. That's okay early in the novel because the narrator is a young apprentice of a guild; it's natural for him to ask questions about his new duties and surroundings. Toward the end of the book, however, the device shows its creakiness. But don't let me put you off the scent. The suspense is beautifully handled. You never quite know where the narrative will end up. I think the book's real strength is its masterful use of omission. It withholds beautifully the information the reader needs to solve everything. But at the same time one is not frustrated by that because one is borne along so expertly. Priest subtly hints at resolutions which never occur. Just when you think you know where he's going, he doesn't. Read it....more
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