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Atomik Aztex

3.41 of 5 stars 3.41 · rating details · 123 ratings · 26 reviews

In the alternate universe of this glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is visited by visions of a parallel world run by the Europeans, where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with automatic weapons, totemic powers and blood sacrifice conquer and colonize 1940s Europe, a...more

Paperback, 203 pages

Published July 1st 2005 by City Lights Publishers (first published January 1st 2002)

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Sep 02, 2011 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Audacious, bodacious, hyperenergetic, imaginative, imagistically generous, interacting alt-realities, porous borders between eras. Reminded me of Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle), ultraviolent voice-driven Vollmanny pyrotechnics, Ishmael Reed (Flight to Canada, Mumbo Jumbo), with mucho "Junot Diaz" spanglish, vato. (Unlike Joyce at all, per some reviews on here.) Slaughterhouses and sacrifices. The most enjoyable novel I've read in a while. A total mindfugg.

Read the complete impressi ...more

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Jan 14, 2008 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: folks who appreciate experimental fiction, find the premise compelling, and don't mind violence.

Shelves: science-fiction, race

A stunning little book. Its brutal violence and hypermasculinity wore on me, and it's nonlinearity might annoy a more conventional reader. But it has a tremendous amount to offer on the relationship between masculinity, empire, and domination. It follows one protagonist in two very different realities: in one, he is a communist labor organize at Farmer John's meat processing plant in Los Angeles in the 1940s; in the other, he is a commanding officer in the Aztec army battling Nazi Germany. In th...more

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Nov 11, 2008 Robert Wells rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not really knowing what to say about this book, I will defer a bit to what others have said, so, please pardon me for a moment. Many, or at least the three or four reviews I have read, have said this is a story of an alternate universe where the protagonist, Zenzontli, is at once in a world where the Aztecs have reigned supreme over the Spanish and have begun the colonialization of Europe. (I should mention here that I saw little if any evidence of this. Yes, in his “alternate” reality Zenzontli...more

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May 29, 2008 Seth rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Sadly, no one.

Recommended to Seth by: Employee recommendation at Staceys Books, San Francisco

Shelves: science-fiction, sf-f-h

Sadly, this book is probably really fun. The conceit--an alternate world where Aztec ("Aztek" in the book) magic not only repulsed the Spaniards but led to Aztec world domination--coupled with a world-spanning plot bringing our protag back and forth to our world (where he works at a meat-packing plant killing cattle all day) sounds like great fun.

Unfortunately, someone convinced the author that telling the Aztek part of the story--which is the bulk of the story, at least as far as I got--in four...more Sadly, this book is probably really fun. The conceit--an alternate world where Aztec ("Aztek" in the book) magic not only repulsed the Spaniards but led to Aztec world domination--coupled with a world-spanning plot bringing our protag back and forth to our world (where he works at a meat-packing plant killing cattle all day) sounds like great fun.

Unfortunately, someone convinced the author that telling the Aztek part of the story--which is the bulk of the story, at least as far as I got--in four- to seven-page paragraphs with no clear cues to the reader as to pacing or thought train (and no way to bookmark!) was a good idea. Clearly, the editor fell down on the job; it was his or her job, and the job of the members of the writers' workshop and the publications that printed portions of the book before it came out, all thanked in the frontmatter, to talk Sesshu Foster down from trying to be James Joyce at the expense of helping readers experience his or her world.

The writing in those unreadable blocks isn't bad. The characters are developed slowly, if at all, but this isn't a character-driven story. Or plot-driven, for that matter. The frontmatter also haughtily suggests that readers looking for a plot should go elsewhere; clearly they don't deserve Foster's vision. But auctorial excess is both one of the prices and one of the rewards of reading. The milieu story is a good read. I especially find myself wondering how the relationship between the two worlds--and their separate kinds of sacrifices--would pan out.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the energy to read the rest. I don't want to fight a book to enjoy it. And unlike Joyce, the words themselves don't transport me sufficiently to draw me along.

I'm glad I saw an in-store employee recommendation for this book and I want to see another by Foster, but I won't buy it until I've spent some time with it in the store. I regret wasting enough time that I'm simply teased by it but I don't resent the shelf space I'll give it.

Well, not too much.(less)

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Sep 10, 2010 Freedom Road El Camino Para la Libertad rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

this novel is SO GOOD. Here's the description from the publisher's website:

"In the alternate universe of Atomik Aztex, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders long ago. Aztek warriors with totemic powers are busy colonizing Europe, and human sacrifice is basic to economic growth.

Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is plagued by nightmares of a parallel reality where American consumerism reigns supreme. Ghosts of banished Aztek warriors emerge to haunt contemporary Los Ang...more

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Oct 29, 2011 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Angeleno poet Sesshu Foster notes this truth before even beginning: "Persons attempting to find a plot in this book should read Huck Finn." I enjoyed this whimsical, profane, and schizophrenic journey via a novel-length prose poem, repetitive at times and squeezing out ever last drop of value out of cliches, adages, and mixed metaphors that the protagonist(s) simultaneously criticize. Many attempting to read this book will likely be turned off early on by the style, language, (lack of) structure...more

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Apr 21, 2012 Allison rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

This book was just not for me. This premise sounds interesting enough--I'm all for the alternate reality thing--but as far as execution goes, this book just did not work.

The entire novel is told in the huge paragraphs that make nearly every single page just look like big blocks of text. That would be fine, except I had no idea what was going on. Halfway through a paragraph I'd forget what I was reading. In a book that is written in a way that felt so muddled, I don't think that format works. Eve...more

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Nov 12, 2009 Catherine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Moves between a few alternate universes, the main one being a world where the Aztecs booted out European invaders and are now busy in the mid-20th century kicking some Nazi ass over on the continent. Lots of ramblings from a crazy Aztec warrior, like

"probably in your World of the future they have discovered amazing stuff like DNA fingerprints, penicillin pencils, free jazz & fusion, 8-track tapes, San Fernando porno-Valley, I can't even imagine all the kool stuff they could discover in the...more

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Jun 21, 2012 Drew rated it 2 of 5 stars

I knew Sesshu Foster and I were going to have problems as soon as I read the "note" before the beginning of the book, which I will reproduce in full, because I think it gives a good sense of what Atomik Aztex is and is not about:

"This is a work of fiction." Did he feel the need to say this because the cover only says Atomik Aztex and not Atomik Aztex: A Novel? Was there any way anybody could have mistaken a book with this title for a work of non-fiction?

"Readers looking for accurate information...more I knew Sesshu Foster and I were going to have problems as soon as I read the "note" before the beginning of the book, which I will reproduce in full, because I think it gives a good sense of what Atomik Aztex is and is not about:

"This is a work of fiction." Did he feel the need to say this because the cover only says Atomik Aztex and not Atomik Aztex: A Novel? Was there any way anybody could have mistaken a book with this title for a work of non-fiction?

"Readers looking for accurate information on Nahua and Mexica peoples or the Farmer John meat packing plant in the City of Vernon need to read nonfiction." (patronizing italics his) So not only does he offend anyone who actually sought out his book and knew what they were looking for, but he's casting doubt on all the seeming facts he includes in the book itself, which is strange, because he spends whole pages talking in great detail about the processes involved in, for instance, Aztec sacrifices or Farmer John meat packing. A significant portion of the book is devoted to listing facts about all this stuff, and he casts doubt on the accuracy of all of it before he even starts. Great.

"Persons attempting to find a plot in this book should read Huck Finn." Whoa, wait. No plot? Shit! Well, he hasn't quite scared me off yet.

"Also, in this book a number of dialects are used, including the extreme form of the South-Western pocho dialect, caló, ordinary inner-city slang, and modified varieties of speech from the Vietnam era. This is no accident." So from this it looks like there are going to be large portions of the book that are nigh incomprehensible to the average person.

Much as I'd like to, I'm not going to give him any more flak about the note, except to say that taken all together, it strongly implies that Atomik Aztex is plotless and characterless, making it, what, an exercise in language? Let's hope the prose is good, then.

Unfortunately, the prose could at best be described as uneven. Foster is clearly a capable writer, maybe even a great one. But every great line is covered in garbage. Sample line of dialogue: "Don't you know nothing? Let me put it another way. Why drown all your kittens in the same sack on a rainy day when you can wear concrete galoshes to your own funeral, find yourself staring up thru the dandelions hog wild on a Month of Sundays in the Windy City? Don't be such a Knuckle Sandwich, Spaz Attack!" I'm not being entirely fair; that line isn't exactly representative of the entire book, but it IS representative of a dense, cliché-ridden six page dialogue with no tags or paragraphs, none of which really makes any sense whatsoever.

Back up. Let me try and reconstruct the story a little bit. For context. The whole book follows Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, and the only character possessing more than one dimension. Half the time, he's a wage slave in a Los Angeles slaughterhouse. The other half, he's an Aztek (sic) warrior of some power and status who leads other Aztek warriors during the Battle of Stalingrad. Guess which one's the dream/vision/hallucination.

It's the slaughterhouse...as far as I can tell. Naturally, it's way more complex than that. There are characters common to both storylines, although they share nothing more than a name; no character is really developed beyond physical description and mannerisms. And the mannerisms seem interchangeable, just like the spelling of every word. Then you have the instances where the two storylines collide, where characters address Zenzontli the meatpacker as if he were Zenzontli the Keeper of the House of Darkness. All this gets pretty confusing, and neither the writing nor the story itself possesses enough power to make the reader want to puzzle it all out.

It definitely has the potential to be interesting; there are some nice parallels between the savage Aztek culture and the equally savage (though slightly more subtly so) American capitalist culture. But why does Foster have to make it so pointlessly difficult? There's no reason to cram all the text onto each page with half-inch margins and no paragraph breaks. There's no reason to include cryptic black-and-white photos at the beginning of every chapter. There's no reason to spell the same word two different ways in the same sentence. There's no reason to write certain passages in italics if those passages don't differ in any meaningful respect from other passages. There's no reason to insert a page of text clearly culled from email spam subject lines into a character's speech. (That's not just me disparaging his writing, he really put email spam in there. "PENIS ENLARGEMENT FDA-Approved vacuum pump/surgical enlargement Gain 1-3'' Permanent and Safe Enhance Erection Dr. Joel Kaplan (619) 574-PUMP," et cetera.)

And there's certainly no reason to end the most/only captivating scene in the book with "Except that never happened."(less)

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Oct 19, 2008 Barbara added it

I just started reading Sesshu Foster's really fucking strange book; I should qualify that the fact that I think it is really strange does not mean that I dislike it. As I am reading I envision Foster really enjoying being indulgent here with the idiosyncratic language of this idiosyncratic character who's become, I think, quite unhinged. In the two realities he occupies in Foster's "omniverse," it's hard to know where to ground myself. Even in the world of 1942 East L.A., which should be relativ...more

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Jun 03, 2010 Xicanopoet Gonzalez rated it 1 of 5 stars

I really wanted to like this book. it was rambling on and on with no real direction. Also, the author doesn't even use paragraphs so it was very hard to read and hard to understand. Great premise bad execution

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Nov 26, 2011 Steev Hise rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fun, novels, own-it, to-re-read

This is one of the best and most fun novels I've read in a long while. It has been super inspiring and influential on my writing too.

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Sep 04, 2010 Tim Heywood rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-borrowed

not particulary great English - written too vernacularly for me to really enjoy this.

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May 15, 2010 Ben Miller rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book walks that fine line between genius and garbled nonsense. It's a spectacular failure, I think, like a zeppelin exploding. Awesome to behold, but not good to be inside.

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Aug 24, 2008 rebecca rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-didn-t-finish-yet

i left my copy somewhere. made me hungry for octopus ceviche. did not quite finish before mistakingly forgetting to take it with me after bailing on crazy-making sublet house from hell. (also forgot amazing weird earrings, cardboard box full of hair/nail clippings, and hush puppies). reminds me strongly of that story in mcsweeneys 16 about girl with mangled legs, though it has completely different subject matter. i feel like the writing is quite exactly the same caliber. if that gives anyone a s...more

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Feb 16, 2008 Jacque wong rated it 3 of 5 stars

ok, the beginning of this book is so amazing that it really will blow your mind. I mean if the Azteks did rule the world, chances are that it really would be like living in a slaughter house every day. And What If you were also working in an abbatoir as well. wouldn't the gore just be totally overwhelming? and how much gore can one human take before the world becomes a totally frickin' psychedelic gore-fest? Gory. Not for PETA lovers.

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Oct 09, 2011 Sumayyah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Strange....

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Nov 05, 2007 Caroline rated it 2 of 5 stars

I did not like this. But I don't know why. I laughed a lot at the beginning, and the language was very good throughout. The idea of Azteks ruling the world is a good premise for a book, but I found the dreams/hallucinations/memoirs of the narrator distracting. It would have had more force if they weren't dreams/hallucinations and Azteks really had taken over the world.

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Nov 06, 2008 Brooke rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was looking for a plot so I guess I should be shot. A compelling experiment saturated in the hallucinatory poetics of a "what-if" world: Aztecs conquer the conquerors, drive Apache pickups. I didn't make it out of the meat-packing plant but will probably give it another go down the line.

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Jan 13, 2009 Chana marked it as started-then

i'm not in the right mind-set for this book.. i'll have to come back to it at another time in my life =)

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Feb 26, 2013 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

One of many cases where assigning stars seems futile to me. Imagination in overdrive, brutal and over-the-top, surrealistic, occasionally too self-indulgent even for a narrative in which excess is key--it's hard to be indifferent about this book.

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Jun 03, 2007 Roberto rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure if we can use profanity on these reviews. Which is too bad. Because the only way to describe this book involves the words 'mind' and another which means sexual penetration.

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Mar 10, 2008 The rated it 1 of 5 stars

could this book be any worse? How dare "The Believer" steer us astray.

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Jul 25, 2008 Koyote rated it 3 of 5 stars

this is not a book for sensitive vegetarians.

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Jun 14, 2007 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is wonderful.

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May 01, 2013 Lauren Bishop marked it as to-read

Apr 27, 2013 William Whitaker rated it 4 of 5 stars

Apr 16, 2013 Alice Case rated it 3 of 5 stars

Apr 15, 2013 Jill rated it 3 of 5 stars

Apr 01, 2013 Odot Lamm is currently reading it

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About Sesshu Foster

Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He's also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Polit...more

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