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This is a weird book. The story concerns the fanciful ordinary American town of Tasmania, Ohio, with "ordinary" meaning, to Colmen Dowell's Kentucky-raised, New York-tempered cynicism: entitled, self-assured, and bigoted in all ways. Into t...
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My book cover blurb: "The decapitation one is better than the sex one."
I didn't exactly walk away from reading Butler's similarly structured book, Intercourse, with much love in my heart, so I felt like I could go into this one and out the other en...moreMy book cover blurb: "The decapitation one is better than the sex one."
I didn't exactly walk away from reading Butler's similarly structured book, Intercourse, with much love in my heart, so I felt like I could go into this one and out the other end with a similar outcome. This was actually the one that caught my attention first and interested me more than the one in which we read the one-page of thought from a person as they get know someone else, Biblically. At the time that I first stumbled upon the fact that Severance existed--probably at least two or three years back--I was really interested in scientific and philosophical debates about The Mind, to be overly concise. So the idea of reading about what the last moments of consciousness would be like as a head severed from its body seemed both novel and weird but also seemed to hold some potential to satisfy the little neuroscience enthusiast I'd become.
I got around to the book much later on and in a period of my life when literary fiction had surpassed my interests in things like cognitive neuroscience and the philosophical debates about the very nature of consciousness itself. Regardless of any of this, the gimmick held up better here despite the close similarities between it and Intercourse--each story is a page long and each involve famous figures and references to actual historical events.
Maybe what made this one work a little more is that I can imagine thoughts-as-internal-words when one is about the have their head lopped off, or is facing down their very immanent death in any occasion, but as much as Freud was onto something about Sex and Death being intertwined preoccupations, I don't believe we experience them the same linguistically. No one thinks the way Butler makes them think during sex, and while realism is not something I insist on at all, Intercourse just became too ridiculous to take as seriously as the book makes itself seem to want to be taken. The formula just works better with experiencing thoughts about mortality than it does with experiencing one of the most all-but-reptilian-brain-regions-of-the-mind-erasing activities there is: Fucking.(less)
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Like other folks I know and respect on Goodreads, I loved the opening, titular story but found the rest of the book to be middling. Like, disappointingly, forgettably, middling. I know the stories were kinda weird and stuff but for the life of me I c...moreLike other folks I know and respect on Goodreads, I loved the opening, titular story but found the rest of the book to be middling. Like, disappointingly, forgettably, middling. I know the stories were kinda weird and stuff but for the life of me I can barely even remember what they were about or even distinguish them from each other. I don't think I've ever felt so uneven about a short story collection. It's so strange that it makes me curious enough to give them a reread at some point, despite the less than flattering description I've just given. I feel like I must have read them incorrectly somehow, since the opening story was so engaging and fun, which is where the four stars come from.
I love books and films that utilize facades and museum-like tableaux and the story "Pastoralia" does this with great effect. This quality plus the cover image of my copy of this book has established itself so firmly in my mind that when I see things like fake trees indoors or big landscape/nature murals (think of the paintings placed around City Hall on the TV show Parks and Recreation) that I think of them as being "Saunders-like" in the instant-association segment of my brain. I haven't yet totally over-analyzed what my attraction to certain uses of facades and replicas is all about yet (though there's been a more extended musing on this elsewhere) but I guess it might just have something to do with fond childhood memories of visiting museums and being enthralled by the displays of animals and humans, made to be lifelike but frozen into place behind glass. I still experience a powerful mix of sentimentality with a healthy dose of Ineffability when I revisit the Milwaukee Public Museum, a place I've wandered around many times over the years, each time worrying that I'll drain the magic of the childhood memories on this visit, but each time managing to still feel wrapped in an almost mystical euphoria and nostalgia.
Saunders tale is surreal and dark and playful and some of its main devices called this feeling up from the inner depths.
This is still the only Saunders I've read. I assumed his work would be so up my alley that I ordered three of his short story collections last year, had my weirdly uneven experience with this one and haven't exactly felt compelled to make the others a priority yet. I still have a sense that I'll like more of his work, but this experience was just such a strange disappointment in a way I can't really explain at all. At least I have a case to solve now, so I'll be back to Saundersville to snoop around for clues and answers later.(less)
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"BOUDINOT!
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I read this book in June of 2011 and recently thought about it again when I stumbled upon an interview the author'd conducted with some Nietzsche appreciation society or somesuch. I liked what he had to say about the remaining relevance of the litera...moreI read this book in June of 2011 and recently thought about it again when I stumbled upon an interview the author'd conducted with some Nietzsche appreciation society or somesuch. I liked what he had to say about the remaining relevance of the literary fiction form, as it jibes with my own opinions and those of others I respect who've been asked to justify the medium they've committed themselves to work within:
"For the last fifty years or so, The Novel’s demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can’t in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language—especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end?"
This book attempts to inhabit the mind of the iconic bristly-lipped German philosopher in his final day of genuine madness. If the language weren't so beautiful it could've been a disaster, and at moments in veered dangerously close to being 'a bit much' but my now distant-seeming memory of it remains largely favorable, despite not enjoying it as much as the first Oslen book that I read, and read right before picking up this cringe-inducingly-titled novel. Like 10:01, it defied my cynical skepticism and ended up being well-worth the currency of my time, attention and money. Much of it is told through flashbacks and details the often mythologized and heavily scrutinized figure with both kind and unkind depictions. Historical accuracy seems a bit besides the point in a novel like this, but it still managed to feel real enough while my eyes were stuck in its pages.
For those who don't know, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche went into a state of insanity for the final ten years of his life. In the early stages he was signing his bizarre letters as "Dionysus" or "The Crucified" and so forth, saying stranger more nonsensical things than he ever published as philosophy while his faculties were intact--this all being immediately after a now famous story about his initial trip to the sanitarium being spurred by him collapsing and weeping while clutching a horse that was being beaten and whipped in the street. The majority of these ten years were spent in bed-ridden catatonic silence while his sister handled his estate and manipulated his writings to serve her own dubious purposes, which would not be corrected until Walter Kaufmann came along to translate his works into English in the 1950's and discovered her omissions and additions. In any case, Olsen attempts to describe the point of view of someone with a genuine degenerative brain disorder (consensus is that syphilis was rotting his brain away for many years) who's on their deathbed. This person just so happens to be a now famous German philosopher with more than a few interesting biographies floating around.
A central narrative arc via flashbacks involves Nietzsche's disastrous attempts at finding lasting romance with Lou Salome, a Strong Independent Woman who snared his affections and also left him standing in the cold with a wedding ring in his hand. It also touches on Nietzsche's father being a Lutheran minister and dying when he was a young boy, both patriarchal details making for great psychoanalytic fodder for scholars to wax theoretical about over the decades, considering the legacy of the philosopher's anti-Christian, God-slaying, Life-On-Earth-embracing canon.
I suspect that only those with some interest in Nietzsche at some point in their lives will possibly find this book worthwhile. Even as someone who realized that Nietzsche wasn't as great on the whole as I once thought him to be, I found something valuable in this and I think purely on the human level of trying to embody the consciousness of someone else, which Olsen's kick-off quote describes as being The Novel's true wheelhouse, and despite my previously acquired knowledge and pretty serious appreciation of the mustachioed man's writing and bio.
Olsen has a real talent with language that's on display here and that alone made it worth the price of admission for me.(less)
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This is undoubtedly the magnum opus of the three novels Ben Marcus has released through the porous borders between the self and the world. The Age of Wire and String (1995) left me baffled and pretty impressed by its unique indexical acrobatics and b...moreThis is undoubtedly the magnum opus of the three novels Ben Marcus has released through the porous borders between the self and the world. The Age of Wire and String (1995) left me baffled and pretty impressed by its unique indexical acrobatics and budding vision of where to take the avant garde programme. Notable American Women (2002) detonated in my brain and dazzled me senseless with its maturing grip on how to show and not tell, and transfigured the form of the metafictional autobiography with both dynamite and surgical incisions. The Flame Alphabet (2012) ascends to magisterial heights, melding the mindfuck detailings that he'd previously coerced into a second nature with a form of storytelling as ancient as the first primordial grunts of mythology. It embeds a staggering amount of content concerning The Human Experience in its deceivingly spare frame (289 pages) and plotline, and does this through deftly swept-together piles of kindling for potential blazes of deep thought rather than direct philosophizing. Characters almost never pontificate and the narrative point of view is more about struggling against the ravages of disease than uncovering and tying together the essential natures of big ideas and difficult questions. It's as deep as you want it to be. And all this flows through the plot's main artery: Language is literally a virus that can strangle and bludgeon and infect the deepest reaches of human biology with horrific decay and there are various ways different factions of people try to remedy (or not) the problem. In the beginning, only the children wreak this havoc upon the adults and this set-up alone is remarkably nerve-shattering to follow. From there, things get decidely more dark and strange beyond all strained reaches of language—to say the least.
An Anxious Inquisition
I may've just been having a random explosion of anxiety, which wouldn't be totally uncharacteristic, or maybe I just had to pee or needed to put on a sweater or turn up the heat, or some combination of these and many other possible culprits of causality, but there were times during my navigation of the masterful slowburn of suspense and transcendently eerie foreshadowing that made my heart race and my palms fall atremble and clammy with cold sweat—which rather uncoincidentally brought to mind the whole central idea about language having direct effects on human physiology. Urgency and Yearning and Seeking are so tightly and expertly threaded through this from open to close—manifesting a finely-tuned dread married to a wide-eyed, page-flipping curiosity. This is a book that'll make terrified but forward-marching explorers of many who engage it.
A Few Words on the Words: Sastrean Cerebral Materialism
"Words are memes that can be pronounced."
—Daniel C. Dennett
My wiser elder brother from another mother—Chris Sastre—was kind enough to look over some infant-stage writing of mine and one of his points caused me to try to further form words for what exactly it is I'm trying to do or am doing when writing in a certain style that seems to flow unconsciously (sometimes against better instincts) from my head to the screen; a style and tone which he whittled down to the words cerebral materialism.
CS: There's a cerebral materialism to your stories that keeps me at a chilly distance upon first exposure—but they invariably warm and reward the more with each subsequent go through.
JN-M: Part of the 'cerebral materialism' is that I like breaking things down, through slow motion, zooming in on them, etc, because it gives me a deep warmth of greater understanding, I guess. Basically, I'm compelled to do this when I try to write. Same goes for the clinical or baroque or purple language. I think the point isn't to alienate or show off, it's to cast things in a different light than normally seen, because it's novel and because it's oftentimes funny, and because it makes me rethink things in a way that gives them more gravitas. It's the whole idea of 'making the strange appear familiar and making the familiar appear strange' that I think has some real emotional-intellectual value and that's the whole point of sometimes casting things clinically or purple-y or whatever.
I feel that this snippet of an exchange partially gets at the effect of the tone and style that Marcus pulls off so flabbergastingly well, and has more or less molded into perfection in this most recent effort. In other words, I found it inspiring to see someone doing something I struggle and aspire to do, giving me some sense of hope that it can be pulled off and not merely be an alienating or derivative disaster, as I often self-loathingly worry about when I make my little unhoned fictional fragments of late. It made my attempts look weak and sloppy (as they very well should, considering the lack of time and effort and the brand-newness of the whole enterprise) but in a tough love kind of way that I'm a big enough boy to be able to appreciate. Thank you sir, may I have another?
As I gazed into the gorgeous abyss of turning pages, Sastre's incisive comment about cerebral materialism gazed back at me, over and over again, each time I found myself stunned by the impressively economical and varied sentences, the elegant precision and the soothing hum of the tuning fork Marcus dings summarily upon every page. To breathe one more breath of symbols at describing the nature of this cerebral materialism: It has the effect of making the normal way we're usually unknowingly immersed in language and perception seem more comforting and appreciated by contrast, like jumping from ice cold lake water into a hot bath--the shivers of the insightful estrangment melting into a newfound sedated bliss of the familiar. Rinse, repeat.
Unfolding Themes
This is the kind of book that is, in a counterintuitive way, about Everything. Not in the way that the gigantic, 1000+ page, information-dense postmodern classics are about Everything, but in, again, that show-not-tell way that Creative Writing 101 courses preach about with regards to scenic descriptions and character traits—but The Flame Alphabet does this with underlying themes and in an ingenious way.
"Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates." —Thomas Mann
This seems to all flower out from the fact that its central and most explicit theme is language itself and language is more all-encompassing than tends to meet the casually observant eye. Once this organizing principle was latched onto it made it hard not to be jolted by nearly every other sentence; instantaneously, vast networks upon the map of Human Experience lit up before me: The struggles and triumphs of striving to communicate exactly what we mean and how we feel to others, or even to ourselves within our own language-saturated inner monologues; the evolution of human beliefs and knowledge through religion and science; certitude v. uncertitude; the relentless mystery of consciousness; the building up and breaking down of social bonds—from the family unit to the whole of global civilization; the ills of dogmatic authoritarianism however well-intentioned; the dangers in having too much available information or not enough.
Despite all these grand, sweeping things being blared through my current mania and ecstatic praise, it should be pointed out again that this is not a book of brittle intellectual curiosities, instead it is one that plunges deep into the heart of the most central human concerns with a highly focused and sharpened plot. It is not meandering in any way shape or form. Every letter and punctuation mark feels essential and carefully plotted. It is not a philosophical wankfest at all; the author strategically creates space where such wankery is possible and the subtext brilliantly juggles the big important themes, but the story is still very much a story, packed with suspense and drama as good as any. Even in its perpetual Lynchian strangeness and White Noise-like familial dynamics, we can see our own experiences of being alive, which is basically the point of fiction and art generally, if forced to comment on that ol' "X is all about Y" scenario.
Solitary Confinement
"Dr. Lester: I've been very lonely in my isolated tower of indecipherable speech." —Charlie Kaufman
There's an interesting fact to consider about prison. Even in the relative hell of such a place, solitary confinement is used as a punishment. Human beings are rather reliably shown to react in a less than mentally healthy way when isolated from other people for extended periods of time. There's an analogous phenomenon to be seen in the individual human mind itself; it is by its very nature a place of isolation, because despite all attempts to bridge the chasm between itself and others it ultimately cannot be shared, only approximations can be given as to its contents through two basic means—language and non-linguistic behavior. This troubles people who think too much and makes for great film premises (e.g. Being John Malkovich) but it also has broader effects. Everyone knows what it's like to feel misunderstood, whether it be through a casual conversation, a work of art, a book review, or whatever. And most people also know what it's like to feel lonely, whether through actual social isolation or a more complicated kind of loneliness usually found through mental health problems like clinical depression, in which the sense of loneliness only increases as more people gather 'round.
The fixation on language in The Flame Alphabet carries itself into a concern with these issues as well. There's a kind of palpable ache to be felt here in the yearning to connect with others as seriously and fully as possible. I've had the image cross my mind before—when feeling this combinaton of frustration and longing—of wanting to bash my skull into anothers and let our brains comingle, finally achieving a full, glorious, mutual understanding. Of course this is grotesque, but as a symbol it gets me one step closer to accurately attaching a series of words to a powerful feeling. So while our minds our inherently private things there are still degrees of feeling isolated and connected to be sought out and experienced; it's not an all or nothing situation. The most isolated end of the spectrum can actually drive people to true madness, while our strongest feelings of connection, however imperfect, are the most important and healing things in our lives. The Flame Alphabet brought all of this into a new focus, with a new heft, and all—counterintuitively, again—through its dark chambers of incredibly inventive narrative, largely drained of sentimentality and optimism. To quote a line that struck me as a teenager while watching Chris Nolan's debut flick Following—"You take it away, and show them what they had."
A View From The Beginning of The End of The World
So it's 2012, the Year of Our Lord Conspiracy Theory. Fuck the Mayan calander bullshit—humanity is more than capable of carelessly dethroning itself into oblivion or being consumed by natural forces beyond our defenses and this has nothing to do with an old collection of arbitrary dates written by people who would be stunned by technology such as the butterchurn or the printing press. But more importantly, who needs boring and wackadoo "theories" when our planet has been graced with two infinitely superior and mesmerizing apocalyptic-minded tales at the front end of the year: Ryan Boudinot's Blueprints of the Afterlife and The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus. Both are extremely unique in their own right but are bonded in their profoundly effective explorations of humanity's capacity for self-annihilation. Flame is an inexorable crescendo of dread and entropy, a merciless savaging of the human experiment, whereas Boudinot gives one room to breath while contemplating the prospect of humanity's final wave goodbye. Both are jaw-droppingly great books to kick off yet another year that end times prophets have marked as our last. If it must be so, at least we got some good reading in beforehand.(less)
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A wise man once said, "Hell yeah, motherfucker. You're gonna love this." Such wisdom remains etched as it first was at the head of the communication boxes below. Verily, I say unto you, this language vessel rises above the din of most experimental or...moreA wise man once said, "Hell yeah, motherfucker. You're gonna love this." Such wisdom remains etched as it first was at the head of the communication boxes below. Verily, I say unto you, this language vessel rises above the din of most experimental or surreal endeavors. It is surely not the only such book concerned with the nature of language and meaning and reality, or assembled with slyly strung together and unrelenting and astounding oddness, but it does more in the service of agitating the reader's thoughts in those directions in a single chapter than many such books do in their entirety, or that their authorial directors manage to in a prolific lifespan of pursuing the sublime but misplacing their footprints into the merely ridiculous. As another wise man of sorts also once said "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous." My judgment thermometer says that Ben Marcus maintains his footing on the better half of this righteous line cut through the sand.
One could get the feeling from reading his work that the author is not of this world. Even a glance at his less than typical promotional photo might aid in furthering the suspicion—with the hairless cranium, utterly emotionless mouth, and somewhat haunting stare. The point of view found within these thinly-wrought gutted-tree bits is often comparable to what a visitor from an indescribably foreign world might see; or perhaps how another terrestrial species, if given the ability and/or desire to commune with our grammar and vocabularly, might describe what takes place amongst we humans; and to absorb this POV with one's seeing and thinking cloth is alternately delightful, frightening and forcefully thought-provoking.
Be forewarned, my friends, if your idea of too weird and/or too difficult and/or too unrealistic is to be exemplified by e.g. the tones emitted from Headmaster DeLillo's typewriter or the heavily populated and wending sentence trails of Brother Foster Wallace, you should probably continue running away from the Marcus monographs with mouths twisted into horrified geometries—and this will now be a conscious fleeing, instead of the one in the silent places of yourself, as before. This is not an indictment of any kind, just a plain statement of caution to my fellow travelers who also feel their way about the Earth with the sensory guidance of ink and paper.
The opening chapter would make for the most clever and hilarious Goodreads review of this book. It is a letter that contains the basic sentiment and actual sentence:
"Forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies."
And is signed:
Your father,
Michael Marcus
"Behold the Strange Miracle and Power of the Word!" is one of the louder things this book would bellow, were it willing and able. If this book does not squeeze thunderous and profound thoughts about language from your pulp, you are reading it incorrectly. Two well-worn U.S. idioms that should be kept in a mildly ventilated mason jar next to you as you read Notable American Women:
"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words can never hurt me." & "Fill in the Blank is beyond words."
The reader was a student in the book's classroom of Perspectivism 101. The reader was assaulted with words that grew into ideas. Root-taking was a euphoric shiver followed by growing pains, followed by serene quiet in the darkened cave where each syllable was a beautiful droplet, each sweet sound held in sustained echo. The reader journeyed to heights and depths, erased meanings and forged new ones. The reader occasionally was spanked by confusion sticks, but loved by the new worlds exposed through the teacher's arsonistic crimes of passion committed against the curtains and walls that would seek to stand in the way of such love.
There are passages to be discovered that appear to have be constructed by a process of such restraint and craftsmenship that it is as if each sentence popped into the one-skulled House of Marcus, one at a time, fully formed ex nihilo, and were carefully extracted with a slow and gentle pinch and delicately set into place upon the page with a silent, pillowed thud. This is in contrast to other great authors of similar persuasion that seem to be in a perpetual wrestling match with a fire hose's powerful spray of thoughts and words, who trim their efforts with artful precision after the open spout's already done its business. The delete key seems eerily absent from the measured and well-paced inscriptions of this strangest of strange creations that continues to elude my own lingual abominations.
Were this reviewer allowed to coin new terms for prose styles, much of this book and a previous Marcus effort (The Age of Wire and String) might be conjoined to the hips or hands of such academic philosophical nomenclature as Eliminative Materialism or Physicalist prose. Wide fields of sentences eschew the function of metaphor and analogy while maintaining the skeletal structure of those things, consequently creating a new physics, a new logic concerning how objects and forces and thoughts stand in relation to one another. There are ripe new items on its vines like listening cloths, behavior smoke, learning ponds, forgetting water, et cetera. A truly newborn ontology awaits thee.
There is an English word, visceral, that gets tossed about when discussing and describing the effects of words; this book contains descriptions so visceral that they laugh at such a word while the letters "v", "i" and "s" hang helplessly from its bloodied maw. The words strange, disturbing, hilarious, weird, brilliant, dark, unique, unnerving, metafiction and even book also scatter in the presence of this series of diverse vignettes tied together by a tale of a cult in Ohio that seeks to trim down the use of language and physical motion until words and movement are annihilated completely.
Language as a weapon, a virulent strain; human activity and mere existence as a mass murderer of air and space; fiction as a lie beyond redemption, and the written word as its ultimate accomplice.
Ben Marcus as insane genius, brought here to save and/or destroy it all.
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For further helpings of book reporting, please see this excellent series of impressions left by the weight of Notable American Women upon Ashley Crawford, a fellow traverser of good reads and Goodreads.(less)
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