Danielewski + Slinkachu: tricksters both
The Fifty Year Sword
by Mark Z Danielewski
There may be no book I felt more powerfully about than Danielewski’s House of Leaves: released in 2000, when I was 21, it was one of those books that seemed to me just infinite, endless magic. 12 years later I still think it was great, but I wonder, now, if I wouldn’t have simply loved anything right then: I was falling in love with reading right then. Certainly HoL had and has lots going for it, from typography to creepiness to the fantastic tri-nature of the narrative; however, it seems increasingly clear that, for those of us waiting for Danielewski do attempt similar magic, we’re simply never gonna get it. Ever. Since 2000, he’s released Only Revolutions (somehow a finalist for the National), a book that’s far more interested in structural symmetry than storytelling; The Whalestoe Letters, which is seemingly just a cash-grab (it only works if you read Leaves); and, now, The Fifty Year Sword (though note that this title was released in the Netherlands in ’05 [yes, I'm that obsessive fan: I've got that version as well, though why I haven't already just sold it for the usual ebay price is unclear]). First things, and most basically: this is a cool as hell story about a birthday party in East Texas, and the story’s told by different narrators who are represented solely by language and color-coded quotes (which is a fairly cool conceit, if, in this case, it doesn’t feel like it matters all that much: I can’t imagine this’d read differently without the futzed-with narration). The book’s worth purchasing, absolutely. Danielewski is, it’s becoming clear, interested almost exclusively in stories which are, ultimately, haunted: it’s less that he’s dark (though he’s that) but that there’s this…absence built into the heart of his work. In Leaves, the house literally had a labyrinth spiralling out right at its center; here, the title sword is, in fact, nothing more than the hilt of a sword: the blade’s gone. Here’s the corollary: the scariest part of a scary movie is not the monster’s arrival, it’s the door open to the darkness, the scrittering jittery camera-panning that doesn’t capture the monster. Ditto Danielewski’s books: they are, ultimately, sort of thin in the sense that he’s telling something like ghost stories in fantastically satisfying and artsy ways (the reason this is a $26 hardcover is because there are these beautiful textile art pieces in it—not textiles actually in the book, but full-color photos of someone’s pretty fantastic art), except they’re not even ghost stories, not really: what he does, again and again, is posit this empty thing at something’s center, let characters consider that absence, and then build a conclusion onto what happens after that consideration or exploration’s run its course. I’m not knocking it: I’ll read Danielewski forever, and, to a degree, gladly. But I can’t imagine I’m alone in hoping he does something magnificent again soon, something as good as Leaves—or maybe not even as good, but something ultimately as generous and with the reader in mind as that (and I don’t mean ‘generous’ in the sense of offering a copy of yr latest book in a limited, signed edition for almost 4x the book’s regular price—generous in a sense that doesn’t feel like gimmickry).
Global Model Village by Slinkachu
I had never heard of this guy before, and I’m thrilled I now have. Here’s a fantastic book about which I can be mercifully brief: you need to own this book because it is, ultimately, a book which’ll force you to see the world as ultimately stranger and more interesting, all the time, than you’re likely to without its nudging. Go to Slinkachu’s website. Poke around. That’s one of his photos, above. I can’t even believe how cool it is. I think the longest I’ve gone without cracking this book, just in sort of amusement and amazement, since getting it is three days. I dare you to go longer (and as a quick going-away note: it’s another fantastic release from Blue Rider Press, which, out of basically nowhere, has just come ass-kickingly into great view: the Neil Young bio, the Damien Echols bio, the Leanne Shapton swimming thing, this book, THE NEXT JEAN THOMPSON: these folks can’t miss).
