The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra /lit/ Approved Epic Fantasy As featured Harold Bloom’s Shiterary Canon - The Best and Worst of Postmodernist Literature Donetsk Times Best Selling Author The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra Translation by Chuck Berry >anonymous An insight into the spook-conscious Enter the toxic post-ironic internet culture of /lit/
Books can be attributed to "Anonymous" for several reasons:
* They are officially published under that name * They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author * They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
Why in the actual fuck is this book the top rated of my "to read" books? Why are there so many glowing reviews? Maybe I'm not enlightened enough to understand this shit, I don't know. All I know is that there is WAY too much stuff about cum. WAY too much. Book-binding with cum, drinking cum, cum all over the walls... ???
Did you come to Babylon to see the soul of men, or for pleasure, or simply as a wanderer lost, lost as I was before I found Harry, or lost like that great span of time between the birth of the universe and your own, which is not accessible to you (and not meant for you), but which you can touch, poignantly, as a single piece in a grand puzzle, by finding your place in time, vast time, is that perhaps what you seek here, your place or your time - if so, I mourn, for you will not find it. It is not accessible to you (and not meant for you), for it is hidden, hid by me, shattered and spread through this city of mankind, like dust or motes of air, and there is not room in that short span of a single life to restore it, this is the individual tragedy, but also majesty; build your own so that others may find it, write your will so that other may listen and learn, and some day, in some far distant future in which the world is no longer the same and no longer like ours, on that day some soul shall rebuild Babylon and the soul shall then read this book and understand it thoroughly.
First off, I know I don't write reviews, and I know this book is kind of a meme. To be fair, it deserves to be, and I see a lot of the reviews recognize that, and, by that logic, cease to become actual, genuine reviews and instead throw themselves headfirst into joining in on the joke. I'll be trying not to do that with this review, which will come with some disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is that I might come off as incredibly pretentious, asinine, and over-analyzing. Those are all probably fair assessments of this review. Nevertheless, let's begin.
My main drive to read this came from the discussion of a completely different book on /lit/. I can't remember the name of the book, all I remember from it is that it was non-fiction, it was most likely written by a woman, and the main premise of the text itself was comparing 4chan (of which /lit/ is a part of) to what the author argued is its spiritual ancestor, the intellectually laissez-faire environment of the late 19th century Vienna coffee shops, where Freud rubbed shoulders with thinkers like Lenin and Hitler, or some other famous sods. You can probably tell that I've never read the book I'm talking about, which is because I'm assuming the book is probably trash and exists to maintain the ethos surrounding 4chan in mainstream culture for a cheap buck from drooling retards.
However, the idea behind the book is interesting. As the web grows ever more homogenized, regulated, and sanitized, the old forum culture of the 2000's shrinks and shrinks, but it had a huge affect on a generation of young browsers, the same young browsers that are now either just entering or well into young adulthood. One day, I think that people will be able to look back analytically upon the old web, but now, since we're still in the middle of the reaction against that way the internet worked, all observations basically end at "man weren't people back then just so XXX-ist? Luckily Facebook®®®®, Twitter®®®®® and YouTube ™™™® protect us from all of those naughty internet users."
But these conclusions deny the amount of creativity and community that used to and still pervade these relics of the mainstream web's past. 4chan's boards are still hugely active and creative, with /mu/ pouring out cover albums, along with several interesting original records, like The Death of Pablo. /v/ is a huge creator of digital art, both solo and collaborative while, to be fair, it's mostly derived from video game IPs. These are just a few examples, I could talk about /pol/'s shenanigans for the last few years, or /tg/'s steady drumbeat of tabletop RPGs, but I need to get to the book someday.
The Legacy of Totalitarianism In A Tundra represents /lit/'s first major step into collective creation. There were other projects before, such as a literary magazine (that I forgot the name of), but Totalitarianism is by far the most monumental and most well-known of /lit/'s output. It's a collaborative fiction novel close to 500 pages long and it probably has well over 100 different authors, each one contributing anywhere between a couple of words talking shit about the plot (or lack thereof) or quite literally 30 pages of a completely unrelated short story.
Oh yeah, the story. If I just met you at a party or something and I gave you the gist of the book roughly outlined in the above paragraph, and the first question you had for me was "well, what's the story?" I would laugh in your face. There is a story in the sense that there are recurring characters and things do happen, but beyond that there is no semblance of narrative structure, beginning and end, or overarching plot. There is a loose plot setup in the first couple of chapters, but that is either discarded by the actual book less than halfway through or by the reader after getting halfway through a full essay about the career of the progressive rock band King Crimson. What little plot there is is non-linear and unintelligible, but that doesn't stem from a lack of ability or effort. In my mind, the majority of the authors basically said, "fuck it, who's here for the plot anyway?" and did what they wanted. That's to the service of the book, not to the detriment of it, and I think most readers would agree with me. Nobody really cares about the anon that starts the book off, that's not what we're here for.
What we're really here for is a complete literary clusterfuck, which this book delivers in spades. Other collaborative fiction projects I've seen (of which there are not many serious ones, most I've found are comfortably sitting at the bottom of fanfiction.net) are usually heavily planned, regimented and organized. Who is contributing is set up beforehand, the overarching plot is established before the writing begins, and each author is designated a chapter of their own. Everyone gets their own walled garden to do whatever they want in, a la Facebook®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®® or YouTube or whatever other big web 3.0 (or 4.0, can't keep up) website is popular. Instead, with Totalitarianism, it was clearly just a google doc. A bunch of people logged on, and someone hit "go".
The best analogy I have to describe how this book reads as a result of this near total anarchy is a linear venn diagram comprised of a few hundred circles. Each circle represents an author. Instead of one author discreetly giving way, cutting off their writing cleanly for another one to begin, writing kind of just bleeds together. It creates this really surreal effect where you'll read a couple pages of almost nonsense, but then you'll break out, and it will clearly be just one person's writing for several pages, before it all falls apart into static again. Later in the book around the 300 page mark, these breakouts of one writer writing for 10-20 pages or so are all of a completely different genre and tone from the main book, if there is even such a thing that can be called a "main book".
What this all serves is in my opinion the best part of the book, the authors. Every bit of writing tells readers less about what the author writing it is trying to say and more about who the author is. It's an effect that doesn't really exist in any other book. For example, if I wanted to pick up and read Infinite Jest, there really isn't any ambiguity about DFW's perspective on anything. I know everything I need to know about him, and if I want to know more there's a treasure trove of interviews, writeups, short biographic articles and even obituaries I can read about him, to get a sense of who he is and how he feels about various topics.
There is no way to get any of this information about any of the authors in this book beyond what they've written in the book itself. The writers, therefore, are characters in the story themselves, something some of the authors are more aware of than others. They're compelling characters that feel reel because, for all intents and purposes, they are real.
Anyway, I might come back to this review and add some more to it, or edit it so it's a little more readable. I just wanted to get my thoughts down in a kind of one draft, one take method. If you want the short version of this review, Totalitarianism was an experience like none other and a legitimately enjoyable read. There are some parts that might be painful, but to me they were so baffling that I simply had to trudge onward. I don't know if this book deserves to be given a literary award to to be chucked into a fire, but I was glad I read it.
Yesterday I was a five foot two intellectual weakling. The river Sambation came up to my neck, the sacred text Moreh Nebhukhin left me perplexed, the Minorites had me imprisoned, and the ten tribes laughed at me and kicked sand in my face. A short while ago a good friend, seeing my plight, handed me a book. That book? The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra. It opened my mind. Now I'm eight metres tall and even The Demiurge is in awe of my intellect.
This book has changed my life. It's a political statement veiled by an enthralling narrative and the most profound characters, combining literary techniques with advanced philosophy. But it's also so much more than that. It's the most enchanting book you'll ever read. This book is relevant to people of every age and from every social class. It contains wit, humour, satire, and tragedy. Ideology in its purest form. It can savely be said that this work surpasses even masterpieces like the Principia Discordia.
I don't know how many of you guys actually read the book, but I'm sad to say I did. Sure I had to skip the parts in Spanish, French, Russian, and Hebrew. Plus the guy trying to write like James Joyce or something by only writing adverbs and pronouns. This was, in all seriousness, a decent book. I'm surprised I even read it at all.
I just have one complaint: it could have been funnier. 3,000 people writing it, from 4chan no less, and it could have been a little funny. Sure there were a couple efforts at it, but most of it was people trying to write like a Philosopher, trying to put out completely ironic ideologies.
My point is, I guess, is that they could have tried to make it a bit more entertaining.
by far the single greatest creative work i have ever read. a compilation from anonymous authors, from multiple origins, who also radically edited one another's works. The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra surpasses much postmodern literature and sets the tone (for those in the know) of the next great era of literature. Even today, I turn back to its chaos for inspiration. TLoTiaT Paperback Edition captures only a snapshot of the work's performance, but enticingly, that lures you to the depths of the human imagination. while you may not be able to witness this work's unfolding, the published version feels more complete in a way that couldn't be encapsulated in its drafts. TLoTiaT challenges the Western canon, deeply insightful into such diverse topics as creation, identity, international geopolitics, human psychology, cyber culture, and the publishing industry.
a must-have, but be wary of buying a new physical copy of this book as i believe the proceeds are donated to a hate group targeting autistic people, which masquerades as a supportive charity - do your own research.
This work is one of the earliest anonymous collaborations of this sort. This does not read like typical fiction. It's packed with idiosyncrasy, profanity, parody, and metafiction of hundreds of anonymous contributors writing, deleting and arguing about the book itself. There's a range of content from crude self-ridicule all the way to what appears to be deathly serious writing. There was an attempt at a plot, but what resulted was reoccurring elements appearing within a wilderness of defaced writing. For the most part, the plot is about anonymous, lizard men (e.g. Lizard Foster Wallace), the 5th dimension, and eventually covers a curious tribe of people who live in a tundra. Understandably, the formatting is hard to read, especially if you are reading in print rather than the more colorful digital format. If you've heard about it and were on the fence about reading it, now's the time to do so.
1.5. To quote an English teacher I once had, "You're not obtuse if it's abstruse." I don't care how many Must Read lists this wild turkey makes, or how free it is on Kindle Unlimited, I don't like it and I'm not sorry. Not my kind of weird.
Vivid and passionate - it has everything you would look for in a book. A stunningly accomplished debut novel by great 22nd century minds (yes, it's ahead of it's time by at least a century).