Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

These observations are relayed in the most sumptuous poetry. I don’t need to take mescaline or hashish, since Michaux has taken those treks for me, but I feel like I wouldn’t have any other explorer in these hallucinogens than him. His reports from the brink of experience are among the most poetic and ecstatic I have ever read.

“It is in the same way an old man repeats a phrase a hundred times, an idea that ninety nine different zones of darkness have successively hidden from him, so that it comes back to him as many times, fresh and spontaneous. All know this uncontrollable rambling, but keep it to themselves. The old, no longer having the same control, betray themselves. As for a child, why should he hide this? …it is his circus.”

Harrowing, absolutely harrowing. I would think this was extremely fanciful horror fiction if I didn’t know it had actually happened. Men are truly monsters.

What an amazing novel. It moves so deftly from heavenly erotica to the most harrowing excoriations of war as the Australian POWs of the story struggle to survive one of the most hellish ordeals in history.