Mark Z Danielewski's Difficult Second Album Syndrome. Also, weekend

[alexsarll]

Even though I got 11+ hours of sleep last night, I don't feel like I've assimilated this weekend. En route to Black Plastic, I saw Neighbourhood Watch signs warning that areas were protected by Smart Water, which just gave me the Waters of Mars fear. The night itself was ace (even if I was a little surprised when, though lots of people were dancing to Kenickie's 'Magnatron', an awful lot of them asked me what it is. But then, it was always an oddly out-of-place song). The problem arose when I went for pub lunch the next day and essentially started drinking again far too soon. And then carried on, on and off, around the filming of 'The Oxford Dons', for far too long. One interesting development of which was the discovery of a new booze. Now, clearly one is always discovering new spirits and liqeurs because the world has a near-limitless variety of foodstuffs which can be weaponised. But a new pint-type beverage, that's rare, and yet this year I've encountered two - first alcoholic ginger beer, and now Faro, which augstone had brought back from Belgium (so it does have a purpose after all) and which smells like beer but tastes of tea. Yum.
This may be why I woke up disastrously late for my Sunday plans, only to discover that they'd been cancelled anyway (a mercy, under the circumstances), and then achieved very little with the day except confirming that Spider-Man 3 is even worse than I'd expected. Bruce Campbell's Frenchman is about the only redeeming feature.

A lot of people I know have read Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves and so far as I'm aware, most agree that it's one of the most terrifying books ever written, its experimental textual tricks working perfectly with the central tale(s) to produce an unease which really feels like it's coming out of the pages to get you.
And yet, nobody much seems to talk about his follow-up, Only Revolutions. I picked it up early in 2007, thought it looked a bit forbidding, and only got around to it this year. And, well, when I thought it looked forbidding, I didn't know the half of it.
It's subtitled 'a novel'. Which is necessary, because otherwise one could easily mistake it for a free verse epic, or perhaps something like Jeff Noon's Cobralingus. Here's the opening - or one of them, but more on that later. I'm not going to attempt the tabbing, but bear in mind, this looks more justified than the original:
Samsara! Samarra!
Grand!
I can walk away
from anything.
Everyone loves
the Dream but I kill it.
Atlas Mountain Cedars gush
over me: - Up Boogaloo!
I leap free this spring.
On fire. How my hair curls.
I'll destroy the World.
Oh, and all the letter Os are in yellow. As is the ribbon bookmark. You read eight pages of this and then revolve the book, start reading it from the back and upside down, where there's an alternate version of the story, with green Os and ribbon. The yellow (theoretically gold) story is Hailey's, the green Sam. They're in love. They drive an ever-changing car, its make and model different each time it's mentioned. Where Hailey's story has plants, Sam's always has animals; he's more romantic than her, too. There are other differences, from minor variants in word choice upwards, but also similarities: both of them always write 'us' in capitals, US (because they somehow represent America?) and 'alone' and 'always' become 'allone' and 'allways'. There's a power to the poetry, often - sometimes it just becomes a series of sounds, sometimes the book actually tries to have a plot and then it gets bogged down (the sequence in the St Louis Club/Grill/Cafe &c is especially wearing). At its best, it really sings:
"- By something wide which feels close.
Open but feels closed. Lying weirdly
across US. Between US. Where we're
closest, where we touch, where we're one.
Somehow continuing on separately.
- Hold me tighter."
And the two versions of the story make a sort of sense, the book revolving like the wheels of all those automobiles. But, that's not all, because each story has sidebars of something else. One runs up to, and one runs away from, Nov 22 1963. Each contains historical snippets for a given day, edited down to near-incomprehensibility. So:
March 4 1976
Pan Am's negligence.
Nigerian BS Dimka
arrested.
Tokyo's 4,000 workers.
Frank Church.
- our greatest foreign
policy problem is our division at.
- and pervasive feer.
Patty Hearst guilty.
Jorge Rafael Videla over
Isabel Martinez de Peron."
'Over' always signifies victory - in election, in sport - and people always 'go' rather than die. I don't know what the point of these sidebars is. They make it hard to follow the two parallel versions of the main story, but they contain something resonant just often enough that I don't feel I can skip them.
This might be another masterpiece. It might just be an experiment too far. Certainly, I think I'm going to wait for someone else to take the first dip before I attempt his third novel.

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i can't tell you how much i disliked house of leaves...

in beer news, faro is basically the same stuff as kriek/framboise except with caramel in instead of cherry/raspberry. of course, the HARDCORE drink geueze which is the unflavoured version and basically tastes like very sour cider if cider were made out of barley and hops, OMNOMNOM

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

That description is really not selling me on geueze...

In my experience, while fruit beers are clearly far preferable to beer beer, they still have an aftertaste of beer. Faro didn't, which was pretty crucial for me.

Why didn't you like HoL?

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

it is an acquired taste (but then, so is most beer rly)...

i found HoL just a bit too "LOOK AT ME, BEING ALL EXPERIMENTAL AND EVERYTHING" which is odd as, y'know, i'm usually quite keen on experimental things. i think it might be because i read so quickly (by which i mean skimread, the perils of growing up on trashy fantasy/sci-fi that's all PLOT PLOT PLOT) that it was making my eyes/brain hurt having to concentrate that hard.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Then in the name of all that is (un)holy do not ever even pick up a copy of Only Revolutions, I fear you might get the red mist...

[augstone.livejournal.com]

my brain wasn't working at all by that point on saturday but i remembered yesterday that faro is a type of lambic. there's also peach and cherry lambic which are quite nice. (i think i may have said cherry faro)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I misread that as 'Iambic', which would be very peculiar but tie in nicely to all those poetry lecturers earlier in the day...

[pippaalice.livejournal.com]

Was the one that smelt of the nice lady peach?

[augstone.livejournal.com]

that was the peach lambic : ) i love that lady.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

I've heard of HoL but haven't read it, do you own a copy and if so can I borrow it?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yes and yes, let me know when we're likely to be in the same place.

[corlimey.livejournal.com]

I've heard good things about Only. I read House of Leaves last year, which remains one of my begrudgingly favourite novels. The end of which made me think Danielewski tends to be better at organising abstract concepts than actual writing. But yeah, still mean to read the other novel but I'm too damn poor to buy anything these days

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Have you joined a library over here yet? I know at least one of my local branches has a copy, though of course I didn't discover that until long after I'd started slogging through a copy of my own. But the end (or at least the climax) of House really worked for me, the way you were compelled to turn the pages ever faster as you were plunged into the horror.

[corlimey.livejournal.com]

[SPOILERISH]

Nah, will do once I move down to London. I'm trying to remember exactly how it ended but wasn't it implied that the protagonist might have just been completely out of it the entire time, hitting a sort of "and it was all a dream" deus ex machina wall? For all the effort put into the rest of the novel is a bloody flat way to end things.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Sort of, but I took that as a homage to all the classic gothic novels which end with similar cop-outs (The Manuscript Found In Saragossa has one which is particularly egregious). For me, anyway, the cop-out doesn't stay with you enough to seriously inhibit all the bad craziness you've gone through by that point.

[corlimey.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, the ratio of puzzlingly shit to stupendously good leans in favour of the good without a doubt.

But in a novel so tricky to interpret and structured in a way to make you wonder how much intentional meaning there is (randomly coloured letters through out the text, etc.), ending it on such an anticlimactic note makes it seem like none of that really referred to anything to begin with. Which works against it, I think.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's a fair point. The randomly coloured letters thing recurs in Only Revolutions where it at least makes sense for the Os to be highlighted because o = circle = revolution, but I think of all his various gambits it's one of the tricksier and more inconsequential.

[xandratheblue.livejournal.com]

"Bruce Campbell's Frenchman is about the only redeeming feature." Pfffft, Emo Jazz musical spiderman in the middle was excellent. If the whole film had been like that, it would have been brilliant.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It was slightly less embarrassing than Evil Peter Gets Funky, but I still fundamentally felt that it was a pale imitation of the jazz flute scene from Anchorman.

[xandratheblue.livejournal.com]

Evil Peter Gets Funky...I think if they'd made spiderman 3 more like evil dead 2, the world would be a better place. Bruce Campbell to play Peter Parker!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Pretty much anyone except Tobey Maguire at his reedy, whiny worst to play Peter Parker would be an improvement!

[xandratheblue.livejournal.com]

Brian Blessed for Playing Spiderman!

"HELLO! I'M PETER PARKER! I'M GOING TO SWING ACROSS THE CITY USING MY BEARD! NORMAN'S....ALIIIIIIVE?"

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

There is a great Doctor Who book about someone hiring a very thinly-disguised Brian Blessed to play God while they muck around with the history of various planets. The author used to go out with the captain of my usual pub quiz team, though I didn't know that when I read it.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

I knew it was Kenickie, and I'm not even cool and hip.

[fugitivemotel.livejournal.com]

I liked House Of Leaves, because I felt that the end justified the means (ie. all the tiny footnotes and the weird experimental fonts were worth navigating because the story was ace) but I didn't quite feel the same about Only Revolutions; it was clever, but mostly style over substance, imo.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's still got a hundred pages to convince me otherwise (which at the rate I'm going could take 'til next year), but at present I'm inclined to agree.