My copy of this enormous behemoth arrived yesterday. Wow, it’s a thing of beauty. I stumbled over XX in Waterstones last week and had exactly the sameMy copy of this enormous behemoth arrived yesterday. Wow, it’s a thing of beauty. I stumbled over XX in Waterstones last week and had exactly the same thoughts as karen brissette
this could either be GREAT and RIGHT UP MY ALLEY, or it could be A PRETENTIOUS NIGHTMARE
Exactly...
If you haven’t seen it XX is as much of an art object as it is a science fiction novel, It's full to bursting with this kind of thing –
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plus a lot of actual normal pages containing characters and plot, I assume.
The first maximalist graphically wild novel I came across way back in 2000 was House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.
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It was exciting to read but I didn’t end up loving it. Still, I was keen to get Mr Danielewski’s even more graphically CRAZY book The Familiar Volume 1, and that one remains the most beautiful novel I ever saw – alas, though, the story was for me unreadable tosh.
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So I wasn't inclined to go for the full set of Familiars -
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(Congratulations and a free hour of counselling for anyone who read all five.)
The third of these monster experimental novels I got was theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh and that was a 2.5 star near-disaster – again, fascinating and exciting to read until you got the idea the story itself was flimsy and egregiously navel-gazing.
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So these huge intriguing graphic/printing/text design experiments mostly seem all dressed up with nowhere to go.
After finding out about this novel, that it is a collage of 40,000 fragments of text found in women’s magazines from the early 60s, I had to get a copAfter finding out about this novel, that it is a collage of 40,000 fragments of text found in women’s magazines from the early 60s, I had to get a copy, just to goggle at it.
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Reading it was quite secondary. But I did try that too. And I could have guessed that it was like being forcefed Battenburg cake
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and chocolate cream rolls
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and elephants’ feet
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morning noon and night and all my teeth fell out and I put on 2 stone, I had to quit, I was quite ill. This book is really like one of those Oulipo books where they write a novel without the letter e in it or like one of those lunatic performance art pieces from the 1980s
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece) by Tehching Hsieh
For one year, from April 11, 1980 through April 11, 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a single picture of himself, which together yield a 6 minute movie. He shaved his head before the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time. Documentation of this piece was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, using film, punch cards and photographs.
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Because when you think about it, Graham Rawle didn’t need to actually cut out and photograph all the 40,000 bits from his piles of magazines, he could have just written a novel in the style of this kind of vapid buy-more-shit-for-your-beautiful-kitchen adspeak and saved himself a world of pain. But that would have been too easy! And it would have just been a parody, not a lunatic performance art piece.
But I see that’s a minority opinion, most readers love this. I believe that when you get further than I did you find there’s an actual story and a fairly tough one at that embedded in all this confectionary. So I’m going to try again at some other time when I’ve recovered from the diabetes and eaten a couple of vegetables....more