Just as a reminder, The Absent Narrative can now be found directly at www.absentnarrative.com
Lots of intriguing articles, and now pages for fiction, essays, poetry, music, artwork, and more!
Come check it out.
7.02.2011
6.01.2010
1.15.2010
1.08.2010
Migration (to the new site) -> -> ->
Thanks to everyone who's given me the wonderful feedback recently, both about this blog and the Unlimited Story Deck.
So I decided that today is the day to migrate everything over to the new site, on my own domain, so that I have a little more control over where everything is located and designed. Currently just the blog is up and running, but I'll be adding more content to the rest of the site (absentnarrative.com) as I have time this year.
I know it's a little obnoxious to jump sites, but The Absent Narrative blog is now here, so update your bookmarks and feeds accordingly if you want to keep following!
So I decided that today is the day to migrate everything over to the new site, on my own domain, so that I have a little more control over where everything is located and designed. Currently just the blog is up and running, but I'll be adding more content to the rest of the site (absentnarrative.com) as I have time this year.
I know it's a little obnoxious to jump sites, but The Absent Narrative blog is now here, so update your bookmarks and feeds accordingly if you want to keep following!
The Method of Loci: Place and the Imagination
The other day I finished moving into a new apartment in the Friendship neighborhood, and in the morning after my first night there I looked out my third story window and was shocked to realize that the view corresponds almost exactly to the view from the window of the house I lived in years ago in my dreams: the playground, the prison-like school, the distant gothic cathedral, the park, each of which carry for me certain symbolic resonances, associating to emotional states, ideas, layers of memory and history. I actually can not see the park - it is only a small triangle compared to the overgrown woodlands in my dreams - but I've had so many powerful and life-changing experiences in that physical location that it is clearly vast and visible in the mind's eye, where such settings take on an imaginistic life of their own. The whole experience would have been uncanny, except that word means "un-homelike," and I felt very much at home. As Gaston Bachelard says in his study of the psychological effects of architecture, The Poetics of Space, "through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days."
I have been intrigued by this concept of psychogeography for years now. Not being a driver, I have the fortune of going on long meandering walks through the city in the dérive style of the early Situationists. However, over and above Debord's aim of psychogeography as the study of the effects of the environment on the emotions and behaviors of individuals, that is, the psychological effect of physical environments, I have grown curious about the representations of locations within the psyche itself, the way people dream, imagine, or narrate settings in which the images of their psychological processes take place, in short, a cartography of the soul.
Granted, there is a correlation between the physical environments we move through and the way we use familiar places to represent psychic states. The view from my dream window does not look out on anywhere that I've not actually walked countless times, but simultaneously, my inner world contains vast deserts, towers spiring into the cosmos, the labyrinthine depths of Hell. The real physical environments are sometimes not big or wild enough to articulate certain feelings and experiences. I was struck with this while readings Jung's Red Book (before I got caught up in moving out of the literal pit of my old neighborhood), particularly that he described his soul as a desert in need of regrowth. I admittedly have not read enough Jung to verify this, but in the popular or casual understanding of Jung's work, while character archetypes play a central role, there is much less thought given to the settings in which those archetypes exist and act. None of us exist in a void (or for that matter in the strange hinterlands our psyches generate, just as very few have actually met living versions of their animas or shadows outside their dreams and projections onto other people). At the most there is discussions of mandalas as the Center, in terms of sacred centers and axis mundis as Eliade discusses in The Sacred and the Profane, but this seems but crude generalization of the array of unique settings in the cultural imagination.
So where do these psychogeographies come from? I am not convinced, as Jung seems to have been, that our archetypal symbols are biologically rooted, or easily divisible into collective vs. individual, conscious vs. subconscious. Instead I currently believe our symbols are mimetic, passed down in the cultural imagination through stories and other media and our personal experiences of and relationship to these cultural expressions. I only started dreaming of the desert after briefly visiting New Mexico, but its psychic power is proportional to the sway that the image of the Wild West still holds on the American imagination, even projected out into space as Tatooine, the desert planet of the Star Wars movie of my childhood. Similarly, the towers and hells could have been evoked by various fantasy stories and video games, and became over my life subconscious settings for the feelings of the epic and apocalyptic that reside in us (these are our oldest modes of storytelling), but seem to have no physical place in the modern world.
On the other hand, people in various times and cultures have imagined precisely such a location where all contents of the human psyche reside. Most popularly articulated in the Theosophist's Akashic Records, this "storehouse of all knowledge" finds earlier analogue in the Islamic Al-Lawh Al-Mahfudh or Hebraic Book of Life. I can vouch for this location from my own psychic experiments, or point to the documented use of it for healing by the medium Edgar Cayce, while also suggesting that it, or there, is a potent metaphor for the possibility of a place for all knowledge, like one of Borges's infinite libraries or Alephs. This is similar to the metaphor of God as the possibility of all knowing, but where we seem today to no longer believe that one consciousness can know all, we are actively working to manifest that place that contains all knowledge. As the Internet expands, the metaphor of the Akashic Records becomes either real or unnecessary (though there are certainly still unknowns, dragons and edges of the world in the tubes of our epistemological maps). The Internet itself has become the imaginal place par excellence, existing nowhere and everywhere and as large as we can populate it, this terrain of our virtual representations which is literally the Sanskrit akasa: the all-pervasive space. Interestingly, it was through various science fiction authors imagining what a virtual reality would feel like - Stephenson's Metaverse, Vinge's Other World, Gibson's matrix - that the Internet as we know it, along with its spatial metaphors, came into being.
While unparalleled as the location for our conscious representations, glimmerings in the cultural imagination suggest that, as a psychogeography, the Internet is too real, or not real enough to fully articulate the more subconscious aspects of human experience, and other settings may have to be found. Last year I watched the TV show Battlestar Galactica, which (beyond its interesting treatment of the role of belief in the contemporary world) made use of a particular psychic location as a symbolic layer over the real world, directly experienced in visions by a number of the characters: the location of the Opera House. While in the show's plot this location ultimately served as only a cheap visual metaphor, its implications for the cultural imagination are far more suggestive. As an academic colleague pointed out, the Opera House replaces the sci-fi trope of virtual reality with a deeper psychic or subconscious reality, the theater as the place where the contents of our imaginations are made real for all of us. I have dreamt of the Opera House many times (though I was once an actor); it is, as Kerouac says in his own Book of Dreams, the Theater... that old spooky opera house and high school auditorium and classmeet hall of all my days, with hints from all the stages of Time's earth and actors too." While the symbol of the Opera House is still uncharted territory on the Internets, one only has to consider the mythological and ritual bombast of Wagner's operas, or just go see a movie. The drawing of the curtains, or now the darkening of the lights, acts as a veil torn between worlds, so that we sensually enter into the realities of our imaginations; the 3D wonderland of Pandora, the barely repressed longings to rescue Gotham, the Theater as the latest incarnation of the temple sanctum, where the gods become real in us. As Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage. We dream of the day (as Vinge does in Rainbows End) when our technologies allow us to visually project the settings of our imaginations onto the physical landscapes around us, so that we really will inhabit the lands of our dreams.
But where is this place (if not in us), and how are we to get there? The ancient Roman orators had a technique for memorizing long speeches and poems called the Method of Loci: one is asked to create a Memory Palace, taking a highly familiar location and placing in it associated images for the information to be recalled, so that all one has to do is stroll through the loci in the correct order. Personally I am interested in reverse-engineering this process, not further associating psychic terrains but unpacking all the cultural references that have been associated over time to various settings (a hermeneutics of the Opera House, of the Badlands, even of my dreams, whose consistent world this house is a cipher). The cities we inhabit may have a psychological effect on us, but we built the cities in our own image, and buried in them strata of meaning and longing. Perhaps we may uncover the ancient fear of Wilderness that has led so gradually to the current environmental destruction, or just learn to feel at home again, wherever we find ourselves.
I have been intrigued by this concept of psychogeography for years now. Not being a driver, I have the fortune of going on long meandering walks through the city in the dérive style of the early Situationists. However, over and above Debord's aim of psychogeography as the study of the effects of the environment on the emotions and behaviors of individuals, that is, the psychological effect of physical environments, I have grown curious about the representations of locations within the psyche itself, the way people dream, imagine, or narrate settings in which the images of their psychological processes take place, in short, a cartography of the soul.
Granted, there is a correlation between the physical environments we move through and the way we use familiar places to represent psychic states. The view from my dream window does not look out on anywhere that I've not actually walked countless times, but simultaneously, my inner world contains vast deserts, towers spiring into the cosmos, the labyrinthine depths of Hell. The real physical environments are sometimes not big or wild enough to articulate certain feelings and experiences. I was struck with this while readings Jung's Red Book (before I got caught up in moving out of the literal pit of my old neighborhood), particularly that he described his soul as a desert in need of regrowth. I admittedly have not read enough Jung to verify this, but in the popular or casual understanding of Jung's work, while character archetypes play a central role, there is much less thought given to the settings in which those archetypes exist and act. None of us exist in a void (or for that matter in the strange hinterlands our psyches generate, just as very few have actually met living versions of their animas or shadows outside their dreams and projections onto other people). At the most there is discussions of mandalas as the Center, in terms of sacred centers and axis mundis as Eliade discusses in The Sacred and the Profane, but this seems but crude generalization of the array of unique settings in the cultural imagination.So where do these psychogeographies come from? I am not convinced, as Jung seems to have been, that our archetypal symbols are biologically rooted, or easily divisible into collective vs. individual, conscious vs. subconscious. Instead I currently believe our symbols are mimetic, passed down in the cultural imagination through stories and other media and our personal experiences of and relationship to these cultural expressions. I only started dreaming of the desert after briefly visiting New Mexico, but its psychic power is proportional to the sway that the image of the Wild West still holds on the American imagination, even projected out into space as Tatooine, the desert planet of the Star Wars movie of my childhood. Similarly, the towers and hells could have been evoked by various fantasy stories and video games, and became over my life subconscious settings for the feelings of the epic and apocalyptic that reside in us (these are our oldest modes of storytelling), but seem to have no physical place in the modern world.
On the other hand, people in various times and cultures have imagined precisely such a location where all contents of the human psyche reside. Most popularly articulated in the Theosophist's Akashic Records, this "storehouse of all knowledge" finds earlier analogue in the Islamic Al-Lawh Al-Mahfudh or Hebraic Book of Life. I can vouch for this location from my own psychic experiments, or point to the documented use of it for healing by the medium Edgar Cayce, while also suggesting that it, or there, is a potent metaphor for the possibility of a place for all knowledge, like one of Borges's infinite libraries or Alephs. This is similar to the metaphor of God as the possibility of all knowing, but where we seem today to no longer believe that one consciousness can know all, we are actively working to manifest that place that contains all knowledge. As the Internet expands, the metaphor of the Akashic Records becomes either real or unnecessary (though there are certainly still unknowns, dragons and edges of the world in the tubes of our epistemological maps). The Internet itself has become the imaginal place par excellence, existing nowhere and everywhere and as large as we can populate it, this terrain of our virtual representations which is literally the Sanskrit akasa: the all-pervasive space. Interestingly, it was through various science fiction authors imagining what a virtual reality would feel like - Stephenson's Metaverse, Vinge's Other World, Gibson's matrix - that the Internet as we know it, along with its spatial metaphors, came into being.While unparalleled as the location for our conscious representations, glimmerings in the cultural imagination suggest that, as a psychogeography, the Internet is too real, or not real enough to fully articulate the more subconscious aspects of human experience, and other settings may have to be found. Last year I watched the TV show Battlestar Galactica, which (beyond its interesting treatment of the role of belief in the contemporary world) made use of a particular psychic location as a symbolic layer over the real world, directly experienced in visions by a number of the characters: the location of the Opera House. While in the show's plot this location ultimately served as only a cheap visual metaphor, its implications for the cultural imagination are far more suggestive. As an academic colleague pointed out, the Opera House replaces the sci-fi trope of virtual reality with a deeper psychic or subconscious reality, the theater as the place where the contents of our imaginations are made real for all of us. I have dreamt of the Opera House many times (though I was once an actor); it is, as Kerouac says in his own Book of Dreams, the Theater... that old spooky opera house and high school auditorium and classmeet hall of all my days, with hints from all the stages of Time's earth and actors too." While the symbol of the Opera House is still uncharted territory on the Internets, one only has to consider the mythological and ritual bombast of Wagner's operas, or just go see a movie. The drawing of the curtains, or now the darkening of the lights, acts as a veil torn between worlds, so that we sensually enter into the realities of our imaginations; the 3D wonderland of Pandora, the barely repressed longings to rescue Gotham, the Theater as the latest incarnation of the temple sanctum, where the gods become real in us. As Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage. We dream of the day (as Vinge does in Rainbows End) when our technologies allow us to visually project the settings of our imaginations onto the physical landscapes around us, so that we really will inhabit the lands of our dreams.But where is this place (if not in us), and how are we to get there? The ancient Roman orators had a technique for memorizing long speeches and poems called the Method of Loci: one is asked to create a Memory Palace, taking a highly familiar location and placing in it associated images for the information to be recalled, so that all one has to do is stroll through the loci in the correct order. Personally I am interested in reverse-engineering this process, not further associating psychic terrains but unpacking all the cultural references that have been associated over time to various settings (a hermeneutics of the Opera House, of the Badlands, even of my dreams, whose consistent world this house is a cipher). The cities we inhabit may have a psychological effect on us, but we built the cities in our own image, and buried in them strata of meaning and longing. Perhaps we may uncover the ancient fear of Wilderness that has led so gradually to the current environmental destruction, or just learn to feel at home again, wherever we find ourselves.
1.01.2010
More USD reviews
Post-Gazette review of the Unlimited Story Deck
Reviews and articles continue to come in, along with emails from teachers who want to purchase copies once the deck is eventually published!
This is a very exciting way to begin the new year, and I hope everyone has as blessed a 2010 as I plan on having.
Reviews and articles continue to come in, along with emails from teachers who want to purchase copies once the deck is eventually published!
This is a very exciting way to begin the new year, and I hope everyone has as blessed a 2010 as I plan on having.
12.24.2009
LA Times Book Review of the Unlimited Story Deck
Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has just posted a positive (and humorous) review of my Unlimited Story Deck!
I am deeply flattered, as the cards are still only in a beta version (though available under a Creative Commons license for download) and not yet actually published. Hopefully someone who can resolve that problem will see it and contact me, but this is a pretty good way to end the year.
Happy Holy Days and stay warm inside!
I am deeply flattered, as the cards are still only in a beta version (though available under a Creative Commons license for download) and not yet actually published. Hopefully someone who can resolve that problem will see it and contact me, but this is a pretty good way to end the year.
Happy Holy Days and stay warm inside!
12.23.2009
A Year in Reading 2009
The end of the year is often a time to look back and reflect on where we've come from, particularly through the easily-digestible form of the best of list, often reminiscing over music and movies and other popular media. Book reviewer The Millions is currently doing a series called A Year in Reading, in which various notable authors discuss what books they read and enjoyed during 2009. As an author and voracious reader, it's nice to see literature represented as a still living form, and thought I'd contribute my own words on some of the books I read this year and didn't get around to rambling about the first time!
The noted reads featured Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Wallace's Infinite Jest, Tsutsui's Paprika, and Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (these links to my reviews). And these were pretty good too:
Death takes a holiday in Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Imagines all the socio-political implications of death stopping in only one country, with all the emotional intensity, compassion, and whimsy available to the Portuguese master-storyteller as he passes through his eighties. I read it on the plane. Also of note is Blindness, which imagines the horror of if everyone except one old lady goes blind.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie tells the nighttime story of India, following the life of one of the fifty magically-gifted children born on the eve of Indian independence. Hailed as eastern magical realism, Rushdie's almost apocryphal tone of storytelling soon descends into the horror of real politics while never once stopping that cloying wink at the reader. While it wasn't a favorite due to Rushdie's over-pretentious use of language, this book holds a significant place in post-colonial literatures, as Rushdie's life took on the quality of his writings when a fatwa was issued for his depiction of Islam in The Satanic Verses, which I'll hopefully get a chance to read over the holidays.
I read One Man's Meat for an autobiography class and was highly impressed. This book is the accounts of the daily life of E.B. White, of both Charlotte's Web and Strunk and White Style Manual fame. White shows a masterful grasp of relating the minutiae of every day life to both complex themes and global/historical changes. Poignant and thought-provoking, this collection of non-fiction essays is highly recommended as a masterpiece of the form.
The Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi is a wild surreal prose-poetic ode to living in New York City as if it was caught between the urban and a land of mythic dreams. An incredible sense of language and the immediacy of the process of writing as a saving grace. Honestly I need to reread it, many many times, and you should too.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov... is just brilliant. The Devil, his shapeshifting cat, and an improbable character in a hideous checked suit and pince-nez wreck havoc in 1930's literary Moscow. At once politically intelligent, fast-paced, and absurdly comic, Bulgakov flat out nails the way literature should be written: with enough of an edge to get banned in his home country for over 40 years.
Hidden Faces is not the novel one imagines Salvador Dali could have written. Penned in a madcap week, it is mainly a story of the dissolution of the bourgeoisie way of life through WWII and the unquenchability of people's obsessive desires. Actually pretty tragic, Dali's language is often dense and abstract, while at the same time being absorbingly visual. Perhaps the most interesting is his technique of telescoping between objects and metaphors, so that the words in a description in one sentence become an emotional state in the next, a real fluidity of meaning that harks more from the interplay of dreams than the figurativeness of poetry.
I've tried reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about four or five times in the last ten years, and finally finished the whole thing this summer. While I read his latest, Inherent Vice, this summer too, it doesn't even hold a match-flame to the sprawling global epic that assured Pynchon as the master American novelist of the 20th century. All I can say is don't give up, it really is worth it. Next time around I'll read it along side Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow... but before then I should probably tackle Ulysses.
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Warlock by Oakley Hall paint the double edged face of the mythic western. The first is a surreal tale of a haunted Indian ghost town, hailed as one of the most important pieces of Latin American literature by both Marquez and Borges, and features one of the most beautiful descriptions of a meteor shower. The second narrates the hard-edged failure of the cowboy to live up to his heroic image, and was Pynchon's favorite novel as a youth (and was most likely the main source inspiration for the show Deadwood). Reading these back to back was highly illuminating of why the "wild west" maintains an integral place in the American cultural imagination.
It took me a long time to get to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, namely as I'm skeptical of reading books that consistently top best of lists. But there is a very good reason why this one does, because it is awesome! The frame story is essentially a set of nesting doll tales taking place through various genres and historical periods from the 1600s to the far future, intertwining a sense of urgency about why and how we are able to narrate our lives, and the effect these narrations can have generations hence. Though a little heavy-handed at the end, this book points to a new direction for the importance of storytelling in the future.
[Edit: For the sake of symmetry here's one absolute reading failure for the year: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below by Jose Maria Arguedas was recommended by my Literature of the Americas teacher as an example of the function of magical realism in the Boom and took half a year to track down an affordable copy of. This book is both a portrait of a small fishing town crumbling under the approach of modernity and the journals of the author crumbling under the weight of the untenability of writing this portrait. While at first glance it looks like an interesting juxtaposition between the process of writing as intertwined with the object of writing, this book has no plot, turgid and horrifying descriptions of life, and an undercurrent of despair that at once is directly critical of the other Boom authors while driving them to reject Arguedas from literary circles. I picked up and put down this book multiple times but was unable at any point to make headway, and finally had to admit that as fraught as this book is it is no wonder the author killed himself before he finished writing it. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years down the road I return to and decide it is a masterpiece.]
The noted reads featured Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Wallace's Infinite Jest, Tsutsui's Paprika, and Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (these links to my reviews). And these were pretty good too:
Death takes a holiday in Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Imagines all the socio-political implications of death stopping in only one country, with all the emotional intensity, compassion, and whimsy available to the Portuguese master-storyteller as he passes through his eighties. I read it on the plane. Also of note is Blindness, which imagines the horror of if everyone except one old lady goes blind.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie tells the nighttime story of India, following the life of one of the fifty magically-gifted children born on the eve of Indian independence. Hailed as eastern magical realism, Rushdie's almost apocryphal tone of storytelling soon descends into the horror of real politics while never once stopping that cloying wink at the reader. While it wasn't a favorite due to Rushdie's over-pretentious use of language, this book holds a significant place in post-colonial literatures, as Rushdie's life took on the quality of his writings when a fatwa was issued for his depiction of Islam in The Satanic Verses, which I'll hopefully get a chance to read over the holidays.
I read One Man's Meat for an autobiography class and was highly impressed. This book is the accounts of the daily life of E.B. White, of both Charlotte's Web and Strunk and White Style Manual fame. White shows a masterful grasp of relating the minutiae of every day life to both complex themes and global/historical changes. Poignant and thought-provoking, this collection of non-fiction essays is highly recommended as a masterpiece of the form.
The Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi is a wild surreal prose-poetic ode to living in New York City as if it was caught between the urban and a land of mythic dreams. An incredible sense of language and the immediacy of the process of writing as a saving grace. Honestly I need to reread it, many many times, and you should too.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov... is just brilliant. The Devil, his shapeshifting cat, and an improbable character in a hideous checked suit and pince-nez wreck havoc in 1930's literary Moscow. At once politically intelligent, fast-paced, and absurdly comic, Bulgakov flat out nails the way literature should be written: with enough of an edge to get banned in his home country for over 40 years.
Hidden Faces is not the novel one imagines Salvador Dali could have written. Penned in a madcap week, it is mainly a story of the dissolution of the bourgeoisie way of life through WWII and the unquenchability of people's obsessive desires. Actually pretty tragic, Dali's language is often dense and abstract, while at the same time being absorbingly visual. Perhaps the most interesting is his technique of telescoping between objects and metaphors, so that the words in a description in one sentence become an emotional state in the next, a real fluidity of meaning that harks more from the interplay of dreams than the figurativeness of poetry.
I've tried reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about four or five times in the last ten years, and finally finished the whole thing this summer. While I read his latest, Inherent Vice, this summer too, it doesn't even hold a match-flame to the sprawling global epic that assured Pynchon as the master American novelist of the 20th century. All I can say is don't give up, it really is worth it. Next time around I'll read it along side Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow... but before then I should probably tackle Ulysses.
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Warlock by Oakley Hall paint the double edged face of the mythic western. The first is a surreal tale of a haunted Indian ghost town, hailed as one of the most important pieces of Latin American literature by both Marquez and Borges, and features one of the most beautiful descriptions of a meteor shower. The second narrates the hard-edged failure of the cowboy to live up to his heroic image, and was Pynchon's favorite novel as a youth (and was most likely the main source inspiration for the show Deadwood). Reading these back to back was highly illuminating of why the "wild west" maintains an integral place in the American cultural imagination.
It took me a long time to get to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, namely as I'm skeptical of reading books that consistently top best of lists. But there is a very good reason why this one does, because it is awesome! The frame story is essentially a set of nesting doll tales taking place through various genres and historical periods from the 1600s to the far future, intertwining a sense of urgency about why and how we are able to narrate our lives, and the effect these narrations can have generations hence. Though a little heavy-handed at the end, this book points to a new direction for the importance of storytelling in the future.
[Edit: For the sake of symmetry here's one absolute reading failure for the year: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below by Jose Maria Arguedas was recommended by my Literature of the Americas teacher as an example of the function of magical realism in the Boom and took half a year to track down an affordable copy of. This book is both a portrait of a small fishing town crumbling under the approach of modernity and the journals of the author crumbling under the weight of the untenability of writing this portrait. While at first glance it looks like an interesting juxtaposition between the process of writing as intertwined with the object of writing, this book has no plot, turgid and horrifying descriptions of life, and an undercurrent of despair that at once is directly critical of the other Boom authors while driving them to reject Arguedas from literary circles. I picked up and put down this book multiple times but was unable at any point to make headway, and finally had to admit that as fraught as this book is it is no wonder the author killed himself before he finished writing it. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years down the road I return to and decide it is a masterpiece.]
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