mae
05-23-2015, 04:48 PM
Have always wanted to read House of Leaves, and now have this to look forward to as well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/books/review/the-familiar-by-mark-z-danielewski.html
Turning thought into writing is an “alchemical wonder,” says Mark Z. Danielewski, America’s foremost literary Magus. He doesn’t just transform leaden narratives like the haunted house tale (“House of Leaves”) or the teenage romance (“Only Revolutions”). He transmutes the pages of base books into rare new forms and formats. Alchemists of the past became cult figures by both keeping and revealing secrets. Danielewski actively uses social media to supplement his novels’ cryptic designs, and his website encourages followers to post recondite explications of his works. But MZD or Z, as he signs his books, is no mere masked Internet phenomenon. After one of his college readings, I witnessed cultists clutching ragged texts form a signing line worthy of the T.S.A.
I don’t know any secret handshakes, but I consider “House of Leaves” the most ingenious, profound and important novel published by an American so far this century. Its fun-house games and Escher-like tricks — lists, footnotes, photo collages, poems and typographical experiments not imagined by Sterne in “Tristram Shandy” — all contribute to the novel’s exploration of the abyss beneath the prison house of language, film and, possibly, life. “House of Leaves” demonstrates that the methods of concrete poetry and Internet hypertext can alchemize line-bound, hidebound fiction and thereby attract a large cohort of passionate young readers who might otherwise be playing video games.
“Nothing Succeeds Like Excess” has been my motto since 1973, when I read “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a work alluded to in Danielewski’s new project, “The Familiar.” “House of Leaves” is 700 pages. “The Familiar” is about 840 so far — but this is only “Volume 1” of an announced 27-volume work! (Volume 2 is scheduled for publication in October.) Danielewski has said the project is a “remediation” of television series like “Twin Peaks” and “Breaking Bad,” to which he refers in the novel. But with its prefatory trailers, rolling final credits and multiple stories in widely separated locations — Singapore, Mexico, Texas and Los Angeles — this volume more resembles Altman-inflected movies like “Crash” and “Babel.” Or the time- and place-skipping novels of David Mitchell, except that all of its narratives occur on May 10, 2014: “One Rainy Day in May,” as his subtitle has it. A reference to the “sublime music of time” may also suggest Danielewski aims to surpass the combined 19 volumes of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time” and Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”
To support that kind of ambition, Danielewski will probably need more than his loyalists of the outré and experimental, so almost half of “The Familiar: Volume 1” solicits readers who like their fiction family-*oriented, mostly realistic and slightly sentimental. His lead is Xanther, an epileptic 12-year-old who voices odd perceptions and asks precocious questions of her father, a computer-game designer, and mother, a would-be psychotherapist. On a day it’s raining cats and dogs in Los Angeles, Xanther goes to pick up her new dog but on the way uses something like extrasensory perception to rescue a kitten. Although some sentences about Xanther have Jamesian qualifications and Faulknerian parentheticals, the long and detailed story of her day could be a novel for young adults who, not far removed from children’s books, would appreciate visual sketches of rain and words sprinkled on pages.
Danielewski’s attention to Xanther and her parents reminds us that “family” is associated with the adjective “familiar.” But as a noun, “familiar” once meant a demon, often in the form of an animal, attending a witch. That meaning seems relevant to the novel’s most unfamiliar set of chapters, where a thief named Jingjing accompanies a cat-owning crone, a mysterious “healer” who also has epilepsy, to the home of a Singapore billionaire with a drug-damaged son. To reinforce the exoticism of his material, Danielewski invents a nearly opaque pidgin English, interspersed with Russian and Chinese printed characters. Two other story lines also have Magus figures: a Mexican animal smuggler named Isandòrno who is called a “brujo,” and an elderly couple, Bobby and Cas, who live off the grid in Marfa, Tex., to evade discovery of their “Orb,” which seems to be a computer program that can predict the future. Bobby is an alchemist working with asters; Cas is identified as “the wizard” in the author’s notes.
Between the normal and paranormal are three remaining sets of chapters that introduce Los Angeles subcultures: a narrative in urban dialect and Spanish about a gang leader’s contracted murder of a young nerd, a story in primer English about an Armenian taxi driver who assists an Armenian scholar researching the genocide, and the meditations of a detective of Turkish descent investigating a murder. Listening to the radio, Xanther roves through very different stations, each with its own call letters, an analog for the irregular order and simultaneity of Danielewski’s chapters and their identifying fonts and color codes.
The possibly grandiose audacity and heterogeneity of “The Familiar” tantalize. But it’s no stand-alone initial offering of a modest trilogy or tetralogy. If “The Familiar” is really the first of 27 volumes, we’re in the very early stage of exposition and probably shouldn’t expect much plot or many linkages to emerge just yet. Bobby and Cas mention Edward Snowden and appear to be members of a multinational hacking group, and they, along with Xanther and Ozgur the detective, know something about a dismemberment in Chinatown, so the series may develop into a murder mystery with national security implications. But for now we have to be content — or not — with pregnant repetitions, thematic connections and verbal associations. Multiple characters hear a faint “cry for help” none can identify. Xanther responds and saves a cat. The Orbists may be trying to save the world from some data cataclysm. The Armenians are attempting to preserve the oral history of a catastrophe, and the “witch” in Singapore is begged to save the billionaire’s catatonic son.
Danielewski wants to combine his new TV accessibility and his usual visuals to save the tired “old form” of fiction from stodgy obsolescence. He continues to play with typography, but it is less radical and more indexical than in “House of Leaves.” That first novel stacked up every possible interpretation of itself. “The Familiar” hustles onward like Xanther switching stations. Its materials are mostly public, definitely contemporary and studiously multiethnic. Although some chapters employ idiosyncratic vernacular styles, they don’t always manage to defamiliarize, as the Russian Formalists said art must; the novel’s Los Angeles often seems derived from movies and television. Detective Ozgur compares himself to noir gumshoes, and the gang leader, Luther, is very aware of his role and image. These imitations of simulacra of stereotypes may be postmodern to the third power, but in future volumes I’d like to see characters from other settings penetrate and disrupt Danielewski’s familiar Los Angeles. He has said serial publication will give him the opportunity to adjust his project according to reader feedback. This reader’s advice: Do less with Xanther and more with the Orbists, whose interests are explicitly intellectual and technological, the strengths of “House of Leaves.”
Of course, unless Danielewski has discovered the alchemists’ secret elixir of life, he can’t spend the decade that went into “House of Leaves” on any one volume of a serial. His crowded and inventive pilot show has me curious about his characters’ futures and how he will connect them. It’s difficult to evaluate a work barely in progress, but I’m definitely in for Volume 2. If Danielewski can complete even part of his grand project, its scale and range and variety could well compete with high-end television series. Alchemists like the fabled Hermes Trismegistus and the self-named Paracelsus produced shelves of volumes. I hope Danielewski can bring off the long-running Magus act of “The Familiar.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/books/review/the-familiar-by-mark-z-danielewski.html
Turning thought into writing is an “alchemical wonder,” says Mark Z. Danielewski, America’s foremost literary Magus. He doesn’t just transform leaden narratives like the haunted house tale (“House of Leaves”) or the teenage romance (“Only Revolutions”). He transmutes the pages of base books into rare new forms and formats. Alchemists of the past became cult figures by both keeping and revealing secrets. Danielewski actively uses social media to supplement his novels’ cryptic designs, and his website encourages followers to post recondite explications of his works. But MZD or Z, as he signs his books, is no mere masked Internet phenomenon. After one of his college readings, I witnessed cultists clutching ragged texts form a signing line worthy of the T.S.A.
I don’t know any secret handshakes, but I consider “House of Leaves” the most ingenious, profound and important novel published by an American so far this century. Its fun-house games and Escher-like tricks — lists, footnotes, photo collages, poems and typographical experiments not imagined by Sterne in “Tristram Shandy” — all contribute to the novel’s exploration of the abyss beneath the prison house of language, film and, possibly, life. “House of Leaves” demonstrates that the methods of concrete poetry and Internet hypertext can alchemize line-bound, hidebound fiction and thereby attract a large cohort of passionate young readers who might otherwise be playing video games.
“Nothing Succeeds Like Excess” has been my motto since 1973, when I read “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a work alluded to in Danielewski’s new project, “The Familiar.” “House of Leaves” is 700 pages. “The Familiar” is about 840 so far — but this is only “Volume 1” of an announced 27-volume work! (Volume 2 is scheduled for publication in October.) Danielewski has said the project is a “remediation” of television series like “Twin Peaks” and “Breaking Bad,” to which he refers in the novel. But with its prefatory trailers, rolling final credits and multiple stories in widely separated locations — Singapore, Mexico, Texas and Los Angeles — this volume more resembles Altman-inflected movies like “Crash” and “Babel.” Or the time- and place-skipping novels of David Mitchell, except that all of its narratives occur on May 10, 2014: “One Rainy Day in May,” as his subtitle has it. A reference to the “sublime music of time” may also suggest Danielewski aims to surpass the combined 19 volumes of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time” and Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”
To support that kind of ambition, Danielewski will probably need more than his loyalists of the outré and experimental, so almost half of “The Familiar: Volume 1” solicits readers who like their fiction family-*oriented, mostly realistic and slightly sentimental. His lead is Xanther, an epileptic 12-year-old who voices odd perceptions and asks precocious questions of her father, a computer-game designer, and mother, a would-be psychotherapist. On a day it’s raining cats and dogs in Los Angeles, Xanther goes to pick up her new dog but on the way uses something like extrasensory perception to rescue a kitten. Although some sentences about Xanther have Jamesian qualifications and Faulknerian parentheticals, the long and detailed story of her day could be a novel for young adults who, not far removed from children’s books, would appreciate visual sketches of rain and words sprinkled on pages.
Danielewski’s attention to Xanther and her parents reminds us that “family” is associated with the adjective “familiar.” But as a noun, “familiar” once meant a demon, often in the form of an animal, attending a witch. That meaning seems relevant to the novel’s most unfamiliar set of chapters, where a thief named Jingjing accompanies a cat-owning crone, a mysterious “healer” who also has epilepsy, to the home of a Singapore billionaire with a drug-damaged son. To reinforce the exoticism of his material, Danielewski invents a nearly opaque pidgin English, interspersed with Russian and Chinese printed characters. Two other story lines also have Magus figures: a Mexican animal smuggler named Isandòrno who is called a “brujo,” and an elderly couple, Bobby and Cas, who live off the grid in Marfa, Tex., to evade discovery of their “Orb,” which seems to be a computer program that can predict the future. Bobby is an alchemist working with asters; Cas is identified as “the wizard” in the author’s notes.
Between the normal and paranormal are three remaining sets of chapters that introduce Los Angeles subcultures: a narrative in urban dialect and Spanish about a gang leader’s contracted murder of a young nerd, a story in primer English about an Armenian taxi driver who assists an Armenian scholar researching the genocide, and the meditations of a detective of Turkish descent investigating a murder. Listening to the radio, Xanther roves through very different stations, each with its own call letters, an analog for the irregular order and simultaneity of Danielewski’s chapters and their identifying fonts and color codes.
The possibly grandiose audacity and heterogeneity of “The Familiar” tantalize. But it’s no stand-alone initial offering of a modest trilogy or tetralogy. If “The Familiar” is really the first of 27 volumes, we’re in the very early stage of exposition and probably shouldn’t expect much plot or many linkages to emerge just yet. Bobby and Cas mention Edward Snowden and appear to be members of a multinational hacking group, and they, along with Xanther and Ozgur the detective, know something about a dismemberment in Chinatown, so the series may develop into a murder mystery with national security implications. But for now we have to be content — or not — with pregnant repetitions, thematic connections and verbal associations. Multiple characters hear a faint “cry for help” none can identify. Xanther responds and saves a cat. The Orbists may be trying to save the world from some data cataclysm. The Armenians are attempting to preserve the oral history of a catastrophe, and the “witch” in Singapore is begged to save the billionaire’s catatonic son.
Danielewski wants to combine his new TV accessibility and his usual visuals to save the tired “old form” of fiction from stodgy obsolescence. He continues to play with typography, but it is less radical and more indexical than in “House of Leaves.” That first novel stacked up every possible interpretation of itself. “The Familiar” hustles onward like Xanther switching stations. Its materials are mostly public, definitely contemporary and studiously multiethnic. Although some chapters employ idiosyncratic vernacular styles, they don’t always manage to defamiliarize, as the Russian Formalists said art must; the novel’s Los Angeles often seems derived from movies and television. Detective Ozgur compares himself to noir gumshoes, and the gang leader, Luther, is very aware of his role and image. These imitations of simulacra of stereotypes may be postmodern to the third power, but in future volumes I’d like to see characters from other settings penetrate and disrupt Danielewski’s familiar Los Angeles. He has said serial publication will give him the opportunity to adjust his project according to reader feedback. This reader’s advice: Do less with Xanther and more with the Orbists, whose interests are explicitly intellectual and technological, the strengths of “House of Leaves.”
Of course, unless Danielewski has discovered the alchemists’ secret elixir of life, he can’t spend the decade that went into “House of Leaves” on any one volume of a serial. His crowded and inventive pilot show has me curious about his characters’ futures and how he will connect them. It’s difficult to evaluate a work barely in progress, but I’m definitely in for Volume 2. If Danielewski can complete even part of his grand project, its scale and range and variety could well compete with high-end television series. Alchemists like the fabled Hermes Trismegistus and the self-named Paracelsus produced shelves of volumes. I hope Danielewski can bring off the long-running Magus act of “The Familiar.”