glabnob
When I started this book, I wasn’t super enticed by the author’s atomic prose (which others have joked about or imitated in their reviews enough for me to avoid it here) but it allowed for a couple notable things: consuming the book from a strictly functional perspective was incredibly easy, and anything beyond the very concise “Subject verbed object.” construction had increased contrast against that as their backdrop. I steadily read the first ~20% before slowing down for a while, then picked up the last ~70% and blazed through it.
After getting used to it, this writing style became a fine companion to the narrative, which was very engaging and challenging enough to follow with simple writing as it is. The bounce between a range of formats (dry reality, wet dreams, historical accounts, interpersonal correspondence, novel-within-novel…) adds to the feeling of building one’s world out of disparate sources and materials, even when these materials never arrive to the character whose world we are building.
The themes of knowing oneself (meaning one’s very reality, much less one’s “true self” that some might look for) and knowing others, the struggles of identifying the influences, experiences, and personal fabrications that shape our sense of identity and continuity in the world, and our (in)ability to extract truth from these or to understand the truth of another’s experience through typical means of communication, these all interest me, and the way this book approaches them (admittedly less-than-directly, aside from a few explicit mentions re: Kumiko) made this read a lot of fun.
When I started this book, I wasn’t super enticed by the author’s atomic prose (which others have joked about or imitated in their reviews enough for me to avoid it here) but it allowed for a couple notable things: consuming the book from a strictly functional perspective was incredibly easy, and anything beyond the very concise “Subject verbed object.” construction had increased contrast against that as their backdrop. I steadily read the first ~20% before slowing down for a while, then picked up the last ~70% and blazed through it.
After getting used to it, this writing style became a fine companion to the narrative, which was very engaging and challenging enough to follow with simple writing as it is. The bounce between a range of formats (dry reality, wet dreams, historical accounts, interpersonal correspondence, novel-within-novel…) adds to the feeling of building one’s world out of disparate sources and materials, even when these materials never arrive to the character whose world we are building.
The themes of knowing oneself (meaning one’s very reality, much less one’s “true self” that some might look for) and knowing others, the struggles of identifying the influences, experiences, and personal fabrications that shape our sense of identity and continuity in the world, and our (in)ability to extract truth from these or to understand the truth of another’s experience through typical means of communication, these all interest me, and the way this book approaches them (admittedly less-than-directly, aside from a few explicit mentions re: Kumiko) made this read a lot of fun.
