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MZD's first book, _House of Leaves_ was a phantasmagorical revelation, playing complex literary formalist games with the nature of book-as-artifact, while simultaneously being a gripping horror novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was really looking forward to his next book, which I have finally gotten around to.
A brief digression: my wife![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kestrell being blind, she will often ask me to identify a book (that she wants to scan), and along the way asks, "Is this the right way up?" For _Only Revolutions_, that answer will always be yes. It's structured as two books that interpenetrate each other. There's a yellow side and a green side, but they are both 'right'. The narrative of your current side takes up the top section of each page, with the narrative from the other side lurking upside-down below it. Each page features two page numbers in the center-outer margin, one for each direction. The inner margins of the page each feature a date, and a series of phrases that evoke historical events of that period. (If, like me, you slept through high school history, many of these have an echoing familiarity, without actually conveying any meaning.) The rest of each page is taken up by the 'story', with each half being narrated by a different character.
You notice how I put 'story' in scare quotes? The bulk of the writing is poetic, but not in a positive way. The language is elliptical, allusive, and opaque. After an hour of reading, I still had *no idea* what was going on, so I stopped. The two narrators appear to be describing the same 'events' from differing points of view, but I don't have any real notion what those events *are*. There are no defined characters apart from the protagonists, and there is no defined context whatsoever. Without that grounding, any 'events' are meaningless, and even the protagonists barely rise above ciphers.
While _House of Leaves_ played a lot of similar structural games, and left a lot of unanswered questions, most individual chunks of it were comprehensible on the level of basic narrative: characters, events, and settings which might be mysterious, but at least were basically recognizable. _Only Revolutions_ doesn't have that baseline of normalcy. As it turns out, I require that baseline as a bare minimum for enjoyment.
Well, at least that was my reaction to the opening few sections (of each side). Mileage obviously varies. A coworker of mine has had a copy on the outside edge of his desk for months, bearing a post-it that says, approximately, "Please take this and read it, it's the most moving book I've read in years." I shall have to ask him why he thinks so. But for my part, this book, despite being a gorgeous physical artifact, is Not Recommended.
Tangentially, this business of context being of vital importance to storytelling is something I've been thinking about ptofessionally for quite a while now. Quite often, the games which get lauded for their 'story' have stories that are just as thin as an average game; what they have that makes them special is a fully-realized *setting* to *contextualize* that story. BioShock's story may be a few notches above average on the merits of pure story, but what puts it over the top for people is how completely realized the city of Rapture is. Without that supporting context, it would fall a lot flatter, and the seams would be way more apparent.
A brief digression: my wife
kestrell being blind, she will often ask me to identify a book (that she wants to scan), and along the way asks, "Is this the right way up?" For _Only Revolutions_, that answer will always be yes. It's structured as two books that interpenetrate each other. There's a yellow side and a green side, but they are both 'right'. The narrative of your current side takes up the top section of each page, with the narrative from the other side lurking upside-down below it. Each page features two page numbers in the center-outer margin, one for each direction. The inner margins of the page each feature a date, and a series of phrases that evoke historical events of that period. (If, like me, you slept through high school history, many of these have an echoing familiarity, without actually conveying any meaning.) The rest of each page is taken up by the 'story', with each half being narrated by a different character.You notice how I put 'story' in scare quotes? The bulk of the writing is poetic, but not in a positive way. The language is elliptical, allusive, and opaque. After an hour of reading, I still had *no idea* what was going on, so I stopped. The two narrators appear to be describing the same 'events' from differing points of view, but I don't have any real notion what those events *are*. There are no defined characters apart from the protagonists, and there is no defined context whatsoever. Without that grounding, any 'events' are meaningless, and even the protagonists barely rise above ciphers.
While _House of Leaves_ played a lot of similar structural games, and left a lot of unanswered questions, most individual chunks of it were comprehensible on the level of basic narrative: characters, events, and settings which might be mysterious, but at least were basically recognizable. _Only Revolutions_ doesn't have that baseline of normalcy. As it turns out, I require that baseline as a bare minimum for enjoyment.
Well, at least that was my reaction to the opening few sections (of each side). Mileage obviously varies. A coworker of mine has had a copy on the outside edge of his desk for months, bearing a post-it that says, approximately, "Please take this and read it, it's the most moving book I've read in years." I shall have to ask him why he thinks so. But for my part, this book, despite being a gorgeous physical artifact, is Not Recommended.
Tangentially, this business of context being of vital importance to storytelling is something I've been thinking about ptofessionally for quite a while now. Quite often, the games which get lauded for their 'story' have stories that are just as thin as an average game; what they have that makes them special is a fully-realized *setting* to *contextualize* that story. BioShock's story may be a few notches above average on the merits of pure story, but what puts it over the top for people is how completely realized the city of Rapture is. Without that supporting context, it would fall a lot flatter, and the seams would be way more apparent.