Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

1 review

brnineworms's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

“Squirming its way into ever more convoluted coils, the Middle East develops a life-form of its own [...] By casting creation aside, this life-form builds worlds and corpses more efficiently than God.”

I really don’t know what to make of this book.

It isn’t so much a work of “theory-fiction” as it is theory infected by fiction. The framing device (if you can call it that) doesn’t add much besides injecting some ambiguity as to what is and isn’t real. There’s no plot to speak of, though there are characters. It’s like there’s a narrator but no narrative – which calls into question the purpose of the narrator.
Perhaps Cyclonopedia would have been easier to follow if it had discarded the prologue and the annotations and instead focused on being a fictional biography of Dr Hamid Parsani, fleshing him out as a character but otherwise not getting bogged down in the construction of a fictional universe. Alternatively, it could have been a speculative fiction novel – philosophical but not academic – with rich worldbuilding influenced by Mesopotamian mythology and geopolitics. I suppose the book would lose some of its allure if it had been more straightforward, however.

The “manuscript” itself meanders in and out of lucidity, with occasional flashes of brilliance. It’s a captivating read. There are some really interesting ideas in there, such as the evocative dichotomy of wet oil vs dry sand, and insights into mythological beings like Pazuzu. But after these bright moments have passed, the reader is pulled back down into a sea of incoherent ramblings. I don’t know what the philosophical equivalent of technobabble is but there’s a lot of that.
Though what I read was supposedly (a fictionalised?) Negarestani’s analysis of the works of (the fictional) Parsani, it can be hard to distinguish between the two sometimes. Parsani is essentially a stand-in for Negarestani himself and the way they write is very similar. Which again makes me wonder why the book was written like this.

I’m conflicted. I’m having a hard time identifying what’s actually significant and what’s just me projecting meaning onto something meaningless – which itself is both frustrating and fascinating. Is the prose supposed to be nonsensical? Are Negarestani and Parsani supposed to blur together into one voice? Am I supposed to examine the intentions of the author rather than suspending my disbelief and experiencing the fiction he has crafted? Am I massively overthinking this? I don’t know. Probably! 
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