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2.75 AVERAGE
2.75 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Dark constellations refers to the negative-space constellations that indigenous cultures of South America recognized in their less-starry night sky than the one northern cultures know. Oloixarac's story is a kind of negative-space account of the Age of Discovery up through the computer age and beyond into the near future, as DNA of all kinds intermingles on multiple planes and one has to wonder who/what is really driving the sexual urge and to what purpose. A mind-blowing novel that seamlessly blends fact and science fiction, turning the past and future inside out.
This book is the epitome of everything I love about Argentine literature-- it's dark and grotesque; it's sexual; it's obsessed with interstices and femininity and masculinity. Pola Oloixarac tells three stories, set many decades apart, with this general thesis: the dark spaces between the lights are far more important than what's illuminated. Her "dark constellations"-- those things which are interstitial-- include the area between two individual minds, the space separating human and computer, and whatever lives in the gaping hole from privacy and freedom to safety and order. Literary and magical realist, wrought with dystopia, this novel is a horror about human potential of the highest order.
DNF because it felt like the author was trying to use every bad phrase for sex possible in as few pages as possible. Another review calls it a literary experiment and that feels accurate.
#AlisaReadstheWorld : Argentina
I didn’t enjoy reading this book. There is next to zero dialogue and no traditional plot to speak of. The translation was heavy handed in some areas. It reads like a hallucinogenic dream sequence (I hate dream sequences as a rule across all mediums), jumping frenetically from the microscopic to the cosmic and from the 22nd century to the 18th often in the same sentence.
On top of all that, I listened to this on audio and the narrator absolutely butchers the Portuguese in the book. Like, how can someone who has a good accent in Spanish kill Portuguese so bad?? If she had read the Portuguese in a Spanish accent at least it would have been closer. Plus, there are some grammatical mistakes in the Portuguese. Ugh.
Anyways, the book is a literary experiment that attempts to show how sexual gender dynamics in the biological natural world inform our digital decisions and structures. It posits that blockchain and other digital innovations are based on desire for capital (and ultimately human capital via biological reproduction, sexual power, and political dominance), and are in fact an evolutionary step in the human species. Just like rats, orchids, cockroaches, and other biological species known for their fecundity and adaptive prowess thrive in the world’s sewage and decomposing mass, so the next step in human evolution is being conceived on the dark web, encoded in digital viruses, and being programmed by the slime that is 4- and 8-chan. The idea is that the internet and big data are not tools for human evolution—they are human evolution itself.
Unfortunately I didn’t really understand that this was the message of the book until the final 15’ of it, so I spent much of the book completely lost and frustrated at the nasty sexual references (care to guess what part of the female anatomy that “mini Jabba the Hut sitting in his throne room” refers to?). I think that the overall idea is interesting but the medium was not the correct one. Poetry, installation art, or perhaps an experimental web design project would have been better.
I didn’t enjoy reading this book. There is next to zero dialogue and no traditional plot to speak of. The translation was heavy handed in some areas. It reads like a hallucinogenic dream sequence (I hate dream sequences as a rule across all mediums), jumping frenetically from the microscopic to the cosmic and from the 22nd century to the 18th often in the same sentence.
On top of all that, I listened to this on audio and the narrator absolutely butchers the Portuguese in the book. Like, how can someone who has a good accent in Spanish kill Portuguese so bad?? If she had read the Portuguese in a Spanish accent at least it would have been closer. Plus, there are some grammatical mistakes in the Portuguese. Ugh.
Anyways, the book is a literary experiment that attempts to show how sexual gender dynamics in the biological natural world inform our digital decisions and structures. It posits that blockchain and other digital innovations are based on desire for capital (and ultimately human capital via biological reproduction, sexual power, and political dominance), and are in fact an evolutionary step in the human species. Just like rats, orchids, cockroaches, and other biological species known for their fecundity and adaptive prowess thrive in the world’s sewage and decomposing mass, so the next step in human evolution is being conceived on the dark web, encoded in digital viruses, and being programmed by the slime that is 4- and 8-chan. The idea is that the internet and big data are not tools for human evolution—they are human evolution itself.
Unfortunately I didn’t really understand that this was the message of the book until the final 15’ of it, so I spent much of the book completely lost and frustrated at the nasty sexual references (care to guess what part of the female anatomy that “mini Jabba the Hut sitting in his throne room” refers to?). I think that the overall idea is interesting but the medium was not the correct one. Poetry, installation art, or perhaps an experimental web design project would have been better.
DNF a little over halfway.
Didn't jive with the arch tone of this story. It's more a stylistic incompatibility than an outright flaw of the book. I can see what the author is going for, I think... but it wasn't my cup of tea.
On the surface, this multi strand narrative is really intriguing, but it took too long to get into the heart of matters in my opinion. Lots of establishing of character that ultimately didn't tell me very much. I kept waiting for the story to kick off in earnest and by page 103 out of 202, I was still... waiting.
Didn't jive with the arch tone of this story. It's more a stylistic incompatibility than an outright flaw of the book. I can see what the author is going for, I think... but it wasn't my cup of tea.
On the surface, this multi strand narrative is really intriguing, but it took too long to get into the heart of matters in my opinion. Lots of establishing of character that ultimately didn't tell me very much. I kept waiting for the story to kick off in earnest and by page 103 out of 202, I was still... waiting.
medium-paced
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Much more compelling than the reviews on here had me believe. Was genuinely surprised by the consensus
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated