Reviews

Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi

aegagrus's review

5.0

 Empire of Dreams is an immersive postmodern dreamscape. Braschi’s writing is urgent, propulsive. She writes and thinks and dreams and declaims with an almost-erotic desperation, burning through a landscape of memory and sensation and truth and lies. Motifs and symbols appear unexpectedly, but develop and return and reinvent themselves; they never seem “random”.  

 

The New York City which circumscribes Braschi’s visions is raucous, rebellious, joyous but never sanitized. The text itself becomes a city, through which Braschi moves in many personas and disguises. The lines between human and nonhuman, diegetic and textual, blur. Travelling from page to page feels like a physical journey, a walk down a New York street buffeted by unexpected encounters of all kinds. It is a fitting milieu in which to experience the swirling contradictions of gender, of ethnicity, of identity and authorship. 

 

Braschi’s writing and the formalisms she employs evolve over the course of this book. Throughout it all, though, these are words that I found myself wanting to hear and to speak out loud, to bellow from a rooftop or a mountaintop or a stage. Even if I found no other value in this work, this quality would remain: Empire of Dreams is simply thrilling to read aloud. The power of Braschi’s voice, and of O’Dwyer’s translation, shines through on each and every page.  

dianawr's review

5.0

I fell in love with this book almost twenty years ago and I still love it today.