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3.59 AVERAGE
3.59 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This book is based on the idea that Edgar Allen Poe's final novel was, instead of a spectacular failure of fiction, a tale based on fact. (In Poe's novel, sailors find an island of all black people, then sail to Antarctica and find a giant albino creature. Then die.)
The protagonist is a black man who studies Poe's racism. He's dismissed from his university position as a teacher because he focuses on Poe instead of black authors and decides to find out if Poe's final novel is real.
It is.
He and an all-black crew go to Antarctica and, lo and behold, find a race of albino giants.
Who, um... (SPOILER ALERT)... enslave them? And they don't try to escape because there's an apocalypse happening up on the rest of the planet?
I don't know. I got about halfway through it and lost interest. It got weird, but not in a charming, avant-garde way. In a confusing and somewhat dull way.
The protagonist is a black man who studies Poe's racism. He's dismissed from his university position as a teacher because he focuses on Poe instead of black authors and decides to find out if Poe's final novel is real.
It is.
He and an all-black crew go to Antarctica and, lo and behold, find a race of albino giants.
Who, um... (SPOILER ALERT)... enslave them? And they don't try to escape because there's an apocalypse happening up on the rest of the planet?
I don't know. I got about halfway through it and lost interest. It got weird, but not in a charming, avant-garde way. In a confusing and somewhat dull way.
Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is much like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: both regard race; both are highly influential texts, and both are dreadful reads.
Poe's Narrative is a story of antarctic adventure. It is important in terms of American science fiction and conspiracy thinking, and its infuriating ending inspired what on A03 would be tagged 'fix-it' from no less than Verne and Lovecraft, for the later one of his top three works. Narrative itself is like 'what if Moby Dick was shite?'. This does not make it a good subject for satire. Parody, maybe, but the sort of intimacy of satire is frustrated by the book's perplexity and, frankly, a bad text is a joke enough on its own.
Pym is a satire of Narrative. The book's protagonist is a literature professor fired for being insufficiently tokenizable by the college he works for, who has a sort of Doylist moment where he discovers the text that is the lost half (sorta) of Narrative being the remainder of the story as told by the Black man who was with the titular character. This leads him to go to Antarctica and follow in the footsteps of the tale, along with a crew of caricatures, all of whom, including the protagonist, are in it for fame and lucre.
Things go disastrously wrong due to a shameless diablo ex machina, whereupon the crew isKinkade in a sort of fortress of heterogeneity (which, I'm going to tell you, feels more like a Watchmen satire, but which more accurately vacuums all the sources from which it referenced), which is where the story ends, abruptly like Poe's but much less of a cliffhanger, specifically due to the sense that this is not a weird and impossible land, but sort of life as normal, just not White.
The book is hilarious, and I did laugh out loud. However, the jokes are a strange bedfellow to the story, funny, but often either outside of the context or beside it. The author did not need Narrative to make them funny, or they could have been just as or more funny without this overbearing conceit. I do not feel the need to ask why the author burdened his work in a Narrative satire - the book itself has the answer to the question and it is in Narrative's quiet importance. But I keep thinking about books like Sewer, Gas, & Electric, where the targeted text is more an object, where it serves a narrative function rather than is the narrative.
Because there is a variety of ways that involving the story here detracts from the core storyline. The book makes the informal 'state of play' fallacy. I also think that, in our era of the Karen, the sort of long suffering beatitude and cunning of the Mrs. feels hollow.
"But it's satire," I argue with myself. Yeah, but it's not enough. Yes, the sorts of things that Pym does are long standing traditions in this sort of text in general and in satirical works in specific. But the book could be twice as weird and work four times better. (I cannot help but think about The Sellout in this context.) The attempt to make it part of what it wants to be to connect it to American letters feels like a big drag.
But then we come to the third hand of the review, which is that when the author decides to kick the plot alive, it runs. After all the comedy, and allegory, and comedic allegory, the back fourth of the book is much more of an adventure story, still jokey, but in an action movie sort of way. And it worked for me, still somewhat absurd but as the pace picks up it makes the whole book end strong.
So how do you rate something like this? Five star jokes in a one star satire of a two star book that morphs into a three star ripping yarn with a thoughtful conclusion? I feel like I fall back to my comment about Masters of Atlantis: this is a book that is very funny, but funny in a way that is not for everyone, here more due to the other two books this is.
Poe's Narrative is a story of antarctic adventure. It is important in terms of American science fiction and conspiracy thinking, and its infuriating ending inspired what on A03 would be tagged 'fix-it' from no less than Verne and Lovecraft, for the later one of his top three works. Narrative itself is like 'what if Moby Dick was shite?'. This does not make it a good subject for satire. Parody, maybe, but the sort of intimacy of satire is frustrated by the book's perplexity and, frankly, a bad text is a joke enough on its own.
Pym is a satire of Narrative. The book's protagonist is a literature professor fired for being insufficiently tokenizable by the college he works for, who has a sort of Doylist moment where he discovers the text that is the lost half (sorta) of Narrative being the remainder of the story as told by the Black man who was with the titular character. This leads him to go to Antarctica and follow in the footsteps of the tale, along with a crew of caricatures, all of whom, including the protagonist, are in it for fame and lucre.
Things go disastrously wrong due to a shameless diablo ex machina, whereupon the crew is
Spoiler
meet Pym, who still lives after 200 some years, are enslaved by the local Yeti-esque population, flee, meet ThomasSpoiler
, end up in a further conflagration between the two factions, then (the survivors) flee again, now ending up in another part of Poe's story, an area he derides as a sort of "land of the black people"The book is hilarious, and I did laugh out loud. However, the jokes are a strange bedfellow to the story, funny, but often either outside of the context or beside it. The author did not need Narrative to make them funny, or they could have been just as or more funny without this overbearing conceit. I do not feel the need to ask why the author burdened his work in a Narrative satire - the book itself has the answer to the question and it is in Narrative's quiet importance. But I keep thinking about books like Sewer, Gas, & Electric, where the targeted text is more an object, where it serves a narrative function rather than is the narrative.
Because there is a variety of ways that involving the story here detracts from the core storyline. The book makes the informal 'state of play' fallacy
Spoiler
in ascribing scientific basis for the takkeli"But it's satire," I argue with myself. Yeah, but it's not enough. Yes, the sorts of things that Pym does are long standing traditions in this sort of text in general and in satirical works in specific. But the book could be twice as weird and work four times better. (I cannot help but think about The Sellout in this context.) The attempt to make it part of what it wants to be to connect it to American letters feels like a big drag.
But then we come to the third hand of the review, which is that when the author decides to kick the plot alive, it runs. After all the comedy, and allegory, and comedic allegory, the back fourth of the book is much more of an adventure story, still jokey, but in an action movie sort of way. And it worked for me, still somewhat absurd but as the pace picks up it makes the whole book end strong.
So how do you rate something like this? Five star jokes in a one star satire of a two star book that morphs into a three star ripping yarn with a thoughtful conclusion? I feel like I fall back to my comment about Masters of Atlantis: this is a book that is very funny, but funny in a way that is not for everyone, here more due to the other two books this is.
Very clever. I laughed from the first page on, and especially loved the craft involved to take Poe's novel and remake it while paying homage to it, pillorying it and reinventing it all at once.
I'll have to dig up the NRP article that recommended this book, but my original expectations was along the vain of some magical, surreal plotline involving Edgar Allen Poe. Honestly, wasn't expected a novel within a novel involving a "fictional" character of Poe's, snow monsters, and armageddon along with a commentary on race and stereotypes. And really! I was expecting anything BUT the race card. I found a lot of Johnson's observations to be on point and even hysterical. Several times where I didn't think he would venture down a path that has been considered a sensitive topic, he managed to address with humor and wit. Race and stereotypes themselves are often blown out of proportion by both sides of the black and white fence that it only seems fair that he base the foundation of his plot on something equally as ludicrous as a untenured Professor searching for the lost and seemingly fictional South Pole island of Tsalal, described in Poe's only novel.
I applaud the effort put into this novel, but there were some aspects of the story I just could not stand. I hated the love story. Hated it. The protagonist, Chris Jayne's unrequited love to his 3rd time married ex-wife seemed whiny and annoying. It felt shallow and detracted from other aspects of the story. Despite all my above accolades, I did think that Johnson may have stretched himself too thin with the plot, the characters, the racial commentary, and Poe. You could almost feel him try to encompass a grandiose concept that just wasn't being cemented on page. I found that to be frustrating.
As the novel came to a close, my interest became more piqued. How was Johnson planning on ending his social commentary? Just like in the Poe tradition, it really left you wondering.
I applaud the effort put into this novel, but there were some aspects of the story I just could not stand. I hated the love story. Hated it. The protagonist, Chris Jayne's unrequited love to his 3rd time married ex-wife seemed whiny and annoying. It felt shallow and detracted from other aspects of the story. Despite all my above accolades, I did think that Johnson may have stretched himself too thin with the plot, the characters, the racial commentary, and Poe. You could almost feel him try to encompass a grandiose concept that just wasn't being cemented on page. I found that to be frustrating.
As the novel came to a close, my interest became more piqued. How was Johnson planning on ending his social commentary? Just like in the Poe tradition, it really left you wondering.
The set up worked much better than the payoff for me on this one. There were a lot of interesting moments, but the whole didn't coalesce for me.
Super smart and impressively readable for how weird and intertextual it is. Unfortunately the prose was frequently annoying to me as well as the wild amount of (mostly?) unexamined fatphobia.
People claim this is satire and humor. I didn’t get it. At all.
It's almost impossible to describe this book without either sounding like an idiot, giving the book away, or making you not want to read it. And this book is so wonderful, that I hope you will read it. Well, here goes.
Professor Chris Jaynes is a professor of African American Literature whose specialty has been to uncover the issue of race in the literature of the majority rather than the one being oppressed, with a special passion for Edgar Allen Poe. This focus didn't go over well with his employers, who expected him to take the traditional route of using the Black literary canon and denied him tenure and subsequently a job. He does not handle it well.
Things begin to look up when his favorite book dealer shows up with a rare manuscript that seems to be a slave narrative that corroborates the tale in Poe's only (and very strange) novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Seeing a way to redeem his professional dignity, Jaynes sets out to verify the rumors surrounding the publication of Poe's book, and leads an all-Black team to the South Pole for research and a money-making venture. What happens next can be likened to an episode of Lost.
Sold yet? I know it sounds crazy and the book is crazy. But it is imaginative, magical, and extremely funny. And it is definitely going in my top five books of the year.
Professor Chris Jaynes is a professor of African American Literature whose specialty has been to uncover the issue of race in the literature of the majority rather than the one being oppressed, with a special passion for Edgar Allen Poe. This focus didn't go over well with his employers, who expected him to take the traditional route of using the Black literary canon and denied him tenure and subsequently a job. He does not handle it well.
Things begin to look up when his favorite book dealer shows up with a rare manuscript that seems to be a slave narrative that corroborates the tale in Poe's only (and very strange) novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Seeing a way to redeem his professional dignity, Jaynes sets out to verify the rumors surrounding the publication of Poe's book, and leads an all-Black team to the South Pole for research and a money-making venture. What happens next can be likened to an episode of Lost.
Sold yet? I know it sounds crazy and the book is crazy. But it is imaginative, magical, and extremely funny. And it is definitely going in my top five books of the year.