Scan barcode
duskyliterati's review against another edition
4.0
Really it's a 4.5. Definitely a challenging read but worth it.
nickie184's review against another edition
Read a bunch of reviews and decided not to even start it...maybe another time.
greeneyedbookworm's review against another edition
2.0
Very fragmented and disjointed writing. I understand these were essentially files/reports, but the weird transmission gibberish took away from the flow of the book. If you asked me what this book is about, I honestly wouldn't know what to say.
gerhard's review against another edition
It is not often that I throw in the towel, but this has to be the most reader-unfriendly book I have ever encountered. I suspect, however, that there will be as many people giving this a rapturous five stars (maybe to be seen as to ‘get it’ or to be ‘in’, as with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, one of the most talked-about but least-read books ever) as there are poor saps like me who wondered what the fuck was going on.
Make no mistake about it, I read a lot of genre fiction, and am open to literary experimentation. Doten does make a fascinating statement in how far you can go to disrupt textual conventions – the text itself is presented as a corrupt transcription, with gibberish coding breaking up sentences and paragraphs – but he pushes the envelope to rupture point.
You can kind of get into the flow of things once you get something of a handle of the meta structure of the novel, which is a boy in a desert speaking in tongues, from Osama bin Laden to Condeleeza Rice to (yours truly) Mark Doten.
But, weirdly enough, this quickly becomes very tedious and numbing. I particularly disliked the Osama bin Laden sections, where there is a very bizarre and very ugly strand of anti-semitism. I suppose ultimately this all has to tie up with the Israel/US, East/West split, as the title The Inferno references Dante.
This (kind of ) reminded of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, where a realist Iraq War section is sandwiched in-between some high-fantasy sections. Doten’s aim here is far more radical: to represent the entire War on Terror as some kind of Grand Guignol panopticon.
However, you are even unsure of any potential meaning here whatsoever, as meaning itself becomes grist for the literary mill. This is either diabolically clever, or just plain bollocks: an open-ended, distorted and fragmented text like this will definitely elicit a range of very diverse opinions and reactions.
I think this would have worked much better as a play. Certainly the structure lends itself more to drama than a novel. But then it would lose some of its anti-novel status, I suppose.
I certainly admire Doten, for this must have been a real bitch to write. Reading it (or trying to, in my case) is certainly a purgatorial (purgative?) experience. Maybe I’ll go back to it one day when I am in a better frame of mind, but for now, this has got the better of me.
Make no mistake about it, I read a lot of genre fiction, and am open to literary experimentation. Doten does make a fascinating statement in how far you can go to disrupt textual conventions – the text itself is presented as a corrupt transcription, with gibberish coding breaking up sentences and paragraphs – but he pushes the envelope to rupture point.
You can kind of get into the flow of things once you get something of a handle of the meta structure of the novel, which is a boy in a desert speaking in tongues, from Osama bin Laden to Condeleeza Rice to (yours truly) Mark Doten.
But, weirdly enough, this quickly becomes very tedious and numbing. I particularly disliked the Osama bin Laden sections, where there is a very bizarre and very ugly strand of anti-semitism. I suppose ultimately this all has to tie up with the Israel/US, East/West split, as the title The Inferno references Dante.
This (kind of ) reminded of The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, where a realist Iraq War section is sandwiched in-between some high-fantasy sections. Doten’s aim here is far more radical: to represent the entire War on Terror as some kind of Grand Guignol panopticon.
However, you are even unsure of any potential meaning here whatsoever, as meaning itself becomes grist for the literary mill. This is either diabolically clever, or just plain bollocks: an open-ended, distorted and fragmented text like this will definitely elicit a range of very diverse opinions and reactions.
I think this would have worked much better as a play. Certainly the structure lends itself more to drama than a novel. But then it would lose some of its anti-novel status, I suppose.
I certainly admire Doten, for this must have been a real bitch to write. Reading it (or trying to, in my case) is certainly a purgatorial (purgative?) experience. Maybe I’ll go back to it one day when I am in a better frame of mind, but for now, this has got the better of me.
daneekasghost's review
4.0
Nightmare novel about the War on Terror. The title and the structure reference Dante, but this is reflected through a mirror that's sometimes absurd and sometimes grotesque.
More...