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naokamiya's review against another edition
5.0
A fucking trip from cover to cover. Maybe not as huge a favorite for me as "Animal Money" is, but this is undoubtedly the tighter narrative [har har], and as far as sheer enjoyment goes it's only barely slacking behind the aforementioned novel. This is possibly Cisco at his absolute best when it comes to the sensorium overload he loves equipping his works with - like "Animal Money", so much working beautifully and almost overwhelmingly on a page-by-page basis, this time in service of a much shorter story but one just as dense and rich with imagistic and thematic meat to chew on. The kind of work that demands you to slow down, absorb every sentence thoroughly and get these absolutely brilliant, unique, and totally insane images engraved into your frontal cortex. And the phantasmagoria here is upheld with a backbone just begging to be used more for weird fiction, and after reading this any more would be a tough act to follow - War, because after all what is stranger than mass murder systemized to power incomprehensible hegemonies?
Reading this [along with two of Amos Tutuola's wonderful little novellas back in July] has increasingly made me feel more aware of the umbrage I take with a lot of contemporary worldbuilding, or at least the way many contemporary authors of fantastic fiction utilize worldbuilding as a technique. Far too much over explaining, hyperspecific detail that gets bogged down in the narrative when the time comes to actually tell the story, far too little space to allow both the reader and the author to let their imagination fill in the blanks. This is exactly what Cisco does the opposite of here, and one of the major things that draws me to his work. This isn't worldbuilding, it's more like world painting - Cisco seems to let the world expand out instead of drawing it inwards. Very little is explained, and explanations are kept to the minimum when they exist - the world overflows with detail but it is all natural, nothing is lingered upon, Cisco trusts the reader to simply experience it and draw their own conclusions. Fantasy, which is fantastic, benefits from a lack of handholding, because when we don't have a frame of reference our imaginations run as wild as intended to be for a book like this.
And boy oh boy is there really a lack of frame of reference here, in terms of just how original and how vivid this world is. The settings and landscapes Low and his party travel through are among some of the most alien I've ever encountered in speculative fiction, and the world is so dissimilar to ours in just about everything - human customs, flora and fauna [which all seem to have a direct sensory impact on our human characters], architecture and nature - everything is just so genuinely extraterrestrial and genuinely surreal, and it paints such a vivid picture. There are times when what Cisco is describing is so genuinely foreign that it's nearly impossible to imagine, and I had to scan sentences slowly and continuously to really let it all sink in. This is the kind of surrealism that the early surrealists would be proud of - organic, absolutely painterly prose, crafting something beyond the bounds of traditional human imagination.
The story is also extremely gripping as a narrative and metatext, not only in its progression but how every question it asks [or leaves out] is in service to the greater picture coalescing here. Our plot concerns Low Loom Column [great name], a youth who serves as a "narrator" who is ensigned into the military to serve an oblique war. There's no real explanation for what exactly a "narrator" entails, or why Low is enscripted, nor if Low is even really narrating the story. I won't go too deep into this, because others have said it better than I could, but a big core of this book is asking who actually quite literally controls the narrative when it comes to war, which is in reality a completely arbitrary and meaningless thing, a systemized bloodshed enabled by the powerful against the weak. The repetition of brutal battle scenes and arduous journeys through these nightmarish landscapes, as well as the lack of clarity on any, is why this works - how can one ever really know War? Is there anything more absurd, strange, and terrifying than the fact that our governments can wipe us all out for power, and ensign us into going toward our own destruction? This book portrays war as an actual nightmare, infusing the entire concept with hallucinatory dream-logic, in maybe the most unique take on this type of story I've read yet. And throughout, I felt a genuine kinship with the characters as they trudge toward doom - feeling like a part of their unit, putting myself in the shoes of Low and Jil etc., feeling as overwhelmed and terrified as they are in their spellbinding journey.
I want to say more here but this story is so imagistic, so contained within the experience one has with it, that I don't want to risk spoiling anything even intermittently. But as if I didn't have enough proof already Cisco just continues to absolutely kill it and solidify himself as one of the most inventive sci-fantasy authors working today, and maybe period, and I'm never going to stop shilling him until he's at least tangentially less underrated than he is now. If the idea of "sci-fi Apocalypse Now/Blood Meridian on peyote and a steady dose of Dali" appeals to you then this is something you definitely want to read. 450 some odd pages, and I could have stayed here for twice the length.
"A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we're going to meet it, but there's no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I'm not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I've already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I'm no more than one sharp breath from waking. It's a breath I can never manage."
Reading this [along with two of Amos Tutuola's wonderful little novellas back in July] has increasingly made me feel more aware of the umbrage I take with a lot of contemporary worldbuilding, or at least the way many contemporary authors of fantastic fiction utilize worldbuilding as a technique. Far too much over explaining, hyperspecific detail that gets bogged down in the narrative when the time comes to actually tell the story, far too little space to allow both the reader and the author to let their imagination fill in the blanks. This is exactly what Cisco does the opposite of here, and one of the major things that draws me to his work. This isn't worldbuilding, it's more like world painting - Cisco seems to let the world expand out instead of drawing it inwards. Very little is explained, and explanations are kept to the minimum when they exist - the world overflows with detail but it is all natural, nothing is lingered upon, Cisco trusts the reader to simply experience it and draw their own conclusions. Fantasy, which is fantastic, benefits from a lack of handholding, because when we don't have a frame of reference our imaginations run as wild as intended to be for a book like this.
And boy oh boy is there really a lack of frame of reference here, in terms of just how original and how vivid this world is. The settings and landscapes Low and his party travel through are among some of the most alien I've ever encountered in speculative fiction, and the world is so dissimilar to ours in just about everything - human customs, flora and fauna [which all seem to have a direct sensory impact on our human characters], architecture and nature - everything is just so genuinely extraterrestrial and genuinely surreal, and it paints such a vivid picture. There are times when what Cisco is describing is so genuinely foreign that it's nearly impossible to imagine, and I had to scan sentences slowly and continuously to really let it all sink in. This is the kind of surrealism that the early surrealists would be proud of - organic, absolutely painterly prose, crafting something beyond the bounds of traditional human imagination.
The story is also extremely gripping as a narrative and metatext, not only in its progression but how every question it asks [or leaves out] is in service to the greater picture coalescing here. Our plot concerns Low Loom Column [great name], a youth who serves as a "narrator" who is ensigned into the military to serve an oblique war. There's no real explanation for what exactly a "narrator" entails, or why Low is enscripted, nor if Low is even really narrating the story. I won't go too deep into this, because others have said it better than I could, but a big core of this book is asking who actually quite literally controls the narrative when it comes to war, which is in reality a completely arbitrary and meaningless thing, a systemized bloodshed enabled by the powerful against the weak. The repetition of brutal battle scenes and arduous journeys through these nightmarish landscapes, as well as the lack of clarity on any, is why this works - how can one ever really know War? Is there anything more absurd, strange, and terrifying than the fact that our governments can wipe us all out for power, and ensign us into going toward our own destruction? This book portrays war as an actual nightmare, infusing the entire concept with hallucinatory dream-logic, in maybe the most unique take on this type of story I've read yet. And throughout, I felt a genuine kinship with the characters as they trudge toward doom - feeling like a part of their unit, putting myself in the shoes of Low and Jil etc., feeling as overwhelmed and terrified as they are in their spellbinding journey.
I want to say more here but this story is so imagistic, so contained within the experience one has with it, that I don't want to risk spoiling anything even intermittently. But as if I didn't have enough proof already Cisco just continues to absolutely kill it and solidify himself as one of the most inventive sci-fantasy authors working today, and maybe period, and I'm never going to stop shilling him until he's at least tangentially less underrated than he is now. If the idea of "sci-fi Apocalypse Now/Blood Meridian on peyote and a steady dose of Dali" appeals to you then this is something you definitely want to read. 450 some odd pages, and I could have stayed here for twice the length.
"A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we're going to meet it, but there's no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I'm not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I've already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I'm no more than one sharp breath from waking. It's a breath I can never manage."
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
4.0
Q: Who do you consider master world-builders, and what did you learn from them?
[a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424079041p2/16939.jpg]: I hardly know what this means. I used to draw a rough map if the story was a 'journey' adventure and made up the rest as needed for the story. My worlds are always inner (unconscious) worlds made manifest. I just learned to tap and shape that unconscious. I've never really understood 'world building' and it seems to derive from D&D etc. about which I know almost nothing.
I honestly believe this is what Howard was doing and what Leiber was doing. I grew up reading Freud and Jung (as it were) and I respond well to plots about people creating their own worlds in their minds. When writing s&s I made my landscapes and weather conditions fit the mood of the characters in straight Romantic tradition. Everything is co-opted into narrative and to a lesser extent character development. Realism or quasi-realism wasn't what I was attracted to in s&s and it's what I rejected in fantasy/sf. It became a convention to suspend disbelief by making the invented world as 'believable' as possible. I preferred mine to be as supportive of the story as possible and not bother to suspend disbelief because my readers already knew what they were reading and why. You don't have to persuade someone who has picked up a fantasy book that it is 'real'. What they want is a good story and characters, some good marvels, and maybe a bit to think about.
You can draw a pretty clear line, I think, from this opinion of Moorcock's (where the created world is a manifestation of the character's "inner world") to M. John Harrison's Viriconium experiments (in which the artificiality of the created world becomes clearer through the interventions of gnostic insects and dreaming readers) and Vandermeer's weirder Ambergris pieces, detouring through the subplot of K. J. Bishop's _The Etched City_ where a character realizes she belongs to a different narrative and quickly vacates the book, to _The Narrator_. I guess the mythical examinations of Rothfuss's Kvothe books are supposed to follow in this tradition too, but they miss the mark widely, to put it nicely.
An aside: I guess I should explain that this is a fantasy/New Weird novel about Low Loom Column, conscripted out of the College of Narrators to fight in a war whose purpose is unclear to both the reader and the characters. That's pretty much the extent of the plot.
Anyway: readers are never meant to conclude or believe that the world in which the narrator of the _The Narrator_ is consistent or rational or self-supporting. You see what I'm getting at here? Unlike many other fantasy novels these days, there is never much of a pretense here of solid, consistent world-building. "I could say she looks like da Vinci's 'Lady with Ermine' if there had ever been such a thing," Low tells us. [81] Cisco is thoroughly and consistently deconstructing the role of narration in that kind of fantasy, and even beyond that, Cisco never makes clear exactly how much Low himself believes in his narration.
Indeed, the whole thing might be a dream (taking place in a land called, tellingly, "Mnemosems"), as when Low and his guide, named Jil Punkinflake, encounter a girl sleepwalking along the street:
Later, Jil Punkinflake becomes convinced that Low, the narrator, is in fact the dreamwalking Narrator of the entire book and turns on him - until he seems to forget the whole thing (as urged by Low?).
Or maybe it isn't a dream, but an almost-conscious meta-textuality (or both?). Low is a narrator by profession, although it's never clear exactly how much of this book is his own narration (which takes shape as a kind of paper golem that he creates almost inadvertently(?) and which proceeds to lurk at the edges of his vision for the remainder of the book). Indeed, Low's abilities as a narrator appear to be lacking:
And even beyond that, Low's self-image appears to be a book ("I see myself as I must appear sitting in this chair, from a point of view high in a corner of the room - rows of tattered, torn-open books dribbling leaves to the floor, tables and stone floor strewn with paragraphs, verses, illustrations, choruses, familiar endings" [41]), and characters (sometimes referred to exactly as such, and not as people, and sometimes as books, even) vomit ink disturbingly often. Low, meanwhile, uses oceanic/nautical metaphors a number of times throughout the novel, each time afterward reminding himself that as a mountain native, he's never seen the sea and shouldn't be using language like that.
You want more? A ghost at a seance's "voice is thin and weak, projected from some other narrative, as he is not at home in this one." [40]
Or when Low goes to the narrator's marketplace, where the common alphabets created "long ago by a handful of ancient masters and gods" are sold, and current alphabet makers and narrators are engaged only by the rich:
I realize that this is less a review than a series of questions and confusions, but that appears to be Cisco's M.O. here - this is a very difficult text/narrative/narration to pin down, and I don't even want to admit how many revisions this review has already gone through. It's pretty telling that all of the other reviews I've read have gotten various details wrong (or maybe just interpreted the novums of this world differently than I did, who knows). What is real here, and what is imagery - and, even further than that, what is real to Low and what is false narrative to him, and then what, if any, are the readers supposed to accept as the "real" aspects of Low's world?
It should also be mentioned that _The Narrator_ is a war story, although a fragmented and incoherent one. Low and his compatriots blunder around under orders they don't agree with in order to fight an enemy which is vaguely defined, at best (purposefully nonsensical), only to be set upon by their enemies (the "blackbirds," so called because their armor is composed of an alloy that allows them to flit about like birds) in scenes that usually begin with Low attempting to figure out what that popping/raining/whizzing noise is. He realizes it's gunfire once blood and guts and death start to erupt all around him, at which point the narrative usually descends into madness and frenzied violence. Armies and war itself, Cisco points out, are variously a plague, an embodied horror, or a shared insanity, an irrational and surreal experience that finds itself reflected in the content and presentation of this text.
All of this to say nothing about the sheer weird beauty of many of the episodes of Low's journey (and this a very episodic narration - shades of Moorcock again).
[a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424079041p2/16939.jpg]: I hardly know what this means. I used to draw a rough map if the story was a 'journey' adventure and made up the rest as needed for the story. My worlds are always inner (unconscious) worlds made manifest. I just learned to tap and shape that unconscious. I've never really understood 'world building' and it seems to derive from D&D etc. about which I know almost nothing.
I honestly believe this is what Howard was doing and what Leiber was doing. I grew up reading Freud and Jung (as it were) and I respond well to plots about people creating their own worlds in their minds. When writing s&s I made my landscapes and weather conditions fit the mood of the characters in straight Romantic tradition. Everything is co-opted into narrative and to a lesser extent character development. Realism or quasi-realism wasn't what I was attracted to in s&s and it's what I rejected in fantasy/sf. It became a convention to suspend disbelief by making the invented world as 'believable' as possible. I preferred mine to be as supportive of the story as possible and not bother to suspend disbelief because my readers already knew what they were reading and why. You don't have to persuade someone who has picked up a fantasy book that it is 'real'. What they want is a good story and characters, some good marvels, and maybe a bit to think about.
You can draw a pretty clear line, I think, from this opinion of Moorcock's (where the created world is a manifestation of the character's "inner world") to M. John Harrison's Viriconium experiments (in which the artificiality of the created world becomes clearer through the interventions of gnostic insects and dreaming readers) and Vandermeer's weirder Ambergris pieces, detouring through the subplot of K. J. Bishop's _The Etched City_ where a character realizes she belongs to a different narrative and quickly vacates the book, to _The Narrator_. I guess the mythical examinations of Rothfuss's Kvothe books are supposed to follow in this tradition too, but they miss the mark widely, to put it nicely.
An aside: I guess I should explain that this is a fantasy/New Weird novel about Low Loom Column, conscripted out of the College of Narrators to fight in a war whose purpose is unclear to both the reader and the characters. That's pretty much the extent of the plot.
Anyway: readers are never meant to conclude or believe that the world in which the narrator of the _The Narrator_ is consistent or rational or self-supporting. You see what I'm getting at here? Unlike many other fantasy novels these days, there is never much of a pretense here of solid, consistent world-building. "I could say she looks like da Vinci's 'Lady with Ermine' if there had ever been such a thing," Low tells us. [81] Cisco is thoroughly and consistently deconstructing the role of narration in that kind of fantasy, and even beyond that, Cisco never makes clear exactly how much Low himself believes in his narration.
Indeed, the whole thing might be a dream (taking place in a land called, tellingly, "Mnemosems"), as when Low and his guide, named Jil Punkinflake, encounter a girl sleepwalking along the street:
"This is their dream," he says pointing vehemently at the earth, and then adds in a bitter, wounded tone, "and we are their creatures. They disguise themselves and trick us, toy with us, draw us into their empty themes, leave us stuck in their follies... trifling with us and then, when we need them - where are they? They're gone."
And then he turns away from me and plunges his face into his hands.
Later, he looks up again, to the sky, the street, and murmurs, "Now we forget, now is the time." [35]
Later, Jil Punkinflake becomes convinced that Low, the narrator, is in fact the dreamwalking Narrator of the entire book and turns on him - until he seems to forget the whole thing (as urged by Low?).
Or maybe it isn't a dream, but an almost-conscious meta-textuality (or both?). Low is a narrator by profession, although it's never clear exactly how much of this book is his own narration (which takes shape as a kind of paper golem that he creates almost inadvertently(?) and which proceeds to lurk at the edges of his vision for the remainder of the book). Indeed, Low's abilities as a narrator appear to be lacking:
"I may never be anything better than a journeyman narrator now. If I ever were to write an account of these events, which are in any case written, my narrative would be incoherent and inconclusive; I never know enough to say." [16]
And even beyond that, Low's self-image appears to be a book ("I see myself as I must appear sitting in this chair, from a point of view high in a corner of the room - rows of tattered, torn-open books dribbling leaves to the floor, tables and stone floor strewn with paragraphs, verses, illustrations, choruses, familiar endings" [41]), and characters (sometimes referred to exactly as such, and not as people, and sometimes as books, even) vomit ink disturbingly often. Low, meanwhile, uses oceanic/nautical metaphors a number of times throughout the novel, each time afterward reminding himself that as a mountain native, he's never seen the sea and shouldn't be using language like that.
You want more? A ghost at a seance's "voice is thin and weak, projected from some other narrative, as he is not at home in this one." [40]
Or when Low goes to the narrator's marketplace, where the common alphabets created "long ago by a handful of ancient masters and gods" are sold, and current alphabet makers and narrators are engaged only by the rich:
"I find unaccountable difficulties always arise in searching out the narrative sections of any marketplace, but of course how could I know that? Anyhow there always seems to be some sort of distraction, or the sort of wrong turn that, having drawn you into the trammels of its mischief, dodges behind the innocent turns and loses itself among them like an absconding pickpocket... the creation of a new symbola is not simply a matter of drawing a series of substitute markings; it is a magical undertaking, in which an ordination must be created that will allow for the improvisation of signs that will become permanent, and which must be commensurate with the client's requirements and expressive, at every point, of a rigorous internal coherence. Some clients will get phonetic alphabets, others syllabaries; some symbols, others pictures, depending on their needs, wants, personalities, whatever exigency is expressed in their need for a writing way of their own. Furthermore, the characters must seem appropriate to their sounds, or concepts, and this is where no amount of unassisted technical ability avails. The association of symbols is conducted in often grueling, if simple, rituals that can last for weeks; some accomplished artisans have died in pursuit of them. There is no telling at the outset what will cause the most difficulty; in some cases, extreme refinement of nuance may bring the symbolist to the point of complete collapse, while in other cases it may be an intolerable simplicity and directness that suffocates her." [32-33]
I realize that this is less a review than a series of questions and confusions, but that appears to be Cisco's M.O. here - this is a very difficult text/narrative/narration to pin down, and I don't even want to admit how many revisions this review has already gone through. It's pretty telling that all of the other reviews I've read have gotten various details wrong (or maybe just interpreted the novums of this world differently than I did, who knows). What is real here, and what is imagery - and, even further than that, what is real to Low and what is false narrative to him, and then what, if any, are the readers supposed to accept as the "real" aspects of Low's world?
It should also be mentioned that _The Narrator_ is a war story, although a fragmented and incoherent one. Low and his compatriots blunder around under orders they don't agree with in order to fight an enemy which is vaguely defined, at best (purposefully nonsensical), only to be set upon by their enemies (the "blackbirds," so called because their armor is composed of an alloy that allows them to flit about like birds) in scenes that usually begin with Low attempting to figure out what that popping/raining/whizzing noise is. He realizes it's gunfire once blood and guts and death start to erupt all around him, at which point the narrative usually descends into madness and frenzied violence. Armies and war itself, Cisco points out, are variously a plague, an embodied horror, or a shared insanity, an irrational and surreal experience that finds itself reflected in the content and presentation of this text.
All of this to say nothing about the sheer weird beauty of many of the episodes of Low's journey (and this a very episodic narration - shades of Moorcock again).
worm_variations's review against another edition
3.0
This is one of the more imaginative weird fantasy novels I’ve read, reminding me a little bit of Thomas Ligotti and a lot of Clive Barker (Imajica and Weaveworld specifically). One specific scene felt like it belonged in Heavy Metal, blood pouring out of gums and faces bloodily tearing away “like wet leaves.” There were some scenes that really stuck with me, dreamlike surreal depictions of landscapes and buildings, and the last two chapters were almost perfect story- and setting-wise. But the spelling mistakes and punctuation boners were on nearly every page. Lashlache, one of the languages the Narrator is fluent in (in which the Narrator is fluent), was spelled at least two different ways a few times in the book that I can remember. Maybe this is a lame complaint, but it made it feel like I was reading an unedited manuscript and not something that China Miéville called “Cisco at his startling best.”
Overall though, definitely a worthwhile read, and as my first Michael Cisco it’s got me pretty pumped to read something else by him.
Overall though, definitely a worthwhile read, and as my first Michael Cisco it’s got me pretty pumped to read something else by him.
skooma's review against another edition
5.0
This story was like an adrenochrome-fueled night terror through a violent and bizarre landscape. I doubt I will ever read another book that so perfectly captures the absurdity of war and the people who wage it on each other. Amazingly atmospheric and bleak, although at times the stream of consciousness could be cumbersome to read in too long of periods at a time.
n7lain's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
taitmckenzie's review against another edition
4.0
"The Narrator" belongs to the same genre of the New Weird as Vandermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen," Bishop's "The Etched City," and Harrison's "Viriconium" (although less the Vandermeer as that work does not have an extant war subplot). These works typically present solitary narrators wandering through psychogeographic, urban environments encountering, well, weird imagery, all of which I should like. However, the urban environments are always a little too normal feeling (they could be the dark corners of any real city), and the imagery is never quite weird enough for my tastes. And beyond this there is often an underdevelopment of theme, lack of plot, and flat characterization not driven by internal, emotional conflict—these later issues being what, I think, ultimately defines the works–both in why they feel weird, but also why they don't satisfy me as stories.
Cisco's book suffers from some of these same issues—the urban exploration at the beginning evokes a morbid atmosphere, but by no means a weird one. The novel eventually does break out some excellently strange images, but only in the last third to a quarter once the characters reach the 'interior.' But beyond the vague theme/plot of 'warfare is bad' there is no real cohesive plot movement or significance to the conflict. What are the two sides after? Who knows. Who cares? Likewise with the character of Low, who doesn't want to fight in a war and occasionally thinks of a girl he left behind but only barely knew—but there is no clear, personal or deeply felt connection between him as a character and these motivations, nor is this conflict resolved or not through a thematic connection.
What is left, then, is the weird imagery. In "The Narrator" this comes so late as to not quite justify the lead-up. The sinister and hallucinatory purpose of the cemetery in the interior is really quite unique, and excellently written, but it also raised a question for me: how do flat characters realistically react to weird imagery from within an already weird world that does not explicitly state what is or is not normal? Clearly Low and the other soldiers have strong reactions to what they—this is not the acceptance found in Magical Realism—but it's a lot harder to gauge if they should be reacting, and what impact that would have on us, the reader.
Comparing the New Weird to Magical Realism may actually help understand what Cisco is trying to do, as both genres attempt to use non-real imagery and incidents to grapple with the psychological impossibility of understanding the cultural impact of such social traumas as warfare or colonialism, etc. But where Magical Realism deliteralizes and attempts t explain these horrors by putting them on a continuum with the accepted magical, the New Weird achieves the opposite effect of making reality itself unreal in the face of the inexplicable. Or at least that is part of the effect achieved in "The Narrator" regardless what else it accomplishes as a story or as an example of its genre.
Cisco's book suffers from some of these same issues—the urban exploration at the beginning evokes a morbid atmosphere, but by no means a weird one. The novel eventually does break out some excellently strange images, but only in the last third to a quarter once the characters reach the 'interior.' But beyond the vague theme/plot of 'warfare is bad' there is no real cohesive plot movement or significance to the conflict. What are the two sides after? Who knows. Who cares? Likewise with the character of Low, who doesn't want to fight in a war and occasionally thinks of a girl he left behind but only barely knew—but there is no clear, personal or deeply felt connection between him as a character and these motivations, nor is this conflict resolved or not through a thematic connection.
What is left, then, is the weird imagery. In "The Narrator" this comes so late as to not quite justify the lead-up. The sinister and hallucinatory purpose of the cemetery in the interior is really quite unique, and excellently written, but it also raised a question for me: how do flat characters realistically react to weird imagery from within an already weird world that does not explicitly state what is or is not normal? Clearly Low and the other soldiers have strong reactions to what they—this is not the acceptance found in Magical Realism—but it's a lot harder to gauge if they should be reacting, and what impact that would have on us, the reader.
Comparing the New Weird to Magical Realism may actually help understand what Cisco is trying to do, as both genres attempt to use non-real imagery and incidents to grapple with the psychological impossibility of understanding the cultural impact of such social traumas as warfare or colonialism, etc. But where Magical Realism deliteralizes and attempts t explain these horrors by putting them on a continuum with the accepted magical, the New Weird achieves the opposite effect of making reality itself unreal in the face of the inexplicable. Or at least that is part of the effect achieved in "The Narrator" regardless what else it accomplishes as a story or as an example of its genre.
mrcasals's review against another edition
3.0
Un llibre força original, se li ha de reconèixer. Dins del gènere "weird". El llibre retrata un exèrcit (des del reclutament fins a la pròpia guerra) en un món fantàstic. És original sobretot en la forma: un narrador que juga entre la 1a i la 3a persona, que no saps si està explicant la realitat o un somni, que no saps com de fiable és... Ni tan sols de si sempre és el mateix narrador. A partir d'aquí, la cosa va a gustos.
En el meu cas, m'ha costat molt connectar-hi. Tot allò que el converteix en original a mi m'ha costat. Massa confús per mi tot plegat.
Pel què fa a l'edició... He trobat molts errors (confusions entre tu/tú, verbs repetits com "en el suelo hay estan"...) i frases complicadíssimes d'entendre. Una pena, tot plegat.
En el meu cas, m'ha costat molt connectar-hi. Tot allò que el converteix en original a mi m'ha costat. Massa confús per mi tot plegat.
Pel què fa a l'edició... He trobat molts errors (confusions entre tu/tú, verbs repetits com "en el suelo hay estan"...) i frases complicadíssimes d'entendre. Una pena, tot plegat.
jeremiahpena's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
triplecitrus's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
mdkha's review against another edition
challenging
dark
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
It's complicated can basically sum up the book. The Narrator demands your attention, and deserves it. I don't know how to explain it (that's how I always feel when I read Michael Cisco), but I enjoyed reading it even while maybe understanding a quarter of what was going on.