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A review by rhys_thomas_sparey
Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
One of the most brilliant and ridiculous books that I have ever been fortunate enough to read!
Its incantation at the beginning frames the time-crushing plot within a neo-Sartrean rage against the machine, against the structures of control that confines and subordinates human behaviour to temporality. It is a remarkable exercise in attempting to give life to fiction, not as a reductive postmodern deconstruction of the real or unreal, or as an elaboration of some multiverse, but as the objectification of a literary interaction with the past, the present, and the future instantaneously in the chronomantic imagining of a weapon that begets piratical freedom. The novel reads linearly and thereby achieves the impossible. By evoking Lovecraft and Libertatia, Burroughs blurs the lines through which time is divided and temporal authority exerted, expanding the judiciary as much to art as to politics. Executed with Burroughs' hallmark sardonicism, distance, and indifference to absurd and hallucinogenic processes of hyperstition, Cities of the Red Night is undoubtedly the first third of his magnum opus.
Its incantation at the beginning frames the time-crushing plot within a neo-Sartrean rage against the machine, against the structures of control that confines and subordinates human behaviour to temporality. It is a remarkable exercise in attempting to give life to fiction, not as a reductive postmodern deconstruction of the real or unreal, or as an elaboration of some multiverse, but as the objectification of a literary interaction with the past, the present, and the future instantaneously in the chronomantic imagining of a weapon that begets piratical freedom. The novel reads linearly and thereby achieves the impossible. By evoking Lovecraft and Libertatia, Burroughs blurs the lines through which time is divided and temporal authority exerted, expanding the judiciary as much to art as to politics. Executed with Burroughs' hallmark sardonicism, distance, and indifference to absurd and hallucinogenic processes of hyperstition, Cities of the Red Night is undoubtedly the first third of his magnum opus.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Racial slurs, Drug abuse, Addiction, Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, Cultural appropriation, Cursing, Pedophilia, Racism, and Rape