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A review by nathansnook
Atta by Jarett Kobek
challenging
dark
funny
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
5.0
"So that the reading was like a book only to the extent that the book is regarded as a porous, unstable, and provisional platform for the dissemination of information. We tend to think of books as interiorized devices, linked to solitude and self-enclosed spaces; and they deliver something, like meaning, up to the reader. But Iβm not so interested in knowledge in that teleological sense; Iβm more interested in the dissipation of knowledge, unfocused attention, and generic receptiveness. It would be nice if a book could reduce the amount of knowledge in the air. Iβm equally interested in the public and communal architecture of reading practices as they intersect with individuals and park benches, the subway and the seminar room. Why canβt a book be more like a perfume? Or a door? Or the year after we graduated from college? A perfume is a communications medium just as literature is. Moods, furniture, restaurants, and books are communications mediums. What is it that Warhol said, 'I think the right hormones can make Chanel No. 5 smell very butch.' -- Tan Lin <a href="https://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/oct/24/interview-tan-lin/">rhizome.org</a>
Kobek made concrete speak. From the depths of Iraqi thought. From the depths of Disney and πππΊπ΄π΄π¦π΄ retellings. From Atta, the architect who piled the plane into the Twin Towers on September 11th. The buildings speak as much as land does to relay history. Each rock speaks for the human conscience. And for the American context, Kobek uses humor and concise prose that swirls and swirls to a dizzying effect. Perhaps the buzzing is everywhere. I too stopped to listen to the buildings and there was a voice in contemporary formations. Sloped and sullen, broken and rebuilt, lost and found in our contemporary voice that struggles to find footing in our positions of things and thoughts.
This book is a sound, a solid, in historical fiction, a perfume of how ideology formulates and resolves through trauma and history to countdown to an unspeakable terror that we all know, one with mixed facts and fictions, an oblivion from text to life, from fiction to nonfiction, that crushes the very essence and idiocracy of autofiction.
Kobek made concrete speak. From the depths of Iraqi thought. From the depths of Disney and πππΊπ΄π΄π¦π΄ retellings. From Atta, the architect who piled the plane into the Twin Towers on September 11th. The buildings speak as much as land does to relay history. Each rock speaks for the human conscience. And for the American context, Kobek uses humor and concise prose that swirls and swirls to a dizzying effect. Perhaps the buzzing is everywhere. I too stopped to listen to the buildings and there was a voice in contemporary formations. Sloped and sullen, broken and rebuilt, lost and found in our contemporary voice that struggles to find footing in our positions of things and thoughts.
This book is a sound, a solid, in historical fiction, a perfume of how ideology formulates and resolves through trauma and history to countdown to an unspeakable terror that we all know, one with mixed facts and fictions, an oblivion from text to life, from fiction to nonfiction, that crushes the very essence and idiocracy of autofiction.