Take a photo of a barcode or cover
spacestationtrustfund 's review for:
They told me of substance and form; they told me of matter, of its consistency as a fluxion of minute, swarming atomies, as Democritus had writ; they told me of shape and essence; they told me of the motion of light, that it was the constant expenditure of particles flying off the surfaces of things; they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver’s mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. [...] And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.What a weird, weird book. Genius, but consummately bizarre.
This novel is a katabasis.
The word katabasis, Ancient Greek κατάβασις, from κατὰ (down) + βαίνω (go), refers to a descent of some sort. It can be used to describe a trip from the interior of a country down to the coast, a military retreat, a movement downhill, the sinking of the winds or sunset—or, perhaps most famously, a descent into hell:
Facilis descensus Averno:Imagine a coming of age story. Then imagine the opposite of it. Simplistically speaking, this novel is a slave narrative, but an incredibly weird one, blinking in and out of various genres and influences, perhaps most notably flirting with turning into a Gothic novel. It also crosses paths with contemporary heroic literature of the American Revolution. It's also, technically, a YA novel? It's less of a coherent genre-novel than a smearing of all the paint across all the canvas, polluting each genre with each other genre and such, gleefully flinging the weirdest sorts of pathos at the audience in a way that, somehow, actually works. It's also a horror story—existential horror, almost Lovecraftian in its sense of scope; of course, also tethered tangibly to the Real, which only makes it all the more horrifying. The first part of the novel narrows in on the existential horror of slavery—the degradation of being owned, of being treated as a thing or a farm animal instead of a person, of being something other than human—while the rest of it plunges headfirst into the gory, nasty underbelly. Octavian's early life is relatively comfortable (apart from the existential horror of being a science experiment, of course), which serves to strip away all the "distractions," in a sense, leaving only the terror of not being in control of your identity and personhood. Then, once that has been solidly established, the genre switches again and all the other evils of slavery come sweeping into the narrative in full force.
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.
The first half of the narrative teases at an almost Camus-esque existentialism and Orwellian surveillance horror. The majuscule-G Gothic novel is also incredibly present; after all, the novel has all the hallmarks: an ancient, wealthy, possibly haunted (by the dead or the living) house; isolation from the outside world; convoluted, unhealthy, erotic power dynamics; a hidden room forbidden to the narrator which conceals a dark secret... to say nothing of Octavian's role as the quintessential unreliable narrator. The novel asks unanswerable questions, posits insolvable puzzles, creates inescapable situations, and is overall an absolutely bizarre rollercoaster of a thriller. It's a mindfuck disguised as a fucking YA novel. It's a katabasis.
I really liked Feed, and apparently M.T. Anderson isn't a one-hit wonder. Yay.