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darkest_timeline 's review for:
Dead Astronauts
by Jeff VanderMeer
This book is a wild ride.
I read this book knowing that I could not think of a single other person I know who I would recommend it to. In fact I would actually avoid recommending it, because not only is this book intensely difficult to read but it is also utterly genre defying and impossible to pin down. It has incredible prose which, particularly towards the end of the book falls apart into outright poetry and at times is marked by version numbers which at first serve to utterly confuse the kindle reader into thinking the have a corrupted copy. At times it almost feels as though the book itself is decaying alongside the subject matter.
This book puts me in mind of A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I could ultimately review both books the same way, they are clearly experimental and neither have any consistent plot but both are very interesting in their approach and flit between wrenchingly visceral in their descriptions (often in the description of viscera in VanderMeer's case) and boring in the repetition of irrelevant minutia. They are both fascinating because of the representation of life in a form very different to mine. They are both far too difficult for me to read them again.
I read this book knowing that I could not think of a single other person I know who I would recommend it to. In fact I would actually avoid recommending it, because not only is this book intensely difficult to read but it is also utterly genre defying and impossible to pin down. It has incredible prose which, particularly towards the end of the book falls apart into outright poetry and at times is marked by version numbers which at first serve to utterly confuse the kindle reader into thinking the have a corrupted copy. At times it almost feels as though the book itself is decaying alongside the subject matter.
This book puts me in mind of A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I could ultimately review both books the same way, they are clearly experimental and neither have any consistent plot but both are very interesting in their approach and flit between wrenchingly visceral in their descriptions (often in the description of viscera in VanderMeer's case) and boring in the repetition of irrelevant minutia. They are both fascinating because of the representation of life in a form very different to mine. They are both far too difficult for me to read them again.