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A review by mamimitanaka
The Cyclist Conspiracy by Svetislav Basara
DNF
This has all the ingredients of something I should enjoy - metafictionality, formal innovation and jumping from style to style, a synthesis between dreams and reality and science and religion - but as it is it's really not doing it for me. Everything feels like it's straining too hard in an obvious effort to be clever than it actually being clever, and so much of it veers into essayistic jargon about theoretical practices and ideas to the point where it lands as utterly incomprehensible for someone not in on whatever Basara is talking about here. I usually like that sort of thing but as opposed to the Pynchons and Ciscos of the world, who balance out that type of goofy theoretical writing with something that ties into their Big Ideas, a lot of this just feels like an in-joke I'm not getting. I'm sure much of this is a translation issue, so I'm not pinning all of the blame on Basara. But what I can pin direct blame on him for is that there's a lot of really odious misogyny in this that doesn't seem to be interrogated by the text at all and just reads further as Basara aping the early postmodernists [and of all the things to take away from the early powerhouses of the genre, the eye-rolling machismo and exclusion of women should absolutely not be one of them]. It's far from terrible, it's a fun concept and it has a lot of promise and the book is extremely well designed, but I can't help but think the ideas here would have actually benefitted from a more traditional narrative style, believe it or not. Maybe I'll return to this when I'm itching for this kind of thing, but I'm not right now.
This has all the ingredients of something I should enjoy - metafictionality, formal innovation and jumping from style to style, a synthesis between dreams and reality and science and religion - but as it is it's really not doing it for me. Everything feels like it's straining too hard in an obvious effort to be clever than it actually being clever, and so much of it veers into essayistic jargon about theoretical practices and ideas to the point where it lands as utterly incomprehensible for someone not in on whatever Basara is talking about here. I usually like that sort of thing but as opposed to the Pynchons and Ciscos of the world, who balance out that type of goofy theoretical writing with something that ties into their Big Ideas, a lot of this just feels like an in-joke I'm not getting. I'm sure much of this is a translation issue, so I'm not pinning all of the blame on Basara. But what I can pin direct blame on him for is that there's a lot of really odious misogyny in this that doesn't seem to be interrogated by the text at all and just reads further as Basara aping the early postmodernists [and of all the things to take away from the early powerhouses of the genre, the eye-rolling machismo and exclusion of women should absolutely not be one of them]. It's far from terrible, it's a fun concept and it has a lot of promise and the book is extremely well designed, but I can't help but think the ideas here would have actually benefitted from a more traditional narrative style, believe it or not. Maybe I'll return to this when I'm itching for this kind of thing, but I'm not right now.