Scan barcode
A review by suddenflamingword
Age of Wire and String: Stories by Ben Marcus
2.0
The Age of Wire and String reads like an auto-mode camera whose broken filter compels it, by obscure physical mechanisms in light and machine, to endlessly zoom, retract, and readjust ISO. You might call it slapstick with words.
For what it's worth, it's definitely engaging in concept: a novel-in-stories disguised as an absurdist scholasticism as dry and dense as a FEIS.
What does work in this book - with its cokebottle gusto - is how it reorients the notion of narrative away from character. The character is this world, this thing held loosely together by self-reference and definitions, in the style of what Timothy Morton calls Hyperobjects: "objects which have a vitality to them but you can't touch them, like race or class, or climate change. Their effects may be experienced even if they cannot be necessarily touched." A human-level perception of the world fails when going into the book.
Which is half what I was looking for when I was redirected here through Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology. It feels, however, caught up in what I can't help but feel is the spiral of hopelessness that began with Anglo "postmodern" literature - somewhere between knowingly precocious and giving up on communication.
Since The Age of Wire and String was published in '92, the hangover of that literary world, it's not surprising that it feels half-foot-in like this. I don't regret reading it; it might be the first book I've read that pushes me to think like a thing removed from an anthrocontext. Still not sure I'd suggest it to anyone who prefers Alexander's solution to Gordian Knots.
For what it's worth, it's definitely engaging in concept: a novel-in-stories disguised as an absurdist scholasticism as dry and dense as a FEIS.
What does work in this book - with its cokebottle gusto - is how it reorients the notion of narrative away from character. The character is this world, this thing held loosely together by self-reference and definitions, in the style of what Timothy Morton calls Hyperobjects: "objects which have a vitality to them but you can't touch them, like race or class, or climate change. Their effects may be experienced even if they cannot be necessarily touched." A human-level perception of the world fails when going into the book.
Which is half what I was looking for when I was redirected here through Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology. It feels, however, caught up in what I can't help but feel is the spiral of hopelessness that began with Anglo "postmodern" literature - somewhere between knowingly precocious and giving up on communication.
Since The Age of Wire and String was published in '92, the hangover of that literary world, it's not surprising that it feels half-foot-in like this. I don't regret reading it; it might be the first book I've read that pushes me to think like a thing removed from an anthrocontext. Still not sure I'd suggest it to anyone who prefers Alexander's solution to Gordian Knots.