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rushthatspeaksBased on this and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Victor Pelevin ought to be a goddamn rockstar. Maybe he is and I just haven't heard?
Seriously, though, this is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as an internet chatroom. Thread started by Ariadne, of course.
This is the kind of book about which I make incoherent flaily-hands. I wrote a short story some time ago called 'The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur', which I need to recall from the market I have to admit to myself is never going to get back to me and send somewhere else, and which is a postmodernist reworking of this myth. I'm fairly fond of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves*, which is a postmodernist reworking of this myth. Maybe there is something about it which attracts them. At any rate, what I'm saying here is that this is a story I care about deeply, which has already been done pretty well and which I spent a while doing as well as I could myself, and Pelevin's version is totally unlike anything I have ever seen or imagined.
The people who are contributing to the chatroom introduce themselves one by one. They write that they have all found themselves in identical keyboard-equipped bedrooms. Their nicknames are preset, and their conversations are heavily moderated: swearing and any references to real names or occupations are replaced by xxxxing. Outside each bedroom is a different portion of the labyrinth, with personalized symbology appropriate to the person whose room it is, so that you get the bit that looks like an old maze screensaver (all brick walls and felt fake rats), the bit that's a church full of displays of every labyrinth that has ever appeared in a church, the bit that's just a bedroom where Ariadne dreams of metaphysics and paradoxes.
There are two obvious questions: which is Theseus? And which is the Minotaur? A non-obvious question: do Theseus and the Minotaur know who they are themselves, if this is an enacted myth, where ordinary people take on the preset roles?
This being a Pelevin novel, the attempts to find out ramble through surrealism, pop culture references, parable, something I swear is Borges' garden of forking paths, discussion of emoticons, discussion of where everyone's handles come from, roundabout revelation of past lives and histories, and dirty jokes.
The thing is, the answers aren't what you expect. I don't care what you're expecting. It's not that. This novel is intentionally trying to confuse you-- that is part of what labyrinths are for-- and it's very hard to write about, therefore, because a lot of the point is the ways it's confusing, the blind alleys and wrong turnings Pelevin works so hard at setting up. I don't want to write the kind of analysis that pins it all down on a cork-board. But I can also see this being a book that is confusing as fuck to a lot of people. It would probably have confused me if it weren't one of my central stories.
I recommend it very highly. Remember that people do not ever have to tell the truth on the internet; remember not to get too attached to any single theory; and above all remember who made the thread and notice who carries it, concentrate on what actually happens in the myth, and it should all make perfect sense.
Pelevin is brilliant. Seriously, I need to read everything he's ever written immediately.
* I'm sorry! I don't know how to make the word house blue! I know it existentially should be.
Seriously, though, this is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as an internet chatroom. Thread started by Ariadne, of course.
This is the kind of book about which I make incoherent flaily-hands. I wrote a short story some time ago called 'The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur', which I need to recall from the market I have to admit to myself is never going to get back to me and send somewhere else, and which is a postmodernist reworking of this myth. I'm fairly fond of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves*, which is a postmodernist reworking of this myth. Maybe there is something about it which attracts them. At any rate, what I'm saying here is that this is a story I care about deeply, which has already been done pretty well and which I spent a while doing as well as I could myself, and Pelevin's version is totally unlike anything I have ever seen or imagined.
The people who are contributing to the chatroom introduce themselves one by one. They write that they have all found themselves in identical keyboard-equipped bedrooms. Their nicknames are preset, and their conversations are heavily moderated: swearing and any references to real names or occupations are replaced by xxxxing. Outside each bedroom is a different portion of the labyrinth, with personalized symbology appropriate to the person whose room it is, so that you get the bit that looks like an old maze screensaver (all brick walls and felt fake rats), the bit that's a church full of displays of every labyrinth that has ever appeared in a church, the bit that's just a bedroom where Ariadne dreams of metaphysics and paradoxes.
There are two obvious questions: which is Theseus? And which is the Minotaur? A non-obvious question: do Theseus and the Minotaur know who they are themselves, if this is an enacted myth, where ordinary people take on the preset roles?
This being a Pelevin novel, the attempts to find out ramble through surrealism, pop culture references, parable, something I swear is Borges' garden of forking paths, discussion of emoticons, discussion of where everyone's handles come from, roundabout revelation of past lives and histories, and dirty jokes.
The thing is, the answers aren't what you expect. I don't care what you're expecting. It's not that. This novel is intentionally trying to confuse you-- that is part of what labyrinths are for-- and it's very hard to write about, therefore, because a lot of the point is the ways it's confusing, the blind alleys and wrong turnings Pelevin works so hard at setting up. I don't want to write the kind of analysis that pins it all down on a cork-board. But I can also see this being a book that is confusing as fuck to a lot of people. It would probably have confused me if it weren't one of my central stories.
I recommend it very highly. Remember that people do not ever have to tell the truth on the internet; remember not to get too attached to any single theory; and above all remember who made the thread and notice who carries it, concentrate on what actually happens in the myth, and it should all make perfect sense.
Pelevin is brilliant. Seriously, I need to read everything he's ever written immediately.
* I'm sorry! I don't know how to make the word house blue! I know it existentially should be.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-10 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 08:37 am (UTC)What I love about Pelevin is that I have read his first novel, Omon Ra (1992), and it is a quite good, absurdist, very Russian satire on the Soviet culture of extraordinary achievement at all costs (including the facts) that does not, an interweaving of Egyptian myth and a late-breaking examination of consensus reality and the manipulable nature of truth aside, presage his later work in any significant fashion at all. It's an early post-Soviet classic; it deserves to be. I'm sure I've got my notes on it somewhere. It is nowhere near the level of multivalent brillance on tap in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf or The Helmet of Horror (which I can tell I read in mid-November from its current position in between Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices and H.D.'s Palimpsest) and it does not point obviously in that direction; I recognized Pelevin's name when
no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 11:56 am (UTC)Relatedly, there's a new Chris Adrian book out. I think it actually might not include P.B., but I'm not sure, I need to re-read it. It is a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream that takes place in San Francisco. It is not Children's Hospital, but for me that is like saying "it's not Ulysses," so you still probably want to read it.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-12 03:44 am (UTC)<span style="color: blue">House</span>
Like so: House
no subject
Date: 2011-07-12 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-12 03:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-20 02:31 pm (UTC)