Here are the two remaining Amazon reviews, which I’ve been posting to this blog in the event that Amazon goes belly-up or decides to suppress all customer reviews or suppress just mine! I’m less and less a fan of Amazon. I did like them for the ability to buy hard-to-find items, but I’m less and less enamored of their evil. (These days, when I purchase books on the Internet, I try to do it from the publisher’s website or from Barnes & Noble. And I don’t post customer reviews anymore.)
Looking at my review of Sunshine in the Valley, I think it’s clear I had no idea what I’d read. I was way out of my depth, couldn’t make heads or tails of it! So I adhered to the ancient scholastic principle of Fake-It-Till-You-Make-It. In my review of Mendacities, well, I was just kind of an asshole. A smiling one, but still a stinky one. In fact, I wrote to the author afterwards to apologize and offered to take it down, but he seemed to find it amusing and told me to leave it … so I left it!
Oh, and I see that I read Mendacities on my Kindle! I’ve had this device for years, and I’ve never been able to read anything on it. I can’t sustain a sitting for more than a few minutes; the thing activates my incipient ADHD in a big way … but apparently, I did manage to wade all the way through this particular ebook. I’m not sure why I was so motivated: the text is not what you’d call remarkable. Consciousness (aka the habit of being human) is complex and arbitrary.
Sunshine in the Valley
- by Kyle Muntz
- pub. Civil Coping Mechanisms
- Review posted October 25, 2011, 5 stars
- Review title: Ghost and Language
Disclosure: Kyle Muntz is a Facebook friend and a colleague at the Step Chamber. He provided me with a review copy.
Sunshine in the Valley is an intriguing novel that explores levels of reality. Characters hover between existence and idea, never quite coalescing into a fixed notion. At times, they seem petty and self-absorbed, whereas at others they seem almost blended into non-self. The world itself seems neither to contain them nor to exclude them; rather, it is a kind of “meta-character” in itself, its identity radiating from “the Sun,” whose light is mysterious, eternal, and unknowable.
Interestingly, the main characters are children, and the energy of childhood serves as a driving force in the narrative, as if the Universe itself is focused on its children, neglectful of those who have moved on into adulthood.
One character is a ghost (a child!), and she seems to be a kind of “narrator,” a disembodied expositer and commentator on events, yet she seems not to remain entirely aloof from what she observes, indeed she interacts with and existentially depends upon the story she is telling … And of course, she herself is part of the story she is telling! My sense of her, thematically, was she stood in for language: the desire of language to become the world it can only evoke.
A mindbender of a novel! :) Reminds me of those beautiful Tarkovsky science fiction movies, Solaris and Stalker, in the sense that while I couldn’t understand everything that was happening, I was always imbued with a sense of ramifying ideation, an enlarging vortex that never quite coalesced, but always drew me in as I attempted to grasp at some profound insight. And of course, everyone’s response to this novel will be quite individual—I’m sure my take will differ profoundly from that of others … Kyle Muntz has mined a rich vein of literary mysterium and beauty.
I think, in the end, this is a novel of pure Language. The world, the characters, the ideas, all are bound inextricably with the vocabulary and grammar employed to create them. There could be no other words, or everything would be different. The ghost haunts the world and the world haunts the ghost.
In sum: A pristine, hermetic, aesthetic engagement of the mental and appreciative faculties.
Mendacities
- by George Berger
- pub. Self (Out of print, apparently!)
- Review posted April 25, 2012, 4 stars
- Review title: Nostalgia
My rating for its entertainment value would be three stars, but I give at another star for effort! (I’ll explain that below.) Plus, I don’t want to mess up that lovely array of four stars already fanned out up there … And it really was a very enjoyable experience!
The style is entertaining, and I was intrigued by the initial promises of the plot as it unfolded, but the author loses track somewhere around the 60% mark. (I read the Kindle Edition, can you tell?) As in, the plot drops off a cliff at that point and makes a faraway “splat.” Nothing much happens for a long long time. The characters kind of disappear into vague exposition … So let’s not talk about it, okay? :)
Which leads me to my next point. The author, on his website, says the book was written in 2010 by a man with a wife and two kids, but uh, that would be pretty hilarious if it were true! Because it reads as if it were written by a very precocious 15-year old boy sometime in the mid- to late eighties. Early nineties? (Don’t get me wrong, the style, grammar, and editing all deserve high marks!) If these are contemporary kids, then where are the cell phones, the internet, computers, etc? Do people still use rolls of film?
Nothing wrong with all of that, I think it’s great! That’s one of the beautiful things about the Kindle and the new self-publishing movement—you can pull out those old novels moldering in your trunk (or hard drive) and give them a new lease on life. And that’s really the only reason I stuck with it after the author lost the thread (or rather, I skimmed—trust me, you’ll need to start seriously skimming once you hit the 60% mark). I was simply curious about this high school kid’s project as an artifact, and it aroused a certain amount of nostalgia in me for a bygone age.
So, an A for effort, and the first half is quite good! Promising and reasonably original material, lots of laughs. I was thoroughly entertained and touched. Certainly worth the price of admission!