Dramatis Personae
Devo
SO
Scene: Sitting on a squishy sofa, DEVO is talking to SO about whatever, along the lines of "snrfl blrf books mph linguistics blrfnrr dystopia."
DEVO: Urk, I need to write a blog post about J. But I mean, what am I supposed to say - it was good until it wasn't?
-- end scene --
This book is eminently quotable - it has beautiful, thought-provoking turns of phrase. Which, being a quote hoarder, I loved. I think this is why I stuck with it for so long. That, and the mystery of why the fingers over the mouth with word-initial [j]s, and what the actual heck happened.
Maybe it was because I was primed by End of Absence, but what I was expecting - the downfall of civilization due to social media [1] and associated linguistic turmoil [2] - was not what I got. What was it about instead? Jewish persecution.
And once I worked that out, the mystery was no longer compelling, and it was getting weirder and more uncomfortable by the second. what happened, if it happened, seems to have been a second Holocaust, and in the book's present day, the entire world is apologizing for it while at the same time denying that anything happened (hence the "if it happened"). All this: not weird. In fact, very interesting - how can you effectively repent of something, or at least apologize for it, if you refuse to admit uncomfortable truths about yourself? What happens when this shying-away from shameful traits or actions becomes institutionalized and denial of the past becomes the only sanctioned [3] way to live?
The weird part? That one of the main characters decides that in order to face the past (maybe? I'm not sure), they have to go back to persecuting the Jews. The world is a brutal place in the aftermath of what happened, if it happened (think, murders, rape, blind fury, purposeless drifting, spying on your neighbors, etc.), and the character decides that the only way to bring back group identity and purpose is to have an Other - somebody must be scapegoated, both for the the in-group's sense of self and for the Other's.
Er...what?
Granted, I stopped reading about the time I was picking up on this vibe, so it may be that it all played out quite differently. But as one Amazon reviewer pointed out, the writing is nebulous. While trying to maintain a miasma of doubt and confusion, the text remains necessarily vague and at times difficult to follow, and I wasn't about to follow it down the path it looked like it was headed.
So, yeah. It was weird and uncomfortable. And if it makes me a bad person to not read about that and face my own discomfort, so be it. I'm not in the reading game for deep, psychological trauma.
Let's do quotes! Because good quotes this book had in spades.
"It helped to know where your madness came from." The author spoke some about the main characters' crazy parents, but I'd've liked to have seen more of it, and more connection between the present characters and the past ones. Would have liked their reactions to finding things out about their parentage, rather than the reader just being told about it.
"Talk is better than silence, the sung word is better than the written, but nothing is better than love." What a sweet sentiment for such a bleak book.
"What was the pursuit of justice but the punishment of the blameworthy? And who was the most blameworthy of all? Those whom you had loved." Yikes. This is so terrifying and so desolate and I love it. "We hurt those we love" is a common, nearly trite, sentiment, but this puts a new face on that cliche. It's not just those we love that we hurt, but that we actively seek to punish them in the name of the greater good ("greater good" here represented by justice). And it's not those we currently love that we seek to blame and therefore punish, but those we have loved. The inability to forgive and forget is destructive.
"There were some questions you couldn't ask, even of yourself. There were some questions you couldn't begin to mold from the black chaos of ignorance, for fear of what definition would bring. Because once you'd framed the question, you'd given a half-shape to the answer." Oy, I feel ya.
Oh, and a final random thought: Besides the sound-bite-y-ness [4] of the text, the dialog's Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead feel was working like gangbusters. The back and forth between the characters about slightly surreal and philosophic questions in a register just slightly too formal for natural speech reminded me greatly of the banter [5] of R&G. Which is appropriate, given that the characters in both works exist in a confused, eternal now.
xo,
Devo
[1] There is even a chapter in J called "Twitternacht," so it truly wasn't that strange a supposition.
[2] And that expectation wasn't so far off the mark, given that the first sentence* of the jacket flap compares it to 1984, which is my favorite linguistically-jumpy dystopian novel of all time
* I only read the first few sentences of jackets. Otherwise, the plot is almost always given away.
[3] "Sanction" is one of those trickily annoying words, where it means both "allowed" and "forbidden." I mean "allowed" here.
[4] Yay, morpheme breaks!
[5] "Banter" is too playful, but I can't think of a better word
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