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The Familiar #1
One Rainy Day in May
NATIONAL BEST SELLER
From the author of the international best seller House of Leaves and National Book Award–nominated Only Revolutions comes a monumental new novel as dazzling as it is riveting. The Familiar (Volume 1) ranges from Mexico to Southeast Asia, from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, with nine lives hanging in the balance, each called upon to make a terrifying choice. They include a therapist-in-training grappling with daughters as demanding as her patients; an ambitious East L.A. gang member contracted for violence; two scientists in Marfa, Texas, on the run from an organization powerful beyond imagining; plus a recovering addict in Singapore summoned at midnight by a desperate billionaire; and a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine might unleash consequences far exceeding the entertainment he intends. At the very heart, though, is a twelve-year-old girl named Xanther who one rainy day in May sets out with her father to get a dog, only to end up trying to save a creature as fragile as it is dangerous . . . which will change not only her life and the lives of those she has yet to encounter, but this world, too—or at least the world we think we know and the future we take for granted.
(With full-color illustrations throughout.)
From the author of the international best seller House of Leaves and National Book Award–nominated Only Revolutions comes a monumental new novel as dazzling as it is riveting. The Familiar (Volume 1) ranges from Mexico to Southeast Asia, from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, with nine lives hanging in the balance, each called upon to make a terrifying choice. They include a therapist-in-training grappling with daughters as demanding as her patients; an ambitious East L.A. gang member contracted for violence; two scientists in Marfa, Texas, on the run from an organization powerful beyond imagining; plus a recovering addict in Singapore summoned at midnight by a desperate billionaire; and a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine might unleash consequences far exceeding the entertainment he intends. At the very heart, though, is a twelve-year-old girl named Xanther who one rainy day in May sets out with her father to get a dog, only to end up trying to save a creature as fragile as it is dangerous . . . which will change not only her life and the lives of those she has yet to encounter, but this world, too—or at least the world we think we know and the future we take for granted.
(With full-color illustrations throughout.)
880 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
916 people are currently reading
15554 people want to read
About the author
Mark Z. Danielewski
18 books8,235 followersMark Z. Danielewski is an American author best known for his books House of Leaves, Only Revolutions, The Fifty Year Sword, The Little Blue Kite, and The Familiar series.
Danielewski studied English Literature at Yale. He then decided to move to Berkeley, California, where he took a summer program in Latin at the University of California, Berkeley. He also spent time in Paris, preoccupied mostly with writing.
In the early 1990s, he pursued graduate studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He later served as an assistant editor and worked on sound for Derrida, a documentary based on the life of the Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida.
His second novel, Only Revolutions, was released in 2006. The novel was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award.
His novel The Fifty Year Sword was released in the Netherlands in 2005. A new version with stitched illustrations was released in the United States 2012 (including a limited-edition release featuring a latched box that held the book). On Halloween 2010-2012, Danielewski "conducted" staged readings of the book at the REDCAT Theater inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Each year was different and included features such as large-scale shadows, music, and performances from actors such as Betsy Brandt (Breaking Bad).
On May 12, 2015, he released the first volume, The Familiar (Volume 1): One Rainy Day in May in his announced 27-volume series The Familiar. The story "concerns a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten..." The second volume, The Familiar (Volume 2): Into the Forest was released on Oct. 27, 2015, The Familiar (Volume 3): Honeysuckle & Pain came out June 14, 2016, and The Familiar (Volume 4): Hades arrived in bookstores on Feb. 7, 2017, and The Familiar (Volume 5): Redwood was released on Halloween 2017.
His latest release, The Little Blue Kite, is out now.
Quick Facts
He is the son of Polish avant-garde film director Tad Danielewski and the brother of singer and songwriter Annie Decatur Danielewski, a.k.a. Poe.
House of Leaves, Danielewski's first novel, has gained a considerable cult following. In 2000, Danielewski toured with his sister across America at Borders Books and Music locations, promoting Poe’s album Haunted, which reflects elements of House of Leaves.
Danielewski's work is characterized by experimental choices in form, such as intricate and multi-layered narratives and typographical variation.
In 2015, his piece Thrown, a reflection on Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, appeared on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Official "Yarn + Ink" apparel inspired by his books House of Leaves and The Familiar is now available through his official website, Amazon and Etsy.
His latest short story, "There's a Place for You" was released on www.markzdanielewski.com in August 2020.
Read more on his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z....
Danielewski studied English Literature at Yale. He then decided to move to Berkeley, California, where he took a summer program in Latin at the University of California, Berkeley. He also spent time in Paris, preoccupied mostly with writing.
In the early 1990s, he pursued graduate studies at the USC School of Cinema-Television. He later served as an assistant editor and worked on sound for Derrida, a documentary based on the life of the Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida.
His second novel, Only Revolutions, was released in 2006. The novel was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award.
His novel The Fifty Year Sword was released in the Netherlands in 2005. A new version with stitched illustrations was released in the United States 2012 (including a limited-edition release featuring a latched box that held the book). On Halloween 2010-2012, Danielewski "conducted" staged readings of the book at the REDCAT Theater inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Each year was different and included features such as large-scale shadows, music, and performances from actors such as Betsy Brandt (Breaking Bad).
On May 12, 2015, he released the first volume, The Familiar (Volume 1): One Rainy Day in May in his announced 27-volume series The Familiar. The story "concerns a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten..." The second volume, The Familiar (Volume 2): Into the Forest was released on Oct. 27, 2015, The Familiar (Volume 3): Honeysuckle & Pain came out June 14, 2016, and The Familiar (Volume 4): Hades arrived in bookstores on Feb. 7, 2017, and The Familiar (Volume 5): Redwood was released on Halloween 2017.
His latest release, The Little Blue Kite, is out now.
Quick Facts
He is the son of Polish avant-garde film director Tad Danielewski and the brother of singer and songwriter Annie Decatur Danielewski, a.k.a. Poe.
House of Leaves, Danielewski's first novel, has gained a considerable cult following. In 2000, Danielewski toured with his sister across America at Borders Books and Music locations, promoting Poe’s album Haunted, which reflects elements of House of Leaves.
Danielewski's work is characterized by experimental choices in form, such as intricate and multi-layered narratives and typographical variation.
In 2015, his piece Thrown, a reflection on Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, appeared on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Official "Yarn + Ink" apparel inspired by his books House of Leaves and The Familiar is now available through his official website, Amazon and Etsy.
His latest short story, "There's a Place for You" was released on www.markzdanielewski.com in August 2020.
Read more on his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z....
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July 9, 2022What Does It Mean to be a Rum Writer?
Danielewski is a rum novelist. He has affinities to experimental, conceptual, hypertextual, metafictional, and other avant-garde writing, but his versions of those practices are awkward. He has the same relation to contemporary experimental fiction as Larry Rivers or David Reed had to abstraction and figuration in the 1980s, or George Rochberg or Alfred Schnittke had to postmodern music in the same decade: that is, he produces unmodulated juxtapositions of styles and modes, on the assumption that they produce new and expressive effects. Danielewski is also similar to Reed in that his books offer popular facsimiles of challenging avant-garde practices.
I think this continuous partial misunderstanding of avant-gardes is true both of Danielewski's writing and his graphics. I'll say something about both, but first a note about what I am not engaging, which is what it seems most readers engage--the book's wide range of references, plots, puzzles, steganographic and other encrypted clues. I'm not interested in novels that present themselves as puzzles. It's a lack of interest I share with Naipaul, who said something of the sort in an interview when someone asked him if he read murder mysteries. I'm also largely uninterested in what is taken as erudition or breadth of reference: that sort of thing is always relative. After you've read some of what Schmidt, Sebald, Canetti, or Steiner have read, then erudition evaporates as a value, and becomes what it always is: a specific sequence of things an author knows, which are arrayed against the many things the author doesn't know. Occasionally, as in Harry Mathews, intellectual puzzles and arcane references can be of interest; but in Danielewski that possibility is squashed, for me, by the poor writing.
If you are interested in Danielewski's intellectual puzzles, there are various sources: a good review in the "Los Angeles Review of Books" (lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-unfami... a forum (forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/the... and a discussion group (thefamiliar.wordpress.com). See also the update at the end of this review.
1. Writing
"The Familiar" is a combination of nine narratives -- the number evokes of the lives of a cat, which is also a "familiar." Various ethnicities, nationalities, trades, and classes are diligently and exhaustively represented, using clichés of places, characters, situations, and narratives. The writing is plot-driven in the way that trade paperbacks commonly are. Here is an example, from a scene with two policemen:
"Long time, Oz," Officer Nyra Carlton bristles. And smiles. Same as when she had her clothes off. Always bristling. And smiling. "Still think I'm a bitch?"
"Well some people think I'm an asshole."
"You're kidding," Nyra smiles. "Who thinks you're not an asshole?" (p. 163)
This is trade paperback writing. "Bristles" is a cliché. It's hackneyed to add "And smiling." as a separate sentence. And the line "Same when she had her clothes off" is from bad pulp fiction.
Some readers will want to understand this as broad parody. It is intentionally broad, but it is not parody, because there is no ironic distance: the policeman "bristling" and imagining the woman naked are the sort of mechanisms drive the story forward. The narrator approves of his choices, he doesn't mock them. Even Tom LeClair, who has supported Danielewski for many years, wasn't entirely convinced by these chapters that "don't always manage to defamiliarize" (New York Times, May 22, 2015).
I think Danielewski imagines that clichés of ethnicity and identity are meliorated by the interpolation of Armenian, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese characters. But graphical details like that merely interrupt pages of problematic narrative. The chapters with the character called jingjing, for example, are awkward in comparison to William Gibson's evocations of mixtures of Chinese and English, or even to David Mitchell's. An Armenian character is especially awkward because his thoughts are written in abbreviated pidgin English (whithout connectives, and with singular nouns and present tense verbs): but no one thinks in pidgin; that particular character would presumably think in Armenian, but speak in pidgin. It's excruciating either way. Why read chapters with characters like Oz and Nyra Carlton in them when there are writers like Richard Price?
"The Familiar" is related in interesting ways to literary fiction. In a section toward the end of "One Rainy Day in May," we are introduced to one of the "Narcons," which stands for "narrative constructs." These are entities (possibly coded software-like programs) who know everything about the characters in the book. This particular Narcon knows every detail of every movement and thought of every character, at al possible moments of their lives, even ones not described in the books. This is a sci-fi version of the omniscient narrator, and the fact that the Narcon talks to us is a sci-fi version of postmodern metanarrative. But it's awkward and naive, because it is not thematized throughout "The Familiar": only Narcons are aware of the narrative itself: the rest is rigorously non-self-referential and non-self-aware. Given that we're approaching 100 years of experiments with self-aware narration, this is a radical simplification of a long tradition of modernism and postmodernism. (A harsher version of some of these ideas can be found in Michael Schaub's "Guardian" review "The Familiar by Mark Z Danielewski review – what the font is going on?," 2015.)
2. Graphics
Danielewski is known for the visual nature of his books, and that is what prompted me to read this. (In connection with writingwithimages.com.) But his typography and design are gauche and often poorly thought through. Some examples, divided because they're separately debatable:
(a) Characters are identified by typefaces. There is a list at the end of the book, which is helpful for learning the books' characters. But if you're going to alternate typefaces, why choose such common ones? Why represent the book's main character, the girl Xanther, with Minion? (Is it a private joke, because she's something of a minion?) Why use Garamond, Imperial, Baskerville, and other common faces? It makes a small amount of sense to represent the Chinese character jingjing with a monospace font, rotis semi sans, because Chinese typefaces include monospace roman for transliterations of non-Chinese words, but other than that none of the matches make sense.
(b) And why print the default fonts so large? One character, Özgür, is represented by an enormous boldface Baskerville, which makes those pages look like they're printed for people who need large print to see. The pages scream for no reason.
(c) There are some effective graphic interventions, such as a series of double-page spreads in which a line about counting raindrops becomes streaks of rain, but many more that make almost no sense. Each chapter begins with a color illustration; the chapter title and an epigraph are superimposed in text boxes with black borders. The colors are bright, sometimes garish -- more like advertising or cheap science fiction than like serious graphics, photographs, or illustrations. The borders around the text boxes make them look like what they are: badly done homemade desktop publishing. Many of the images are manipulated using the simplest tools and filters: he would have been better advised to let someone else do the work for him. In this respect the graphics in "The Familiar" are like the awkward homemade graphics in William Gass's "The Tunnel," which he once told me -- unbelievably -- were intended to be as hamfisted as the narrator's writing.
(d) The upper outside corner of each page is colored, with the colors keyed to the characters and chapters. Again the colors are garish and seem randomly chosen. Danielewski either has no color sense, or he is trying to go for maximum visibility, Edward Tufte fashion.
(e) The Astair and Anwar chapters make use of multiple parentheses. For example:
"As might be expected with such a ridiculous (and arrogant(?) (even wince-worthy) pursuit ("Quest!" Fabler had shouted in his office) the paper had not come easily." (p. 121)
But expressive punctuation has been done so much more expressively, so much more inventively, so much more wildly and sensitively, by Arno Schmidt. In other chapters the parentheses serve more logical purposes, for example:
"Astair had no doubt (though) that when Xanther saw the dog (((might have happened already (even now?) when) she threw those gangly arms around its neck (petted it and brushed it (and later walked it and watered it and fed it))) when she named it) all Astair's doubts would join that dim..." (p. 445)
Danielewski sometimes arranges his parentheses so he can surprise readers with many parentheses closing at once, like this )?)))?).
But this sort of thing has been done so much more excessively, and compulsively, by Raymond Roussel in "New Impressions of Africa."
(f) The unintentionally hokey and gauche quality of the graphics extends to the cover design (thick laminated, with a punch-through number "one" and a diagonal cut flap) and even to the endorsements: on the half-title page, they are typeset to run diagonally down the page and into the gutter, as if to suggest there are many of them. Each is surrounded by a little microscript frame, reading "praise praise praise." But the device of running boxes is uninteresting, over-familiar, and unspecific to the subject: it is the rote application of an inappropriate, unmotivated graphic device.
Update, winter 2017
I won't conclude this review, because there are 26 more volumes coming; the fourth has just been released. Danielewski's editor's assistant at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) meeting in Los Angeles in 2016 told me 10 volumes are "firmly" under contract. Despite their bulk, these are not long novels: the editor's assistant said they're about 80,000 words each, which would make the entire series 2,080,000 words, which would put it just over Jules Romains's "Men of Goodwill," the novel that tops Wikipedia's list of the world's longest novels. I wonder if that could possibly not be intentional.
Update, 2022
In spring 2018 Danielewski announced, on Facebook and Instagram (February 2, 2018) that "The Familiar" had been "paused." Pantheon had canceled the series at 5 volumes. He has a very active fan base, with several concurrent reading groups (including one for "The Familiar"), and a massive Google Drive folder filled with fan-generated material (the link used to be http://goo.gl/mjQQTf). So it won't surprise me if there's a reincarnation. There's also an article about it here: www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fa....
Danielewski is a rum novelist. He has affinities to experimental, conceptual, hypertextual, metafictional, and other avant-garde writing, but his versions of those practices are awkward. He has the same relation to contemporary experimental fiction as Larry Rivers or David Reed had to abstraction and figuration in the 1980s, or George Rochberg or Alfred Schnittke had to postmodern music in the same decade: that is, he produces unmodulated juxtapositions of styles and modes, on the assumption that they produce new and expressive effects. Danielewski is also similar to Reed in that his books offer popular facsimiles of challenging avant-garde practices.
I think this continuous partial misunderstanding of avant-gardes is true both of Danielewski's writing and his graphics. I'll say something about both, but first a note about what I am not engaging, which is what it seems most readers engage--the book's wide range of references, plots, puzzles, steganographic and other encrypted clues. I'm not interested in novels that present themselves as puzzles. It's a lack of interest I share with Naipaul, who said something of the sort in an interview when someone asked him if he read murder mysteries. I'm also largely uninterested in what is taken as erudition or breadth of reference: that sort of thing is always relative. After you've read some of what Schmidt, Sebald, Canetti, or Steiner have read, then erudition evaporates as a value, and becomes what it always is: a specific sequence of things an author knows, which are arrayed against the many things the author doesn't know. Occasionally, as in Harry Mathews, intellectual puzzles and arcane references can be of interest; but in Danielewski that possibility is squashed, for me, by the poor writing.
If you are interested in Danielewski's intellectual puzzles, there are various sources: a good review in the "Los Angeles Review of Books" (lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-unfami... a forum (forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/the... and a discussion group (thefamiliar.wordpress.com). See also the update at the end of this review.
1. Writing
"The Familiar" is a combination of nine narratives -- the number evokes of the lives of a cat, which is also a "familiar." Various ethnicities, nationalities, trades, and classes are diligently and exhaustively represented, using clichés of places, characters, situations, and narratives. The writing is plot-driven in the way that trade paperbacks commonly are. Here is an example, from a scene with two policemen:
"Long time, Oz," Officer Nyra Carlton bristles. And smiles. Same as when she had her clothes off. Always bristling. And smiling. "Still think I'm a bitch?"
"Well some people think I'm an asshole."
"You're kidding," Nyra smiles. "Who thinks you're not an asshole?" (p. 163)
This is trade paperback writing. "Bristles" is a cliché. It's hackneyed to add "And smiling." as a separate sentence. And the line "Same when she had her clothes off" is from bad pulp fiction.
Some readers will want to understand this as broad parody. It is intentionally broad, but it is not parody, because there is no ironic distance: the policeman "bristling" and imagining the woman naked are the sort of mechanisms drive the story forward. The narrator approves of his choices, he doesn't mock them. Even Tom LeClair, who has supported Danielewski for many years, wasn't entirely convinced by these chapters that "don't always manage to defamiliarize" (New York Times, May 22, 2015).
I think Danielewski imagines that clichés of ethnicity and identity are meliorated by the interpolation of Armenian, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese characters. But graphical details like that merely interrupt pages of problematic narrative. The chapters with the character called jingjing, for example, are awkward in comparison to William Gibson's evocations of mixtures of Chinese and English, or even to David Mitchell's. An Armenian character is especially awkward because his thoughts are written in abbreviated pidgin English (whithout connectives, and with singular nouns and present tense verbs): but no one thinks in pidgin; that particular character would presumably think in Armenian, but speak in pidgin. It's excruciating either way. Why read chapters with characters like Oz and Nyra Carlton in them when there are writers like Richard Price?
"The Familiar" is related in interesting ways to literary fiction. In a section toward the end of "One Rainy Day in May," we are introduced to one of the "Narcons," which stands for "narrative constructs." These are entities (possibly coded software-like programs) who know everything about the characters in the book. This particular Narcon knows every detail of every movement and thought of every character, at al possible moments of their lives, even ones not described in the books. This is a sci-fi version of the omniscient narrator, and the fact that the Narcon talks to us is a sci-fi version of postmodern metanarrative. But it's awkward and naive, because it is not thematized throughout "The Familiar": only Narcons are aware of the narrative itself: the rest is rigorously non-self-referential and non-self-aware. Given that we're approaching 100 years of experiments with self-aware narration, this is a radical simplification of a long tradition of modernism and postmodernism. (A harsher version of some of these ideas can be found in Michael Schaub's "Guardian" review "The Familiar by Mark Z Danielewski review – what the font is going on?," 2015.)
2. Graphics
Danielewski is known for the visual nature of his books, and that is what prompted me to read this. (In connection with writingwithimages.com.) But his typography and design are gauche and often poorly thought through. Some examples, divided because they're separately debatable:
(a) Characters are identified by typefaces. There is a list at the end of the book, which is helpful for learning the books' characters. But if you're going to alternate typefaces, why choose such common ones? Why represent the book's main character, the girl Xanther, with Minion? (Is it a private joke, because she's something of a minion?) Why use Garamond, Imperial, Baskerville, and other common faces? It makes a small amount of sense to represent the Chinese character jingjing with a monospace font, rotis semi sans, because Chinese typefaces include monospace roman for transliterations of non-Chinese words, but other than that none of the matches make sense.
(b) And why print the default fonts so large? One character, Özgür, is represented by an enormous boldface Baskerville, which makes those pages look like they're printed for people who need large print to see. The pages scream for no reason.
(c) There are some effective graphic interventions, such as a series of double-page spreads in which a line about counting raindrops becomes streaks of rain, but many more that make almost no sense. Each chapter begins with a color illustration; the chapter title and an epigraph are superimposed in text boxes with black borders. The colors are bright, sometimes garish -- more like advertising or cheap science fiction than like serious graphics, photographs, or illustrations. The borders around the text boxes make them look like what they are: badly done homemade desktop publishing. Many of the images are manipulated using the simplest tools and filters: he would have been better advised to let someone else do the work for him. In this respect the graphics in "The Familiar" are like the awkward homemade graphics in William Gass's "The Tunnel," which he once told me -- unbelievably -- were intended to be as hamfisted as the narrator's writing.
(d) The upper outside corner of each page is colored, with the colors keyed to the characters and chapters. Again the colors are garish and seem randomly chosen. Danielewski either has no color sense, or he is trying to go for maximum visibility, Edward Tufte fashion.
(e) The Astair and Anwar chapters make use of multiple parentheses. For example:
"As might be expected with such a ridiculous (and arrogant(?) (even wince-worthy) pursuit ("Quest!" Fabler had shouted in his office) the paper had not come easily." (p. 121)
But expressive punctuation has been done so much more expressively, so much more inventively, so much more wildly and sensitively, by Arno Schmidt. In other chapters the parentheses serve more logical purposes, for example:
"Astair had no doubt (though) that when Xanther saw the dog (((might have happened already (even now?) when) she threw those gangly arms around its neck (petted it and brushed it (and later walked it and watered it and fed it))) when she named it) all Astair's doubts would join that dim..." (p. 445)
Danielewski sometimes arranges his parentheses so he can surprise readers with many parentheses closing at once, like this )?)))?).
But this sort of thing has been done so much more excessively, and compulsively, by Raymond Roussel in "New Impressions of Africa."
(f) The unintentionally hokey and gauche quality of the graphics extends to the cover design (thick laminated, with a punch-through number "one" and a diagonal cut flap) and even to the endorsements: on the half-title page, they are typeset to run diagonally down the page and into the gutter, as if to suggest there are many of them. Each is surrounded by a little microscript frame, reading "praise praise praise." But the device of running boxes is uninteresting, over-familiar, and unspecific to the subject: it is the rote application of an inappropriate, unmotivated graphic device.
Update, winter 2017
I won't conclude this review, because there are 26 more volumes coming; the fourth has just been released. Danielewski's editor's assistant at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) meeting in Los Angeles in 2016 told me 10 volumes are "firmly" under contract. Despite their bulk, these are not long novels: the editor's assistant said they're about 80,000 words each, which would make the entire series 2,080,000 words, which would put it just over Jules Romains's "Men of Goodwill," the novel that tops Wikipedia's list of the world's longest novels. I wonder if that could possibly not be intentional.
Update, 2022
In spring 2018 Danielewski announced, on Facebook and Instagram (February 2, 2018) that "The Familiar" had been "paused." Pantheon had canceled the series at 5 volumes. He has a very active fan base, with several concurrent reading groups (including one for "The Familiar"), and a massive Google Drive folder filled with fan-generated material (the link used to be http://goo.gl/mjQQTf). So it won't surprise me if there's a reincarnation. There's also an article about it here: www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fa....
Want to read
April 30, 2015The story concerns a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten.
okay, danielewski. you get one more chance to wow me.
make it count!
okay, danielewski. you get one more chance to wow me.
make it count!
July 13, 2017
Not a Kindle read....
Unique layout design- dazzling & riveting & emotional. It took me a few months to finish.
A twelve year old girl sets out with her dad to get a dog. You ask why it takes 800 plus pages to tell this story?? - They have a creature to save......
travel the world and save it! Awesome journey!!! Unbelievably ambitious!
Unique layout design- dazzling & riveting & emotional. It took me a few months to finish.
A twelve year old girl sets out with her dad to get a dog. You ask why it takes 800 plus pages to tell this story?? - They have a creature to save......
travel the world and save it! Awesome journey!!! Unbelievably ambitious!
August 24, 2015
What the fuck was I even reading.
September 11, 2015
Got 200 pages in before I finally gave up. Sorry, Danielewski. Never in my entire life have I seen an author force their fans to wade through so much bullshit just to read a mediocre Young Adult science-fiction story. Love the ambition, but despise the results.
May 7, 2015
bwaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh
I can't believe it'll be 13 years before this is done. I can't even imagine how it will go, what it will be, how any of this connects or works.
but if Danielewski's stated goal was to make the novel compete with modern-day serialized television, he's doing it. He's also doing about eight hundred other things and kind of blowing my mind with each of them. I'm all in on this series, already - and dare-I-say excited to know that I'll have an installment to look forward to every six-or-so months from now until I'm pushing 40.
Oh my god I'll be pushing 40 when this is wrapping up. EEP.
And, I mean, there are plenty of things to call out in this staggeringly ambitious 'debut' - some awkward phrasing, some chapters/narrators that seem superfluous or completely incomprehensible - but, should you turn an overly-critical eye upon the book, you must remember: this is the first of a purported 27 volumes. This is, at best, an introduction. Perhaps, like in TV shows, characters or whole storylines will be cut adrift - perhaps we won't even notice. Maybe we'll get 8, 12, 22 volumes in and realize we're being hosed and that the whole thing will never make sense. But Danielewski is deploying all of his many talents here, showing a love of research, a love of storytelling, and a pronounced desire to deliver a supremely entertaining literary experience that swallows you whole. I will, from now until 2028, be picking up these (absolutely beautiful) volumes as soon as they go onsale (and hopefully Strand will keep dropping them a few weeks early...) - because I want to know what happens next.
If you're willing to take the plunge, jump in now. Don't wait to binge-watch - let's do this old-school.
More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/05...
I can't believe it'll be 13 years before this is done. I can't even imagine how it will go, what it will be, how any of this connects or works.
but if Danielewski's stated goal was to make the novel compete with modern-day serialized television, he's doing it. He's also doing about eight hundred other things and kind of blowing my mind with each of them. I'm all in on this series, already - and dare-I-say excited to know that I'll have an installment to look forward to every six-or-so months from now until I'm pushing 40.
Oh my god I'll be pushing 40 when this is wrapping up. EEP.
And, I mean, there are plenty of things to call out in this staggeringly ambitious 'debut' - some awkward phrasing, some chapters/narrators that seem superfluous or completely incomprehensible - but, should you turn an overly-critical eye upon the book, you must remember: this is the first of a purported 27 volumes. This is, at best, an introduction. Perhaps, like in TV shows, characters or whole storylines will be cut adrift - perhaps we won't even notice. Maybe we'll get 8, 12, 22 volumes in and realize we're being hosed and that the whole thing will never make sense. But Danielewski is deploying all of his many talents here, showing a love of research, a love of storytelling, and a pronounced desire to deliver a supremely entertaining literary experience that swallows you whole. I will, from now until 2028, be picking up these (absolutely beautiful) volumes as soon as they go onsale (and hopefully Strand will keep dropping them a few weeks early...) - because I want to know what happens next.
If you're willing to take the plunge, jump in now. Don't wait to binge-watch - let's do this old-school.
More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/05...
August 28, 2017
I guess it’s funny that I’ve reviewed Volumes 3 and 4 of The Familiar but not 1 and 2. Hell, my write up for Vol. 3 wound up blurb-ed on the back of Vol. 4, so I guess that’s something, right? So why review Vol. 1 now? Out of completionism? Out of some self-serving need? Out of deep admiration and appreciation for the affect these books have? Out of boredom? Commitment to the cause? Procrastination at work—can I say I get paid to write reviews if I do them on company time?
The answer is probably “yes” to all those questions (or most of them, at least), but more importantly is the fact that The Familiar is a singular literary moment in the making that I am not so sure is getting the attention it deserves, so I’ll use my tiny little voice on this remote corner of the internet to profess to you its power. Before I speak directly about Vol. 1, I’ll mention a bit about the series as a whole: I’ve said in later reviews that The Familiar isn’t just a novel in serial, but the development of a whole mythology on par with the classics, codified in our unique 21st century world. The global scope, the webwork of connectivity, the implications of science and technology on humanity, the greater forces (neither bene- nor malevolent, [just volent?]) that affect our lives. The story has a way of swelling like a tide, gathering in more and more water as its crescent rises higher and higher, threatening to subsume you, but only yet just a threat. In that way, any single volume cannot convince a readership—perhaps it will be the series’ fatal issue in an age so desperately in need of instant and immediate (if only surface) gratification—but once a second, and especially a third book has been devoured, only then does the water pull you under, making you as much a part of the tidal crash as the rest of the ocean and the sand and the algae and the fish. And so maybe that’s why I didn’t write reviews for Vols. 1 & 2, because, while they had enough hooks in my skin, it wasn’t until Vol. 3 that the tumblers clicked like a key in a lock, turning over my mind and kicking off—a probably overly obsessive—love for what Danielewski is up to here. Forgive all the mixed metaphors. After 4 books, I can say with surety, The Familiar is his opus and will outshine the accomplishments that House of Leaves made in changing literature.
So, Vol. 1... Wait, before we get there, let’s give a background of this reader’s relationship with his writing: As a young highschoolian underachiever in the early aughts, more dedicated to the drumset after class than academics, reading, writing, etc., I came upon this dark and mysterious object called House of Leaves. I had seen it mentioned on a book-recco thread on a local Cincinnati punk message board (now dead and defunct, RIP Neus Subjex), and happened to be in a Borders bookstore later that day. Flipping through the thing, I was piqued and so I doled out my $20 and changed my life. I read the book feverishly in my room. The book fed nightmares, which excited me for some reason. It made me feel like I had lost my mind. It altered my understanding of what literature is and does and can be, and set me on the path of erudite and arcane and bizarre and wonderfully inventive fictions I continue to walk. Had I not read House of Leaves at that time, I don’t know that I would be a person who reads the Gravity’s Rainbows of the world, the Moby-Dicks, the Absalom, Absaloms. Hell, I don’t know that I would have gone down the lit degree path where I gained my MA, much less working as a professional writer had I not picked up that mysterious tome. Assertively, House of Leaves changed me as a person, or at least unlocked a part of me that allowed me to become this person. The disappointment is that I’ve not been very engaged in Danielewski’s intermining books—Only Revolutions was a true letdown for me, where the form and style didn’t inform the content, which was written in a poetic style that didn’t jive with my tastes, and The 50 Year Sword is a fun romp, though inessential. I had been tracking the progress of The Familiar since first hearing about it, probably in like 2009(?), so when it was finally coming out, I told myself this is my last shot with MZD: He’d delivered such a novel that changed the landscape of novels, that I was okay with the rest of his output being not my cup of tea. Fortunately, I gave him that last shot, renewing my trust in his capable mind (and writing).
Finally, we’re at One Rainy Day in May—which is set on my birthday (not significant, but it did tickle me). I had high hopes with low expectations going in. I mean, the thing sounded fucking weird, and maybe a little arrogant: a 27-volume story about a 12-year old girl and a kitten? And when it came out that each book would be 880 pages, I just laughed. I shelled out again for MZD’s latest excursion, cautiously stepping onto a boat ride that might take 10+ years to get off of. So I read the damn thing and it was… conflicting. There was all this genre-y stuff (YA, comically hard-boiled noir, techno-thriller/cyberpunk). Spatters of a number of foreign languages, with a prominent character writing in a weird pidgin blend of English that challenged my faculties as a reader. Images rendered in text and also actual images littering the pages, overwhelming the senses. A few pages that are just computer code, indecipherable to the casual reader. But at the root, it’s a story about an epileptic and (seemingly) hyper-vulnerable (to bullies, to health, to life) 12-year old girl who leaves the house with the promise of getting a dog and winds up with a cat.
Bait was laid. Traps were set. Couched in the language of a “remediation of the television series,” one had to think of this in terms of a “pilot episode.” The gang’s all here, and the plots are (sorta?) setup, but it all seems so disconnected and conducive to head-spinning. There was so much to latch on to, but yet, not enough to really get a bearing. But, as a pilot, the aesthetics were established, and I had to admit that I was sold for episode two. Vol. 2 expanded on everything great in Vol. 1 and from there, you can see where it lead me by reading my other reviews in the series (Vol. 2 will get its due at the end of August when I finish that re-read with the FB group).
Okay, so I’m really writing much more of an autobiography here than a review. I’m sorry about that. Maybe that says something about me. Maybe it says something about the books. There are plenty of negative to middling reviews on this site (and plenty of positive, mind you), with most of the lower ratings focusing in on not understanding the story immediately (would you judge a film, a TV show on the first 10 minutes? And what is the fun of immediately and completely grasping a story?), or questioning the typographical and ergodic choices leading one to question what the fuck they expected with a book from the master of funny-looking-pages (and, often, those reviewers, rather than question the nature of MZD’s choices, settled on the easiest of possible answers: that they are pointless choices to tell the story—this is wrong and intellectually lazy). My favorite is the one where the guy comes up with a purple-y misnomer (see “rum writer”) that imposes a critical lack of engagement with what he’s criticizing in the book. I think he just came up with this dumb phrase (which is ill-defined in his review and a misnomer because the phrase does nothing to inform you what it means on its own) and then he tried to write a review around it.
Just so you know, if you’re still reading along, I’m really unhappy with how this review is shaping up in contrast to the ones I’ve written for Vols. 3 & 4. I thought I’d have something really great to deliver about this book, so here’s this:
This review comes to you as I re-read the entire series leading up to the release of Vol. 5 (dubbed the “season finale” of “season one”). And where my first read was confounding and perhaps garnered a little tepid of an immediate response from me (though also enticing), a second reading with the full grasp of the succeeding 3 books changed my tune on this one. It’s still, surely, the weakest of the series so far, but unbeknownst to you who reads it (and those of you who’ve made it this far into this banal and boring review), MZD has masterfully placed the set pieces across the board—not just characters, but motifs, meaning, themes, symbols, plot points are all perfectly placed in Vol. 1, set for ripening through the rest of the series. Re-reading reaps rewards, revealing crumbs of ideas that don’t come to bear until 2 and 3 books later, leaving one to wonder how much else lives in Vols. 2-4 that will bear its full fruit down the line.
My advice about The Familiar: read two books before you make your final decision on reading further. Each one can be read in a week—and who doesn’t like the thought of reading 880 pages in a week?—and each one builds the mythology of MZD’s oeuvre exponentially. Find a friend to read it with. You’ll find yourself in conversations and speculations that reach well beyond the bounds of the book, but all still somehow addressed in the book. Because that’s probably one of the most powerful things of all about a book that purports to need twenty-seven 880 page volumes: within it, you will find everything.
My reviews for other books in the series below:
Volume 2: Into the Forest
Volume 3: Honeysuckle & Pain
Volume 4: Hades
The answer is probably “yes” to all those questions (or most of them, at least), but more importantly is the fact that The Familiar is a singular literary moment in the making that I am not so sure is getting the attention it deserves, so I’ll use my tiny little voice on this remote corner of the internet to profess to you its power. Before I speak directly about Vol. 1, I’ll mention a bit about the series as a whole: I’ve said in later reviews that The Familiar isn’t just a novel in serial, but the development of a whole mythology on par with the classics, codified in our unique 21st century world. The global scope, the webwork of connectivity, the implications of science and technology on humanity, the greater forces (neither bene- nor malevolent, [just volent?]) that affect our lives. The story has a way of swelling like a tide, gathering in more and more water as its crescent rises higher and higher, threatening to subsume you, but only yet just a threat. In that way, any single volume cannot convince a readership—perhaps it will be the series’ fatal issue in an age so desperately in need of instant and immediate (if only surface) gratification—but once a second, and especially a third book has been devoured, only then does the water pull you under, making you as much a part of the tidal crash as the rest of the ocean and the sand and the algae and the fish. And so maybe that’s why I didn’t write reviews for Vols. 1 & 2, because, while they had enough hooks in my skin, it wasn’t until Vol. 3 that the tumblers clicked like a key in a lock, turning over my mind and kicking off—a probably overly obsessive—love for what Danielewski is up to here. Forgive all the mixed metaphors. After 4 books, I can say with surety, The Familiar is his opus and will outshine the accomplishments that House of Leaves made in changing literature.
So, Vol. 1... Wait, before we get there, let’s give a background of this reader’s relationship with his writing: As a young highschoolian underachiever in the early aughts, more dedicated to the drumset after class than academics, reading, writing, etc., I came upon this dark and mysterious object called House of Leaves. I had seen it mentioned on a book-recco thread on a local Cincinnati punk message board (now dead and defunct, RIP Neus Subjex), and happened to be in a Borders bookstore later that day. Flipping through the thing, I was piqued and so I doled out my $20 and changed my life. I read the book feverishly in my room. The book fed nightmares, which excited me for some reason. It made me feel like I had lost my mind. It altered my understanding of what literature is and does and can be, and set me on the path of erudite and arcane and bizarre and wonderfully inventive fictions I continue to walk. Had I not read House of Leaves at that time, I don’t know that I would be a person who reads the Gravity’s Rainbows of the world, the Moby-Dicks, the Absalom, Absaloms. Hell, I don’t know that I would have gone down the lit degree path where I gained my MA, much less working as a professional writer had I not picked up that mysterious tome. Assertively, House of Leaves changed me as a person, or at least unlocked a part of me that allowed me to become this person. The disappointment is that I’ve not been very engaged in Danielewski’s intermining books—Only Revolutions was a true letdown for me, where the form and style didn’t inform the content, which was written in a poetic style that didn’t jive with my tastes, and The 50 Year Sword is a fun romp, though inessential. I had been tracking the progress of The Familiar since first hearing about it, probably in like 2009(?), so when it was finally coming out, I told myself this is my last shot with MZD: He’d delivered such a novel that changed the landscape of novels, that I was okay with the rest of his output being not my cup of tea. Fortunately, I gave him that last shot, renewing my trust in his capable mind (and writing).
Finally, we’re at One Rainy Day in May—which is set on my birthday (not significant, but it did tickle me). I had high hopes with low expectations going in. I mean, the thing sounded fucking weird, and maybe a little arrogant: a 27-volume story about a 12-year old girl and a kitten? And when it came out that each book would be 880 pages, I just laughed. I shelled out again for MZD’s latest excursion, cautiously stepping onto a boat ride that might take 10+ years to get off of. So I read the damn thing and it was… conflicting. There was all this genre-y stuff (YA, comically hard-boiled noir, techno-thriller/cyberpunk). Spatters of a number of foreign languages, with a prominent character writing in a weird pidgin blend of English that challenged my faculties as a reader. Images rendered in text and also actual images littering the pages, overwhelming the senses. A few pages that are just computer code, indecipherable to the casual reader. But at the root, it’s a story about an epileptic and (seemingly) hyper-vulnerable (to bullies, to health, to life) 12-year old girl who leaves the house with the promise of getting a dog and winds up with a cat.
Bait was laid. Traps were set. Couched in the language of a “remediation of the television series,” one had to think of this in terms of a “pilot episode.” The gang’s all here, and the plots are (sorta?) setup, but it all seems so disconnected and conducive to head-spinning. There was so much to latch on to, but yet, not enough to really get a bearing. But, as a pilot, the aesthetics were established, and I had to admit that I was sold for episode two. Vol. 2 expanded on everything great in Vol. 1 and from there, you can see where it lead me by reading my other reviews in the series (Vol. 2 will get its due at the end of August when I finish that re-read with the FB group).
Okay, so I’m really writing much more of an autobiography here than a review. I’m sorry about that. Maybe that says something about me. Maybe it says something about the books. There are plenty of negative to middling reviews on this site (and plenty of positive, mind you), with most of the lower ratings focusing in on not understanding the story immediately (would you judge a film, a TV show on the first 10 minutes? And what is the fun of immediately and completely grasping a story?), or questioning the typographical and ergodic choices leading one to question what the fuck they expected with a book from the master of funny-looking-pages (and, often, those reviewers, rather than question the nature of MZD’s choices, settled on the easiest of possible answers: that they are pointless choices to tell the story—this is wrong and intellectually lazy). My favorite is the one where the guy comes up with a purple-y misnomer (see “rum writer”) that imposes a critical lack of engagement with what he’s criticizing in the book. I think he just came up with this dumb phrase (which is ill-defined in his review and a misnomer because the phrase does nothing to inform you what it means on its own) and then he tried to write a review around it.
Just so you know, if you’re still reading along, I’m really unhappy with how this review is shaping up in contrast to the ones I’ve written for Vols. 3 & 4. I thought I’d have something really great to deliver about this book, so here’s this:
This review comes to you as I re-read the entire series leading up to the release of Vol. 5 (dubbed the “season finale” of “season one”). And where my first read was confounding and perhaps garnered a little tepid of an immediate response from me (though also enticing), a second reading with the full grasp of the succeeding 3 books changed my tune on this one. It’s still, surely, the weakest of the series so far, but unbeknownst to you who reads it (and those of you who’ve made it this far into this banal and boring review), MZD has masterfully placed the set pieces across the board—not just characters, but motifs, meaning, themes, symbols, plot points are all perfectly placed in Vol. 1, set for ripening through the rest of the series. Re-reading reaps rewards, revealing crumbs of ideas that don’t come to bear until 2 and 3 books later, leaving one to wonder how much else lives in Vols. 2-4 that will bear its full fruit down the line.
My advice about The Familiar: read two books before you make your final decision on reading further. Each one can be read in a week—and who doesn’t like the thought of reading 880 pages in a week?—and each one builds the mythology of MZD’s oeuvre exponentially. Find a friend to read it with. You’ll find yourself in conversations and speculations that reach well beyond the bounds of the book, but all still somehow addressed in the book. Because that’s probably one of the most powerful things of all about a book that purports to need twenty-seven 880 page volumes: within it, you will find everything.
My reviews for other books in the series below:
Volume 2: Into the Forest
Volume 3: Honeysuckle & Pain
Volume 4: Hades
May 7, 2019
[Not sure a second reading improved my measure of the book. I will begin the second volume though with a reluctance and misgivings about the MZD's use of voice and his waste of space.]
In other words: I am not original. I am merely a blend of current texts neither influenced nor influential because all that I reveal can at any point be reconfigured via any of the above-mentioned subset voicings.
The above quote arrives two-thirds of the way through the first (and likely my last) volume of the planned 27 volume series The Familiar. The highlighted section reveals the nature of the Narrative Constructs, the explanation behind these mysterious statements and explanations which litter the novel form its first pages. The existence of the Narcons isn't a spoiler, it is barely a plot device. Like so much of this, it is filler or masturbation. It isn't that reader will or won't "get" it. The point remains, why? This vague/arty/lazy situation places the author and reader in a strange predicament.
There is some gorgeous writing here. There are also pages and pages of a single word repeated at different angles: why? One explanation is to delineate something via font and image which language can't. If that is the rub, then stick to film.
There are at least a half dozen plotlines. One expects some healthy fleshing in a 22,000 page project, unless "mewl" and "cry" receive the obligatory 9000 pages of distortion and elongation. Another aspect of this project which pisses me off is when people speak a foreign language Danielewski employs the native graphemes. What kind of shit is that?
As I noted above, there is some touching narrative about the host family some spectacular passages about the monsoon gripping Southern California and I have to give it three stars -- despite my internal rumblings and protestations.
MZD is a Pseud. Spread the word.
In other words: I am not original. I am merely a blend of current texts neither influenced nor influential because all that I reveal can at any point be reconfigured via any of the above-mentioned subset voicings.
The above quote arrives two-thirds of the way through the first (and likely my last) volume of the planned 27 volume series The Familiar. The highlighted section reveals the nature of the Narrative Constructs, the explanation behind these mysterious statements and explanations which litter the novel form its first pages. The existence of the Narcons isn't a spoiler, it is barely a plot device. Like so much of this, it is filler or masturbation. It isn't that reader will or won't "get" it. The point remains, why? This vague/arty/lazy situation places the author and reader in a strange predicament.
There is some gorgeous writing here. There are also pages and pages of a single word repeated at different angles: why? One explanation is to delineate something via font and image which language can't. If that is the rub, then stick to film.
There are at least a half dozen plotlines. One expects some healthy fleshing in a 22,000 page project, unless "mewl" and "cry" receive the obligatory 9000 pages of distortion and elongation. Another aspect of this project which pisses me off is when people speak a foreign language Danielewski employs the native graphemes. What kind of shit is that?
As I noted above, there is some touching narrative about the host family some spectacular passages about the monsoon gripping Southern California and I have to give it three stars -- despite my internal rumblings and protestations.
MZD is a Pseud. Spread the word.
April 16, 2015
This book is big. This book is ambitious. It's challenging and experimental and impressionistic. I have nothing against big, ambitious, challenging books. But I really disliked this.
Mark Z. Danielewski is apparently going to publish 27 volumes of this story, and once I found that out, it really helped to make sense of this book. It has the feel of a television pilot, struggling to introduce the themes and diverse cast of characters it features, while never really getting into the meat of the story. In television, that might cost you forty minutes; this takes four days (minimum). I know Danielewski has his hardcore fans (I personally have never read House of Leaves), but I find it hard to believe that people will be willing to invest this much time and effort into a story that, quite frankly, has no real hook.
Danielewski is obviously a talented writer - his play with form and the writing itself can be quite impressive - but I'm checking out. I wish him luck, and hope those that stay with the story find the rewards I could not.
Mark Z. Danielewski is apparently going to publish 27 volumes of this story, and once I found that out, it really helped to make sense of this book. It has the feel of a television pilot, struggling to introduce the themes and diverse cast of characters it features, while never really getting into the meat of the story. In television, that might cost you forty minutes; this takes four days (minimum). I know Danielewski has his hardcore fans (I personally have never read House of Leaves), but I find it hard to believe that people will be willing to invest this much time and effort into a story that, quite frankly, has no real hook.
Danielewski is obviously a talented writer - his play with form and the writing itself can be quite impressive - but I'm checking out. I wish him luck, and hope those that stay with the story find the rewards I could not.
August 30, 2015
I can't put into words how much I loved this book for what it did to my mind while reading!
I believe one should go into this book not knowing anything and remember: this is just the beginning.
I will try to put my thoughts into a video if you want to know more about the book, if you can't go into it blindly or have read it and want to compare ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbOxv...
I believe one should go into this book not knowing anything and remember: this is just the beginning.
I will try to put my thoughts into a video if you want to know more about the book, if you can't go into it blindly or have read it and want to compare ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbOxv...
June 28, 2015
This is a beautiful book that you really need in print, to hold in your hands, to explore, to flip back when you realize something....
The theme of rain comes back and there is actually art made of raindrops or the letters of rain within the text. I'm sure I missed half the hidden stuff but this is the first of 27 volumes (this one is almost 900 pages, so imagine the shelving I will need just for this series alone!). This is immersive, multi-faceted, yet not as terrifying as House of Leaves.
I found myself wishing for audio. House of Leaves had a "soundtrack" from the author's sister and this one would have been beautiful with something to listen to while reading it. This book has several stories going on, as if Cloud Atlas moved into the present, added quantum mechanics, and intertwined the stories. The core story is Xanther and the narrative style for that one takes some getting used to. Each story has its own font and use of the page, and there are beautiful full-page illustrations beginning the chapters as well as spread elsewhere.
"How easily she finds the impossible in the ordinary." (from the astrophysicist (?) in the desert)
"Maybe it was time to stop making longing a lover." (from the Turkish character)
"Outside the rain had come on like it was thunder. With no need for thunder. Like an ocean up there discovered a deeper bottom. And they the bottom. Beating on the van roof for more bottom. Gonna beat through. Weight never rests until there is none." (from the gangland section)
The theme of rain comes back and there is actually art made of raindrops or the letters of rain within the text. I'm sure I missed half the hidden stuff but this is the first of 27 volumes (this one is almost 900 pages, so imagine the shelving I will need just for this series alone!). This is immersive, multi-faceted, yet not as terrifying as House of Leaves.
I found myself wishing for audio. House of Leaves had a "soundtrack" from the author's sister and this one would have been beautiful with something to listen to while reading it. This book has several stories going on, as if Cloud Atlas moved into the present, added quantum mechanics, and intertwined the stories. The core story is Xanther and the narrative style for that one takes some getting used to. Each story has its own font and use of the page, and there are beautiful full-page illustrations beginning the chapters as well as spread elsewhere.
"How easily she finds the impossible in the ordinary." (from the astrophysicist (?) in the desert)
"Maybe it was time to stop making longing a lover." (from the Turkish character)
"Outside the rain had come on like it was thunder. With no need for thunder. Like an ocean up there discovered a deeper bottom. And they the bottom. Beating on the van roof for more bottom. Gonna beat through. Weight never rests until there is none." (from the gangland section)
May 21, 2015
Wonderful.
It's tough to put a specific rating on this book, as it's like reading what could be your favorite book, but being asked to rate it when you're yet only a tenth of the way through (or, here, 1/27th). But, much like a pilot to a television show (as the book intentionally echoes), there's a lot to talk about, a lot to love, a lot to keep hoping for. Others far smarter than me have written brilliant analyses of this already (googling for some of these after reading should be required -- the ShortForCaterina blog being the best).
It's a hard book. Some readers will be lost too quickly and abandon it. That's gonna happen. But what's deeply redeeming is that it's a book that teaches you how to read it, and continues to propel you even if you're struggling. The readability (and likability of Xanther's central narrative) is, for me, that driving force. If you're curious, I can only encourage that 1) it's worth it to take the time to learn how to read it, and 2) the textual play is not simply a gimmick, as those unimpressed by the hype may claim. Danielewski is perhaps the smartest living novelist of our time, if not one of the smartest in the past 100 years. And he's actively challenging narrative frameworks. If you only like straight-forward stories, maybe this isn't for you. But I love it. The work is breaking down language, playing with the very idea of story and meaning and truth and reality, and, god, I LOVE that. House of Leaves demonstrated to us that there is method and reason to the changing textual dynamics, but here it's in a different way. It's a lot more about the text conforming to images, and playing with the way that text breaks down and transitions to the very thing (or, another way of representing the thing) it's referencing. Which I suppose makes it more readable in the sense that it's a bit less (on the surface) intellectually challenging and more of an experience (the purpose of which, though, is still just as challenging).
Of course, most of us are going to talk about how the Familiar compares to House of Leaves. I feel inclined to because HoL is my favorite book of all time and I've never expected anything to top it since reading it. But if anyone's going to do it, it would be MZD. Now, with the Familiar (and very much with Only Revolutions, intentionally), Danielewski has actively tried to do something different from HoL (confessing at a reading in Fort Collins that he doesn't like Sacred Texts, and doesn't want HoL to become that by going even deeper in the story everyone already adores). But the Familiar is a return to a similar world. Narrative-driven, a novel, that brings all the stuff I love about HoL back to the forefront. Though HoL was an exploration of the supernatural, the infinite, tons of human themes and emotion, done intensely, BIG, and deeply smart, I just want, as a fan, to see more of that, even if it's in a different context. And The Familiar aims this direction. The uncanny / supernatural / infinite / darkness is there in The Familiar, but thus far only hinted at. So I can't say it's in the same vein yet, but it's there enough, and it's different enough, that I'm both on board for all the earlier reasons of it being a GREAT book, but also a great book that speaks to me personally and my interests (and, I feel safe to say, to those of the legions of other HoL fans).
So, should you read this? If that all up above sounds good, absolutely. I'll be devouring each book/edition/episode as it drops twice a year. And I say you should too (if just because I'm selfish and am desperately afraid that the momentum won't carry for the publisher to approve the next 25 volumes after the first two). So try this book out (it's a fucking beautiful book, whether you like it or not, and that alone is worth the 25 bucks), and help keep this train moving for the next... oh god, thirteen years.
It's tough to put a specific rating on this book, as it's like reading what could be your favorite book, but being asked to rate it when you're yet only a tenth of the way through (or, here, 1/27th). But, much like a pilot to a television show (as the book intentionally echoes), there's a lot to talk about, a lot to love, a lot to keep hoping for. Others far smarter than me have written brilliant analyses of this already (googling for some of these after reading should be required -- the ShortForCaterina blog being the best).
It's a hard book. Some readers will be lost too quickly and abandon it. That's gonna happen. But what's deeply redeeming is that it's a book that teaches you how to read it, and continues to propel you even if you're struggling. The readability (and likability of Xanther's central narrative) is, for me, that driving force. If you're curious, I can only encourage that 1) it's worth it to take the time to learn how to read it, and 2) the textual play is not simply a gimmick, as those unimpressed by the hype may claim. Danielewski is perhaps the smartest living novelist of our time, if not one of the smartest in the past 100 years. And he's actively challenging narrative frameworks. If you only like straight-forward stories, maybe this isn't for you. But I love it. The work is breaking down language, playing with the very idea of story and meaning and truth and reality, and, god, I LOVE that. House of Leaves demonstrated to us that there is method and reason to the changing textual dynamics, but here it's in a different way. It's a lot more about the text conforming to images, and playing with the way that text breaks down and transitions to the very thing (or, another way of representing the thing) it's referencing. Which I suppose makes it more readable in the sense that it's a bit less (on the surface) intellectually challenging and more of an experience (the purpose of which, though, is still just as challenging).
Of course, most of us are going to talk about how the Familiar compares to House of Leaves. I feel inclined to because HoL is my favorite book of all time and I've never expected anything to top it since reading it. But if anyone's going to do it, it would be MZD. Now, with the Familiar (and very much with Only Revolutions, intentionally), Danielewski has actively tried to do something different from HoL (confessing at a reading in Fort Collins that he doesn't like Sacred Texts, and doesn't want HoL to become that by going even deeper in the story everyone already adores). But the Familiar is a return to a similar world. Narrative-driven, a novel, that brings all the stuff I love about HoL back to the forefront. Though HoL was an exploration of the supernatural, the infinite, tons of human themes and emotion, done intensely, BIG, and deeply smart, I just want, as a fan, to see more of that, even if it's in a different context. And The Familiar aims this direction. The uncanny / supernatural / infinite / darkness is there in The Familiar, but thus far only hinted at. So I can't say it's in the same vein yet, but it's there enough, and it's different enough, that I'm both on board for all the earlier reasons of it being a GREAT book, but also a great book that speaks to me personally and my interests (and, I feel safe to say, to those of the legions of other HoL fans).
So, should you read this? If that all up above sounds good, absolutely. I'll be devouring each book/edition/episode as it drops twice a year. And I say you should too (if just because I'm selfish and am desperately afraid that the momentum won't carry for the publisher to approve the next 25 volumes after the first two). So try this book out (it's a fucking beautiful book, whether you like it or not, and that alone is worth the 25 bucks), and help keep this train moving for the next... oh god, thirteen years.
June 16, 2015
Math warning! Then a slight review!
It's really 3.7564536 stars, an irrational number that I've rounded for your benefit. Remember an irrational number is a number with a decimal that never ends and never repeats. Or, a simpler way, perhaps, of remembering it, is that the number cannot be written as a fraction like rational numbers (2/3 is rational, so is -4 because that can be expressed at -4/1.). e, pi, square root of 2 are examples of irrational numbers. The real numbers are made up of both rational and irrational numbers. Despite our using rational numbers almost exclusively in our everyday math lives (yes, you do use them, I hear you snickering in the back row), the irrational numbers are dense in the real number system. What does that mean? Well, let's imagine a real number line stretching from one corner of the universe to the other, with it conveniently wrapping around the earth once or twice, and I gave every person who ever lived a dart. Before perishing everyone gets a chance to throw the dart at the number line, which is comprised of both rational numbers (again, 2, 1, 0, -3, 2/3 etc) and irrational numbers. The probability that anyone would hit a rational number on that number line is 0. If you're still with me, yeah 0. No tricks like the dart misses or bounces off like when you think you hit a bullseye but only hit the stupid metal circle enclosing the bullseye. Probability of 0, no statistical chance of hitting a rational number. Because...in the real number system there are no consecutive rational numbers, which implies that there are infinite irrationals between any two rationals, so that number line would essentially be those infinite irrationals between those two lonely rationals stuck somewhere at the edges of the (mostly) infinite universe. You know those rationals are out there somewhere, but you'll never be able to hit them. Find them.
Reading THE FAMILIAR vol 1 is like dealing with and thinking about irrational numbers. You sense them there more than you know they're there. You know there's some grand, deeper meaning hidden in the seemingly random stretch of numbers that never repeat, but it's just beyond your grasp.
House of Leaves is one of my favorite novels ever. Only Revolutions I couldn't finish and thought the typographical trickery was just that. In THE FAMILIAR it works as there's a wonderful sense of visual rhythm (as opposed to textual rhythm) within the book that's genius.
The heart of the book are the Xanther sections. They are well done and compelling (although she's a little precious and treated as the glass-figurine-little-girl (and the big emotional climax hinges on an everyday creature that made me say really? (and I said it out loud, like twice, in a lumpy space princess accent too))). Some of the other story threads are, frankly, an unreadable mess, but still entertaining.
There is more than enough there to keep me going. I do worry how, if this is to be a 27 volume THING, I can possibly keep up with this ever expanding irrational number.
It's really 3.7564536 stars, an irrational number that I've rounded for your benefit. Remember an irrational number is a number with a decimal that never ends and never repeats. Or, a simpler way, perhaps, of remembering it, is that the number cannot be written as a fraction like rational numbers (2/3 is rational, so is -4 because that can be expressed at -4/1.). e, pi, square root of 2 are examples of irrational numbers. The real numbers are made up of both rational and irrational numbers. Despite our using rational numbers almost exclusively in our everyday math lives (yes, you do use them, I hear you snickering in the back row), the irrational numbers are dense in the real number system. What does that mean? Well, let's imagine a real number line stretching from one corner of the universe to the other, with it conveniently wrapping around the earth once or twice, and I gave every person who ever lived a dart. Before perishing everyone gets a chance to throw the dart at the number line, which is comprised of both rational numbers (again, 2, 1, 0, -3, 2/3 etc) and irrational numbers. The probability that anyone would hit a rational number on that number line is 0. If you're still with me, yeah 0. No tricks like the dart misses or bounces off like when you think you hit a bullseye but only hit the stupid metal circle enclosing the bullseye. Probability of 0, no statistical chance of hitting a rational number. Because...in the real number system there are no consecutive rational numbers, which implies that there are infinite irrationals between any two rationals, so that number line would essentially be those infinite irrationals between those two lonely rationals stuck somewhere at the edges of the (mostly) infinite universe. You know those rationals are out there somewhere, but you'll never be able to hit them. Find them.
Reading THE FAMILIAR vol 1 is like dealing with and thinking about irrational numbers. You sense them there more than you know they're there. You know there's some grand, deeper meaning hidden in the seemingly random stretch of numbers that never repeat, but it's just beyond your grasp.
House of Leaves is one of my favorite novels ever. Only Revolutions I couldn't finish and thought the typographical trickery was just that. In THE FAMILIAR it works as there's a wonderful sense of visual rhythm (as opposed to textual rhythm) within the book that's genius.
The heart of the book are the Xanther sections. They are well done and compelling (although she's a little precious and treated as the glass-figurine-little-girl (and the big emotional climax hinges on an everyday creature that made me say really? (and I said it out loud, like twice, in a lumpy space princess accent too))). Some of the other story threads are, frankly, an unreadable mess, but still entertaining.
There is more than enough there to keep me going. I do worry how, if this is to be a 27 volume THING, I can possibly keep up with this ever expanding irrational number.
November 28, 2017
There are some great, insightful reviews of The Familiar (Book 1), here on Goodreads.
My enjoyment of One Rainy Day In May, and better understanding has also been vastly assisted by the excellent FANDOM Wikia, and by Ian Scuffling and his Goodreads Familiar Group.
I've completed volume 1, the characters have been introduced, the scene is set, and with four follow up volumes published I’m ready for full on immersion in time for Christmas 2017.
Danielewski fans need little or no encouragement from me, but I wonder how many readers are based outside the United States?
As a UK resident I have not come across much coverage of The Familiar, and that's a pity.
The excellent Goldsmiths Prize was started in 2013 for fiction that “opens up new possibilities for the novel form”.
It's just as well that Danielewski isn't British. He would contend for the prize every year (with two offerings!) and would become the resident winner in most years, I suspect.
The 2017 Goldsmith winner H(A)PPY is in so many ways an imitation of The Familar (or of House of Leaves). The use of colour in H(A)PPY, and shaping of text across and around the lines of prose is very evocative of Danielewski.
The Familiar narrative is expressed in a variety of different voices (nine characters, and effectively six different (potentially interlinked) stories).
(You have to be careful of the brackets with the Familiar!)
Anwar and Xanther are, so far, central to the story, and the most conventionally written. The father daughter dynamic between the two is absolutely loving and convincing. Its full of word play.
There are two strands of The Familiar that remind me (so far) of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings . The Jamaican patois in James’s book is matched by Jingjing in Singapore, and Luther in Los Angeles. It’s difficult at first, but amazingly the reader starts to get a natural feel for the words and message.
There’s significant parts that are versed in contemporary (21st century) technology. The deep reaches of the internet, and the covert espionage and Intelligence communities are lurking in the background. The world of computer gaming is strongly featured. There’s paranoia building throughout. It will be fascinating to read back on this in 2028 when the world is a different place, to see how this is reflected in Danielewski’s dynamic writing.
And small surprises abound. I wonder if Martin Freeman, or Serena Williams ever thought they would get referenced in literature of such cutting edge?
The legacies of Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace are in good hands.
My enjoyment of One Rainy Day In May, and better understanding has also been vastly assisted by the excellent FANDOM Wikia, and by Ian Scuffling and his Goodreads Familiar Group.
I've completed volume 1, the characters have been introduced, the scene is set, and with four follow up volumes published I’m ready for full on immersion in time for Christmas 2017.
Danielewski fans need little or no encouragement from me, but I wonder how many readers are based outside the United States?
As a UK resident I have not come across much coverage of The Familiar, and that's a pity.
The excellent Goldsmiths Prize was started in 2013 for fiction that “opens up new possibilities for the novel form”.
It's just as well that Danielewski isn't British. He would contend for the prize every year (with two offerings!) and would become the resident winner in most years, I suspect.
The 2017 Goldsmith winner H(A)PPY is in so many ways an imitation of The Familar (or of House of Leaves). The use of colour in H(A)PPY, and shaping of text across and around the lines of prose is very evocative of Danielewski.
The Familiar narrative is expressed in a variety of different voices (nine characters, and effectively six different (potentially interlinked) stories).
(You have to be careful of the brackets with the Familiar!)
Anwar and Xanther are, so far, central to the story, and the most conventionally written. The father daughter dynamic between the two is absolutely loving and convincing. Its full of word play.
There are two strands of The Familiar that remind me (so far) of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings . The Jamaican patois in James’s book is matched by Jingjing in Singapore, and Luther in Los Angeles. It’s difficult at first, but amazingly the reader starts to get a natural feel for the words and message.
There’s significant parts that are versed in contemporary (21st century) technology. The deep reaches of the internet, and the covert espionage and Intelligence communities are lurking in the background. The world of computer gaming is strongly featured. There’s paranoia building throughout. It will be fascinating to read back on this in 2028 when the world is a different place, to see how this is reflected in Danielewski’s dynamic writing.
And small surprises abound. I wonder if Martin Freeman, or Serena Williams ever thought they would get referenced in literature of such cutting edge?
The legacies of Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace are in good hands.
November 30, 2014
It's like a strange dream, a confirmation and an explosion of my intuitions; that the visions half-articulated by the earlier stories are all occurring now in real time, horrifyingly, and so much more clearly than I had been able to hope.
Mark knows his symbolic language, this universe of his, which is our universe, inside and out. It's in every paragraph. What bothers me— which means, what I love about it— is how much I understand, and how much it makes me sure I don't understand it all, at all.
His most approachable, readable work, even as it gets into the strangest territories of his obsessions more deeply than anything that has preceded. I loved it. The characters, composition, and concept are better than I had dared to dream.
The best thing I can think to say about The Familiar is that it makes everything else he's ever published feel like a prelude. House of Leaves? An appetizer. Only Revolutions? A neapolitan sherbet. The Fifty Year Sword? The mood lighting.
With The Familiar, we are the main course.
Mark knows his symbolic language, this universe of his, which is our universe, inside and out. It's in every paragraph. What bothers me— which means, what I love about it— is how much I understand, and how much it makes me sure I don't understand it all, at all.
His most approachable, readable work, even as it gets into the strangest territories of his obsessions more deeply than anything that has preceded. I loved it. The characters, composition, and concept are better than I had dared to dream.
The best thing I can think to say about The Familiar is that it makes everything else he's ever published feel like a prelude. House of Leaves? An appetizer. Only Revolutions? A neapolitan sherbet. The Fifty Year Sword? The mood lighting.
With The Familiar, we are the main course.
started_finish_later
November 29, 2015weird but quite interesting so far - a novel that has the 7 indeterminate limits ( 0/0, 0*infinity, 1^infinity, etc)on one page and the fallacious proof that 1=2 dividing by zero on another page is definitely one I want to read; also excellent artwork and while sometimes the scattered words pages typical of the author are annoying, the novel is worth the time and effort so far
read about 200 pages - bought the ebook (which in the BN epub form is quite decently looking on the 9'' HD+ )but this one needs the print edition too so i ordered that - definitely worth so far and while I am still mostly clueless what is about and where it will go (not to forget that while having 800+ pages it is still volume 1), I can see this one becoming a huge favorite
read about 200 pages - bought the ebook (which in the BN epub form is quite decently looking on the 9'' HD+ )but this one needs the print edition too so i ordered that - definitely worth so far and while I am still mostly clueless what is about and where it will go (not to forget that while having 800+ pages it is still volume 1), I can see this one becoming a huge favorite
May 25, 2015
I loved this. I can't believe there are going to be 27 vols and I can't imagine where it will go by the end but I for one am along for the ride.
Read
November 4, 2016Let's run some numbers.
We have here volume #1 of 26 ; subsequent volumes released on a 6=monthly basis. This first in May 2015. The final volume, 13 years later ; some time around October 2028* ;; which is like several presidential terms hence.
Here we have 880 pages. The average of the first 4 volumes (for which we have data) :: 850 (we'll call it). Times 26 volumes :: 22,100 pages.
Not bad.
BUT. I do not have a word count ; and the D-to-the-ZMan is notorious for his white=page=space. I read these 880 pages in like five days ; which for me is like a normally (but seriously words/page can vary by a factor of three) typeset 250-300(?) page novel. We'll let that question rest for now. Unless I can google something.
That's a lot of stuff. I'm not convinced (what a stupid thing to say ; who's convinced about what will/won't be pub'd in '028?) the 6/month schedule will hold, nor that we'll get all 26. No idea if it's all written. But, what?, it takes six months to book=design the whole mf, sure. But it shouldn't matter because with something this big, there is no aesthetic way it can have one of those old=fashion'd novelistic resolutions. Too much sprawl. Like the westward=expansion (imperialistic analogy) across the US=West didn't really end/resolve in CA ; but finally just got underway. That's the way it is with these big novels (minus the imperialistic=analogy because that would mis=indicate generally the scope of this kind of novel whose politics are worn upon the sleeve like in that one everyone misreads --; The Tunnel). At any rate, The Z Man's got 22,100 pages in which to stretch out in and just let stuff happen (or not). And in today's world, when paper's cheap, anyone can take their 22,100 pages and just let it run. Like back in the day when Giacomo Casanova ran on and on about stuff for (not quite 22,100) many=many pages.
And Casnova's not the only one. Back in the day there were some literary projects (lets not belittle them with "series" which is a seriously unfortunately lost word ;; series just gets episodes takt=on like the way television was back in the day ;; keep the franchise going. 'project' is of course a unity. But don't confuse the aesthetic=sprawl of the BIG Novel with the many=page count of the mere=series. If you're willing you too can make these distinctions ; unless you're one of those ________) which make the Seven Dreams look like a weekend's bit of novellas. Like there's that one from Balzac, La Comédie Humaine {the gr=db is a wreck on this one} which according to wikiland consists of "91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works" [I know, right?] and there's that one from Émile Zola whose Les Rougon-Macquart consists of something like 20 novels. Of course someone like Danielewski, his whole thing is going to be altogether different from these two French Men with their naturalism which today is definitely not in vogue [thank gods!] and so you'll say you can't compare so fine. Just that there's some precedent for this kind of thing but our anemic literary culture today still can't get over something so strange(?).
But the Book Design. Used to be one'd have to do this kind of thing on a type=writer. One page at a time. Like Federman. page after page after page of the same damn thing trying to get it all to fit write where you wanted it and then the printer couldn't even typeset (the $$$, the $$$, won't someone think of the $$$!!) the damn thing so it gets printed directly from his typescript. Just like with Zettel's Traum. And then one day computers come along and things like the above mentioned gass tunnel is doable and Federman's first two novels find themselves in properly typeset=and=bound editions and eventually even Zettel's Traum gets the works {and don't forget what Faulkner wanted done with The S & the F} and meanwhile folks like this Danielewski guy here discover all the shit you can screw with when you've got a big multi=media type computer thing writing your novel with you. And a(n apparently) patient and willing publisher.
God bless you Mark.
But so is it any good? Sure is a hell of a lot of fun. And yes it does resolve him from the catastrophes his two previous books were. Without being quite a throwback to his StarMaking first novel ;; although true to say there's of lot of that one here too and not just the graphics.
Look, the title is literal. Our first volume here really does take place on a single day in May. 2014. That is, each chapter is timestamped (fore and aft) such that the novel runs from 08:03:05 05/10/2014 to 23:27:02 05/10/2014. {Mostly in LA (so far).} Which of course is a little gimmicky but I think it's funny. Here's what came to mind when I saw those timestamps ; what came to mind was the title of Steven Moore's first thing he did on Gaddis, ie, "Chronological Difficulties in the novels of William Gaddis". So if you're one of those persnickety readers, keep a stopwatch at your side cuz you know he won't be able to keep up that kind of punctuality over the course of 22,100 pages.
Yes, quantity --> quality. iff you understand what 'quantity' is and what 'quality' is. And there's definitely going to be a quality shift happening here. You just can't avoid it ; like with Marx and his thing about modes of production and things of this nature. To say nothing of The Greater Logic.
Looking forward to Volume the Second.
* I ain't got the html to even mimic The Big Z. But once upon a time I came a bit closer ; put a bit more effort into it. viz ::
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
We have here volume #1 of 26 ; subsequent volumes released on a 6=monthly basis. This first in May 2015. The final volume, 13 years later ; some time around October 2028* ;; which is like several presidential terms hence.
Here we have 880 pages. The average of the first 4 volumes (for which we have data) :: 850 (we'll call it). Times 26 volumes :: 22,100 pages.
Not bad.
BUT. I do not have a word count ; and the D-to-the-ZMan is notorious for his white=page=space. I read these 880 pages in like five days ; which for me is like a normally (but seriously words/page can vary by a factor of three) typeset 250-300(?) page novel. We'll let that question rest for now. Unless I can google something.
That's a lot of stuff. I'm not convinced (what a stupid thing to say ; who's convinced about what will/won't be pub'd in '028?) the 6/month schedule will hold, nor that we'll get all 26. No idea if it's all written. But, what?, it takes six months to book=design the whole mf, sure. But it shouldn't matter because with something this big, there is no aesthetic way it can have one of those old=fashion'd novelistic resolutions. Too much sprawl. Like the westward=expansion (imperialistic analogy) across the US=West didn't really end/resolve in CA ; but finally just got underway. That's the way it is with these big novels (minus the imperialistic=analogy because that would mis=indicate generally the scope of this kind of novel whose politics are worn upon the sleeve like in that one everyone misreads --; The Tunnel). At any rate, The Z Man's got 22,100 pages in which to stretch out in and just let stuff happen (or not). And in today's world, when paper's cheap, anyone can take their 22,100 pages and just let it run. Like back in the day when Giacomo Casanova ran on and on about stuff for (not quite 22,100) many=many pages.
And Casnova's not the only one. Back in the day there were some literary projects (lets not belittle them with "series" which is a seriously unfortunately lost word ;; series just gets episodes takt=on like the way television was back in the day ;; keep the franchise going. 'project' is of course a unity. But don't confuse the aesthetic=sprawl of the BIG Novel with the many=page count of the mere=series. If you're willing you too can make these distinctions ; unless you're one of those ________) which make the Seven Dreams look like a weekend's bit of novellas. Like there's that one from Balzac, La Comédie Humaine {the gr=db is a wreck on this one} which according to wikiland consists of "91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works" [I know, right?] and there's that one from Émile Zola whose Les Rougon-Macquart consists of something like 20 novels. Of course someone like Danielewski, his whole thing is going to be altogether different from these two French Men with their naturalism which today is definitely not in vogue [thank gods!] and so you'll say you can't compare so fine. Just that there's some precedent for this kind of thing but our anemic literary culture today still can't get over something so strange(?).
But the Book Design. Used to be one'd have to do this kind of thing on a type=writer. One page at a time. Like Federman. page after page after page of the same damn thing trying to get it all to fit write where you wanted it and then the printer couldn't even typeset (the $$$, the $$$, won't someone think of the $$$!!) the damn thing so it gets printed directly from his typescript. Just like with Zettel's Traum. And then one day computers come along and things like the above mentioned gass tunnel is doable and Federman's first two novels find themselves in properly typeset=and=bound editions and eventually even Zettel's Traum gets the works {and don't forget what Faulkner wanted done with The S & the F} and meanwhile folks like this Danielewski guy here discover all the shit you can screw with when you've got a big multi=media type computer thing writing your novel with you. And a(n apparently) patient and willing publisher.
God bless you Mark.
But so is it any good? Sure is a hell of a lot of fun. And yes it does resolve him from the catastrophes his two previous books were. Without being quite a throwback to his StarMaking first novel ;; although true to say there's of lot of that one here too and not just the graphics.
Look, the title is literal. Our first volume here really does take place on a single day in May. 2014. That is, each chapter is timestamped (fore and aft) such that the novel runs from 08:03:05 05/10/2014 to 23:27:02 05/10/2014. {Mostly in LA (so far).} Which of course is a little gimmicky but I think it's funny. Here's what came to mind when I saw those timestamps ; what came to mind was the title of Steven Moore's first thing he did on Gaddis, ie, "Chronological Difficulties in the novels of William Gaddis". So if you're one of those persnickety readers, keep a stopwatch at your side cuz you know he won't be able to keep up that kind of punctuality over the course of 22,100 pages.
Yes, quantity --> quality. iff you understand what 'quantity' is and what 'quality' is. And there's definitely going to be a quality shift happening here. You just can't avoid it ; like with Marx and his thing about modes of production and things of this nature. To say nothing of The Greater Logic.
Looking forward to Volume the Second.
* I ain't got the html to even mimic The Big Z. But once upon a time I came a bit closer ; put a bit more effort into it. viz ::
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
did-not-finish
July 10, 2020Cheguei à conclusão de que a vida é muito curta para ler uma série de 26 livros que, provavelmente, nunca será terminada.
August 12, 2016
This is a tough book to review...
As someone who routinely reads epic fantasies, the size of an individual book (or series) usually isn't a concern for me. (I've read the Malazan series [10 books], the Wheel of Time [14 books], the Dresden Files [15 and counting], the Cerebus comic series, etc.)
That said, I'm not sure how I feel about this book, or this series, even after reading this behemoth of a novel.... (I'm not even sure I can accurately summarize the book, if asked.)
I feel like it verged on potential greatness, but fell just shy? And while I liked this book overall, I'm not sure I'm intrigued enough to continue with the series in the hopes that that greatness is borne out....
I'm giving this 3.5 stars (rounded to 4 for the sheer audacity), subject to a re-review at a later date....
As someone who routinely reads epic fantasies, the size of an individual book (or series) usually isn't a concern for me. (I've read the Malazan series [10 books], the Wheel of Time [14 books], the Dresden Files [15 and counting], the Cerebus comic series, etc.)
That said, I'm not sure how I feel about this book, or this series, even after reading this behemoth of a novel.... (I'm not even sure I can accurately summarize the book, if asked.)
I feel like it verged on potential greatness, but fell just shy? And while I liked this book overall, I'm not sure I'm intrigued enough to continue with the series in the hopes that that greatness is borne out....
I'm giving this 3.5 stars (rounded to 4 for the sheer audacity), subject to a re-review at a later date....
December 12, 2017
"Dad always says reading is a risky business"
It’s hard to know where to start when writing something about this book. Essentially, it is 839 pages in which almost nothing happens. Well, that’s not true, a lot happens, but very little moves forward. There’s a clue in the title: “One Rainy Day In May”. All the action takes place on a single day (10 May 2014) and, you’ve guessed it, it rains a lot. The heart of the book belongs to Xanther, a young girl battling epilepsy, and her mother Astair and step-father Anwar. Various chapters are told from their perspectives. But there are six other protagonists, as well, and it is not clear for a long time whether or not their sections are related to Xanther’s. Some of them are difficult to read because of the language used (slang, patois - a bit like trying to read A Brief History of Seven Killings but without all the violence).
The other, perhaps even more, noticeable thing about the book is the typesetting. The book is more a work of art than it is a novel. There are pages laid out to look like falling rain, pages with white circles or parts of circles in the middle, pages with just two quarters of the page written on … and I could go on. In fact, you have to ask how Nicola Barker won The Goldsmiths prize for innovation when this was already two years old and does everything Barker did and more.
I’m not going to explain anything about what happens to any of the nine protagonists. Seeing them progress through the “one rainy day”, wondering if their stories are linked and then starting to discover some links is a large part of the fun to be had reading this and I wouldn’t want to spoil that for anyone.
I’ve seen a few criticisms levelled at the book due to its lack of cohesion and narrative progression. However, I think it is important to note that it is the first volume of a planned 27 volumes that will not all be published until 2028 (I’ll be 67, for goodness’ sake!). Throwing those criticisms at it seems a bit unfair when you consider that this represents maybe the first 15-20 pages of a normal novel. Would you expect everything to hang together in just 20 pages? Would you expect to know how all the characters linked to one another? You have to be prepared to play the long game, and reset your expectations accordingly, if you want to enjoy what Danielewski is doing.
Reading is a risky business. I imagine a lot of people will read 50 pages of this, turn the book from side to side to read the strange layouts, puzzle over the unrelated plot lines and just put it down. And I, for one, could do without the multiple nested parentheses (which I ended up (perhaps unsurprisingly (but probably (almost certainly) not as the author intended)) ignoring and reading (as best I could)(maybe this is wrong) as plain text (which seemed (mostly) to make (sort of) sense)). (I’ve knocked a star off for those shenanigans).
But that aside, I am keen to know what happens to all the nine protagonists I have met over the last few days. I think I am willing to take the risk: I have the feeling that you need to invest time in reading at least the first three volumes before you can really judge). Don’t be put off by the page count: it’s 839 pages but it reads like about 350 pages with all the white space, graphics and unusual page layouts. I’m certainly intrigued enough to want to pick up Volume 2 and see where it goes. I have some concerns that the triumph of form over content might mean the story runs out of steam, but there’s enough in this first volume to suggest that, actually, exactly the opposite might happen and I could be sucked into a multi-year reading project.
PS There’s a wiki available to help you. I didn’t use it when reading, but I imagine I will use it when I get to Volume 2 as there is going to be a break of several weeks now because of other reading commitments. It will be useful when (assuming I do) I’ve caught up and have to wait 6 months between volumes.
PPS Although I do a fair proportion of my reading on a Kindle, I would add a warning here that this one needs to be read as a paper book. It will not work on a Kindle and I would say "Don't even think about it!".
It’s hard to know where to start when writing something about this book. Essentially, it is 839 pages in which almost nothing happens. Well, that’s not true, a lot happens, but very little moves forward. There’s a clue in the title: “One Rainy Day In May”. All the action takes place on a single day (10 May 2014) and, you’ve guessed it, it rains a lot. The heart of the book belongs to Xanther, a young girl battling epilepsy, and her mother Astair and step-father Anwar. Various chapters are told from their perspectives. But there are six other protagonists, as well, and it is not clear for a long time whether or not their sections are related to Xanther’s. Some of them are difficult to read because of the language used (slang, patois - a bit like trying to read A Brief History of Seven Killings but without all the violence).
The other, perhaps even more, noticeable thing about the book is the typesetting. The book is more a work of art than it is a novel. There are pages laid out to look like falling rain, pages with white circles or parts of circles in the middle, pages with just two quarters of the page written on … and I could go on. In fact, you have to ask how Nicola Barker won The Goldsmiths prize for innovation when this was already two years old and does everything Barker did and more.
I’m not going to explain anything about what happens to any of the nine protagonists. Seeing them progress through the “one rainy day”, wondering if their stories are linked and then starting to discover some links is a large part of the fun to be had reading this and I wouldn’t want to spoil that for anyone.
I’ve seen a few criticisms levelled at the book due to its lack of cohesion and narrative progression. However, I think it is important to note that it is the first volume of a planned 27 volumes that will not all be published until 2028 (I’ll be 67, for goodness’ sake!). Throwing those criticisms at it seems a bit unfair when you consider that this represents maybe the first 15-20 pages of a normal novel. Would you expect everything to hang together in just 20 pages? Would you expect to know how all the characters linked to one another? You have to be prepared to play the long game, and reset your expectations accordingly, if you want to enjoy what Danielewski is doing.
Reading is a risky business. I imagine a lot of people will read 50 pages of this, turn the book from side to side to read the strange layouts, puzzle over the unrelated plot lines and just put it down. And I, for one, could do without the multiple nested parentheses (which I ended up (perhaps unsurprisingly (but probably (almost certainly) not as the author intended)) ignoring and reading (as best I could)(maybe this is wrong) as plain text (which seemed (mostly) to make (sort of) sense)). (I’ve knocked a star off for those shenanigans).
But that aside, I am keen to know what happens to all the nine protagonists I have met over the last few days. I think I am willing to take the risk: I have the feeling that you need to invest time in reading at least the first three volumes before you can really judge). Don’t be put off by the page count: it’s 839 pages but it reads like about 350 pages with all the white space, graphics and unusual page layouts. I’m certainly intrigued enough to want to pick up Volume 2 and see where it goes. I have some concerns that the triumph of form over content might mean the story runs out of steam, but there’s enough in this first volume to suggest that, actually, exactly the opposite might happen and I could be sucked into a multi-year reading project.
PS There’s a wiki available to help you. I didn’t use it when reading, but I imagine I will use it when I get to Volume 2 as there is going to be a break of several weeks now because of other reading commitments. It will be useful when (assuming I do) I’ve caught up and have to wait 6 months between volumes.
PPS Although I do a fair proportion of my reading on a Kindle, I would add a warning here that this one needs to be read as a paper book. It will not work on a Kindle and I would say "Don't even think about it!".
June 15, 2015
I believe I'm done with Danielewski. Or maybe I'm not; maybe just until The Familiar is finished.
I'm one of these people who loved House of Leaves. I felt that the plot was on point and that the writing trickery supplemented the story wonderfully.
I also love experimental literature, with The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia being my favourite book. I love novels like The Raw Shark Texts, or The Third Policeman, and just other novels that like to mess with the conventional format of literature. Hell, when I finally get around to writing a book, there's a very real possibility I include gimmicks in it.
When he released Only Revolutions, I admired how it looked but just could not read it. The most use I got out of it was using it to keep my broken door shut. It felt more like the style, while gorgeous, hindered the narrative. Cool idea but overstuffed.
Now we're at The Familiar and we have 880 pages of him doing what he is known to do, only it doesn't look as nice as Only Revolutions (or House of Leaves), nor does it have the depth and clever writing as House of Leaves. It's boring and confusing, with the latter complaint not being in an endearing way. HoL was confusing but you could enjoy it on a more shallow surface level if you were so inclined; if deep thought about it wasn't your thing.
If the gimmicks aren't recycled from his superior debut (like colouring the word 'familiar', then the new ones simply don't work. It's still mildly enjoyable to flip through and see what he does, but that's about it.
It flips around between a ton of different characters, which is fine, but are they interesting? Nope, not really. Very little happens in such a huge book, and while I'm well aware that the page layout makes the book length a little deceiving, there is no reason to care about these people. Xanther is the only character who has a fairly compelling story and Danielewski tries to butcher it by (putting) ((too many)) ((Parentheses)))). Ultimately, he kills whatever solid writing may be there because he doesn't let it breathe. At all.
I never felt that House of Leaves was cheesy. I never rolled my eyes at the writing. But with The Familiar I often sat there wondering what the hell this obviously intelligent man was doing.
There's going to be those who love it and I wanted to be in that group so bad. There are those who will defend the multiple fonts, the way the pages are set up, the literary rain, and all the other gimmicks that he employs, and I will gladly listen... but I don't think it can convince me. I have put thought into why he has chosen to present his ideas in the ways that he has, but by the end of the day, I couldn't care less.
I'm one of these people who loved House of Leaves. I felt that the plot was on point and that the writing trickery supplemented the story wonderfully.
I also love experimental literature, with The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia being my favourite book. I love novels like The Raw Shark Texts, or The Third Policeman, and just other novels that like to mess with the conventional format of literature. Hell, when I finally get around to writing a book, there's a very real possibility I include gimmicks in it.
When he released Only Revolutions, I admired how it looked but just could not read it. The most use I got out of it was using it to keep my broken door shut. It felt more like the style, while gorgeous, hindered the narrative. Cool idea but overstuffed.
Now we're at The Familiar and we have 880 pages of him doing what he is known to do, only it doesn't look as nice as Only Revolutions (or House of Leaves), nor does it have the depth and clever writing as House of Leaves. It's boring and confusing, with the latter complaint not being in an endearing way. HoL was confusing but you could enjoy it on a more shallow surface level if you were so inclined; if deep thought about it wasn't your thing.
If the gimmicks aren't recycled from his superior debut (like colouring the word 'familiar', then the new ones simply don't work. It's still mildly enjoyable to flip through and see what he does, but that's about it.
It flips around between a ton of different characters, which is fine, but are they interesting? Nope, not really. Very little happens in such a huge book, and while I'm well aware that the page layout makes the book length a little deceiving, there is no reason to care about these people. Xanther is the only character who has a fairly compelling story and Danielewski tries to butcher it by (putting) ((too many)) ((Parentheses)))). Ultimately, he kills whatever solid writing may be there because he doesn't let it breathe. At all.
I never felt that House of Leaves was cheesy. I never rolled my eyes at the writing. But with The Familiar I often sat there wondering what the hell this obviously intelligent man was doing.
There's going to be those who love it and I wanted to be in that group so bad. There are those who will defend the multiple fonts, the way the pages are set up, the literary rain, and all the other gimmicks that he employs, and I will gladly listen... but I don't think it can convince me. I have put thought into why he has chosen to present his ideas in the ways that he has, but by the end of the day, I couldn't care less.
July 30, 2015
I'm marking this as read as this is as read as this book will ever get with me. I read 300 pages and skimmed the rest, searching - fruitlessly - for a shred of a plot line that contained a character I was interested in or was at least fleshed out enough to vaguely understand. To learn that this is the first of 27 volumes, I can understand why each character is so minimally expanded on. The only character of any interest to me was Xanther (the 12-year-old girl) and really all the rest could have been edited out for as little interest or information they provide. The character in Singapore was completely incomprehensible. An excerpt:
"they saysay she tutor demons, lah. saysay mice dance to her finger snap and a pelesit - Animistic spirit frequently aligned with Polong - does her bidding. saysay sa-rukup rang bumi- World Coverer - fly to her window and call her mother. they saysay a lot." (page 101)
Um?
I thought this would be an interesting take on my perception of what a novel is but there is zero chance that I will force myself to wait thirteen years and thousands of pages to slog through crap writing that I am unable to comprehend to figure out if there is actually a narrative thread in there. Nope. Sorry.
"they saysay she tutor demons, lah. saysay mice dance to her finger snap and a pelesit - Animistic spirit frequently aligned with Polong - does her bidding. saysay sa-rukup rang bumi- World Coverer - fly to her window and call her mother. they saysay a lot." (page 101)
Um?
I thought this would be an interesting take on my perception of what a novel is but there is zero chance that I will force myself to wait thirteen years and thousands of pages to slog through crap writing that I am unable to comprehend to figure out if there is actually a narrative thread in there. Nope. Sorry.
July 9, 2015
3.5 stars. I can't review this is a stand alone as it is part of a much larger series. I will warn those looking for a plot heavy story should look elsewhere. An interesting experiment in literary art am not Eager to read the rest but am intrigued enough to check out the next couple volumes.
March 11, 2017
My overall impression of this book is that I loved it. I loved the style, the visual layout, the puzzles and all the theorizing it created. To try and write a complete review is difficult because there is so much to say and also I don't want to spoil any of the mystery for someone.
This is the first volume in the 27 volume series. The first volume poses as an introduction to the 9 characters that it focuses on by way of chapters dedicated to each one. The story unfolds nicely and in a way that kept me engaged. I read through the 880 pages pretty quickly.
My favorite character so far is Xanther, but there are certain aspects about them all that I really enjoyed.
Perhaps my favorite element of the book was how much it made me think, hypothesize, and work toward solving the unknowns. If you want to know more about what the book is about, you could read the synopsis on Goodreads. Personally, I read it after I finished the book, and I'm glad that I didn't read it beforehand. In my opinion it spoiled certain things I enjoyed finding out for myself.
The story reminds me of an epic saga of events I'm curious to see if some of my theories pan out or where this continues to lead.
This is the first volume in the 27 volume series. The first volume poses as an introduction to the 9 characters that it focuses on by way of chapters dedicated to each one. The story unfolds nicely and in a way that kept me engaged. I read through the 880 pages pretty quickly.
My favorite character so far is Xanther, but there are certain aspects about them all that I really enjoyed.
Perhaps my favorite element of the book was how much it made me think, hypothesize, and work toward solving the unknowns. If you want to know more about what the book is about, you could read the synopsis on Goodreads. Personally, I read it after I finished the book, and I'm glad that I didn't read it beforehand. In my opinion it spoiled certain things I enjoyed finding out for myself.
The story reminds me of an epic saga of events I'm curious to see if some of my theories pan out or where this continues to lead.
November 13, 2015
Short summary: Nothing happens, and slowly.
This book is about the closest thing to unreadable that I've picked up. Everything from the style to the font to the characters are postured in a way to make it seem super intellectual, and it just fails on a fundamental level.
This book is not about the story or the characters or even a plot. It's about how many different ways the author can arrange words on a page. Never mind a coherent story line or characters that seem human in any way.
It wasn't only the fonts that were unreadable. The writing was actually really, really terrible. Dialogue was somehow both wooden and computer-like, the characters were interchangeable and robotic and did things that made no sense, and when Danielewski tried to write Asian and Mexican characters, it really made me cringe. It is a shame, since the summary had potential, and I will admit, the format of some pages did look cool. But that's not why I read books, and that's not what books are about.
I think experimental fiction, when done well, is really interesting. This is not done well. It's empty, pretentious, and extremely pointless. Style over substance. Would not recommend.
This book is about the closest thing to unreadable that I've picked up. Everything from the style to the font to the characters are postured in a way to make it seem super intellectual, and it just fails on a fundamental level.
This book is not about the story or the characters or even a plot. It's about how many different ways the author can arrange words on a page. Never mind a coherent story line or characters that seem human in any way.
It wasn't only the fonts that were unreadable. The writing was actually really, really terrible. Dialogue was somehow both wooden and computer-like, the characters were interchangeable and robotic and did things that made no sense, and when Danielewski tried to write Asian and Mexican characters, it really made me cringe. It is a shame, since the summary had potential, and I will admit, the format of some pages did look cool. But that's not why I read books, and that's not what books are about.
I think experimental fiction, when done well, is really interesting. This is not done well. It's empty, pretentious, and extremely pointless. Style over substance. Would not recommend.
dnf
January 11, 2016I read 100 pages of this, and I actually like were it's going and want to continue, but I think I'd rather wait until more books in the series are out. The book is written in a complex style and there is no way I will remember the events of the first book when the final book comes out. I'm going to give the series a few years to develop.
November 11, 2024
This book starts making a lot more sense when you realize it was intended to be the first in a 27 (???[!!]) volume series. Immersive writing style however VERY strong Written By A Man energy and highly questionable treatment of non English speaking characters…. ultimately explains nearly nothing and not even in a fun way
Want to read
November 2, 2017Alright. I'll bite. All the savory updates on this sequence of books and the MZD Bookworm episode have me wanting to give MZD another go.
May 2, 2016
3.5
I do not know how to review this. My rating may change depending on the next novel. Supposedly of which there will be twenty-seven in total.
Worth the read.
I do not know how to review this. My rating may change depending on the next novel. Supposedly of which there will be twenty-seven in total.
Worth the read.
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