by Samuel R. Delany, 1974
“Everybody’s somebody’s fetish.” p. 324
This is one of the most bizarre, disturbing, beautiful, dense and fascinating novels I’ve ever read. I want to recommend it to everyone; however, I have to contain myself because it certainly won’t appeal to everyone. For example, there are some pretty explicit and strange sex scenes (which I will not quote here), and the style is David Lynch meets David Foster Wallace meets T.S. Eliot. It’s dense, it’s weird, it gets denser and weirder, then it ends before you really figure out anything.
Delany is a pretty prolific science fiction writer, and so this novel is generally categorized as “science fiction,” but it’s not quite that (it’s not quite clear what it is). In quick summary, this guy ends up in the post-apocalyptic city (though there is the impression that the rest of the country is still functioning pretty normally outside the city). The book is about his experiences in the city and with the people who have chosen to remain in the city.
Anyway, I’m not really going to use this post to summarize the book. I mostly want to share some of Delany’s beautiful use of language:
“This park is alive with darknesses, textures of silence” p. 35; “The ribs of day cracked on the sky” p. 57; “Like some color outside this grey range, music spilled the trees… the notes knotted with the upper branches” p. 61; “hints of moon struck webs of silver on the raveling mist” p. 94; “I fear those moments before sleep when words tear form the nervous matrix and, like sparks, light what responses they may.” p. 308
I really enjoyed the parts of the book about the city. The city is always present and always affecting the characters. It is ugly and destroyed, but still has potential beauty in places. There is one non-dependable bus, but mostly getting anywhere means walking (which is probably part of the reason I liked the book).
“Do you think a city can control the way people live inside it? I mean just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?” p. 249-50
“You meet a new person, you go with him… and suddenly you get a whole new city.” p. 318
Here’s what William Gibson says in his foreword to the book: “I remember being simply and frequently grateful to Delany for so powerfully confirming that certain states had ever been experienced at all, by anyone.” It’s comforting and disconcerting when someone unexpectedly describes something you’ve thought or experienced before. (Are we not unique? thank goodness.)
“And I cried about all the things people can not understand when other people say them. I cried over the miracle that they could understand anything at all. I cried for all the things I had said to other people that had been misunderstood because I, not knowing, had said them wrong. I cried with joy about those times when someone and I had nodded together, grinning over an understanding, real or wished for.” p. 772
“Now for me, you’re the irreplaceable one: I’ve never seen you up so close before, and I do not understand you at all. You say sometimes I act like I don’t see you? I don’t even know where to look! Living with you around is like living with a permanent dazzle. The fact that you even like me, or look at me, or brush by me, or hug me, or hold me, is so surprising that after it’s over I have to go back through it a dozen times in my head to savor it and try and figure out what it was like because I was too busy being astounded while it was happening.” p. 682
“Bullshit! Only I felt like that when I wrote it—no: I felt something, and thought those words the proper ashes of the feeling as I searched the smolderings. But they were only smoke. Now I cannot tell whether the feeling itself was misperceived or merely its record inaccurate.” p. 723