Antoine Volodine's RADIANT TERMINUS (Tr by Jeffrey Zuckerman)

Recently I indulged in a buddy read with my old pal, the Popqueenie, of one of my favorite Philip K. Dick novels, Dr. Bloodmoney, so that tale of post-nuclear-apocalypse and mutant psychic superpowers was very much on my mind as I settled into my second foray into the one-man genre of post-exoticism* that comes to us from the many-named author who invented it.

Radiant Terminus has cemented my interest in the work of Antoine Volodine/Manuela Draeger/Elli Kronauer/Lutz Bassman/Infernus Johannes. And damn it, I may have actually to learn French at some point because only some of his books have made it to English translation.

It's also very much an exploration of what life would have been like in post-nuclear Marin County in Dr. Bloodmoney if [REDACTED] hadn't [REDACTED] [REDACTED].** Except instead of the remains of luxurious and affluent northern California, we're in what's left of an old collective farm from the heyday of the world-encircling Second Soviet Union, and instead of the aftermath of a nuclear war, we have a world slowly devastated by Chernobyl-type accidents as the Second Soviet Union, under constant attack by pockets of fascists, slowly receded from its high water mark, leaving collective farm/village complexes like Radiant Terminus to fend for themselves without regular and competent maintenance of their neighborhood nuclear power plants. 

Oops!

We begin our story following the desperate retreat of a trio of survivors of the battle that lost the fictional territory of the Orbise. Slowly dying of radiation sickness and out of food and water, the three have one hope left: if the most able-bodied among them can make it to the next settlement and bring back some water and food.

Unfortunately for this barely-survivor, Kronauer (yes, one of the author's heteronyms), the next settlement is Radiant Terminus, where the nuclear plant has not only failed catastrophically but its core has completely melted down and later sank deep into the earth. The residents now use it as a sort of all-purpose garbage disposal, which they can only do thanks to the heroic efforts of "one of the most valiant figures of the second Soviet union, a legendary survivor, sagging under medals and highlighted in various enlightening stories," the Gramma Ugdal. The Gramma Ugdal, who is only ever referred to this way, has mutated into an immortal woman who cannot be harmed by radiation and thus has become famous for rushing in to help after countless nuclear accidents. Since this is so, she can safely handle contaminated carcasses, bits of furniture and farm equipment, whatever needs disposed of, and push it down into the melted-down core to its destruction. She has found, furthermore, a way to, at least partially, heal radiation damage in some others by the use of various altered waters. And that's not all. Sometimes she can bring them back from the dead. And if she can't with her waters, there's someone else around who probably can.

For the Gramma Ugdal is not the only immortal in Radiant Terminus! Her former husband from her long-ago (like 100 years long ago) youth, Solovyei, is also immortal and their reunion was unexpected and consequential, for he has powers even greater than hers*** for all that he has lived in obscurity where she became an international hero. But see, Solovyei is this novel's Hoppy Harrington, a figure of menace and bizarre psychic powers, who absolutely dominates Radiant Terminus and its environs by dominating the minds and bodies of its people. None of whom has the first idea of how to revolt against their god-king, all of whom have at least been led to believe that they literally owe him their lives, and many of whom are pretty sure that they only even exist because Solovyei has, Borges-like, dreamed them.

Solovyei also has a special hell set aside for any man dumb enough to involve himself, even in the most innocent way, with one of his three weirdly beautiful mutant daughters by "unknown mothers." Take poor Schulhoff, who legally married one of them and seemed genuinely to love her, but whom Solovyei has made to forget her utterly and roam the earth, as he explains upon meeting our veteran, Kronauer: 

Solovyei has made sure it will never pass. He makes me walk from forest to forest, from lake to lake, and when the absence of the woman I love seems a little less unbearable, when the loss makes me suffer a little less, he reintroduces himself in my head and he revives my urge to remember. He whistles in my head until I collapse. He keeps whistling, he sings his sorts of poems. It lasts for days and nights. I can't escape it. I can't die. I'm stuck within his clutches. Within his dreams. No death is available to me. I also wonder if maybe I'm actually inside one of his dreams. It won't pass and I can't escape.

Thus while we might have been expecting a tender reunion between the Gramma Ugdal and her Solovyei,  and a nice autumn twilight love story, what we get instead is a Twilight Zone episode. The one with Billy Mumy as a terrifying and omnipotent child. Except this time he's a gigantic full-grown man with yellow eyes and an axe in his belt and three beautiful mutant daughters and a conviction that no male human being ever born has ever meant anything but harm to the female of the species and must be punished for his bad intentions. And if a man Solovyei encounters actually doesn't have bad intentions towards those daughters, well, not only does Solovyei not believe it but he'll actually warp reality to make his preconceptions true. And then administer "appropriate" punishments.

Yikes.

So, half Hoppy Harrington and half Palmer Eldritch, let's say. Or maybe, the malevolent supercomputer I AM. And a little bit of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz - Solovyei loves to inflict his poetry on the entire village via a loudspeaker system.

But come to think if it, what Solovyei reminds me of the most is Dr. Haber, the subtly-terrifying-until-he-abandons-subtlety villain of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, who parlays his hypnotic control and medical/psychiatric power imbalance over poor George Orr to dream his way to world domination. Like Haber, Solovyei appears to have swollen his physical dimensions to match his massive self-conception; the first thing everybody notices upon meeting him is that he is simply huge, with a big axe shoved through his belt for extra intimidation. It's a classic diversion on both characters' parts, minimizing their actual threat by distracting their victims with the display of a quite different one. Few are guarding against a psychic attack when the likelihood appears to be that the opponent is going to just step up and tear one to pieces with his bare hands.

For all this, though, what Radiant Terminus seems most concerned with is the impact of literature, of Volodine's imagined post-exotic canon, on the people who have read it. The literary star of this novel is one Maria Kwoll, a post-exotic feminist whom even Andrea Dworkin might consider extreme. Because one of Solovyei's daughters is the village librarian and grew up on Kwoll's works, she has made sure that nothing written is left to be read except those works and things like machinery repair manuals and agronomy pamphlets. The result is a village of people, not only utterly under Solovyei's control, but also under Kwoll's influence: to them, sex is inherently aggressive and gross, it's impossible for a male human to think about anything else anyway, and everything such a creature says or does is in "the cock's language."

Which means that yes, even Solovyei is a Kwollite. Kwollian?

There's another element of Radiant Terminus that I can't help but single or for praise: its inventiveness in dealing with the altered landscape of a world that has suffered a thousand nuclear accidents. Volodine conjures up a whole alternate herbarium for his world. It's as if he decided that the Voynich manuscript was an accurate rendering that had just come unstuck in time. We get to learn a bit about them through the character of Kronauer, whose wife was busy on a project to identify all the weird new flora before the fascists murdered her, and about whom he thinks as he mentally catalogs what he sees on his journey to Radiant Terminus: 

Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.****

Like I said, I might have to start working on my French, which I can already kind of parse because of years farting around with Portuguese, Latin and Spanish, just so I can explore the rest of Volodine et al's works set in this bizarre world.

I hope there are lots more Crones in it.

*My first being Manuela Draeger's Eleven Sooty Dreams, another book with a prominent and formidable grandmother-who-isn't-a-grandmother figure -- which I simply love. As for what "post-exoticism" is, it's a sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe but for a group of imaginary and revolutionary writers who form the cultural milieu of a worldwide Marxist-Leninist society, the Second Soviet Union, that was hugely successful and utopian until it wasn't. The post-exotic works of Volodine et al are now its autopsy in print, melancholy and lovely and weird as hell. So, you know, pretty close to being my ideal reading material.

**If you know, you know. If you don't, go read Dr. Bloodmoney.

***Oddly, this gives an author the best excuse ever to use an omniscient narrator, for Solovyei can read minds even at infinite distances in addition to his other uncanny abilities, as is made plain when, almost exactly halfway through the novel, he is revealed to be possessing a crow that has been following some of his banished citizens around. These passages are written in the first person omniscient, but most of the rest of the book is in a very traditional third, which seems like a missed opportunity to have one of the best bastard narrators of all time. Le sigh.

****Those "Jeannes" have a longer name, by the way; they are Jeanne-of-the-Communists. Volodine is nothing if not committed to the Second Soviet but.

Robert K. Merton's ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: A SHANDEAN POSTSCRIPT

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675.

Memes are older than the Internet. We just used to call them "aphorisms" or "quotations" or "folk wisdom". And back before we called them "memes" they were pretty hard to trace to sources. Pretty hard but also, as mid-century intellectual delight Robert K. Merton has proven in his utterly wonderful On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a whole lot of fun! 

Anyone who's spent more than ten minutes reading this blog knows that my favorite novel, probably ever, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I'll be reading again later this summer as not one but two of the Discord Servers I hang out on are brewing up giant buddy reads of this book. 

I'm going to encourage all of them to try to track down a copy of On the Shoulders of Giants (or OTSOG, as Merton himself has charmingly dubbed it and elucidates late in this work as a versatile new word which by all rights should have entered our vernacular but has largely been replaced by the less amusing but also less opaque "humblebrag") as either a companion read or a chaser. It's just the perfect example of what I've always imagined as the ideal way to live a life, as Casaubon attempted to do in Eco's novel:* be the "Sam Spade of Culture "

The mystery here being, while most modern people think it was Isaac Newton who first said "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants,"** intellectuals know he was condensing and paraphrasing a much earlier thought. A meme. But where did he get it? And where did that person get it? And the person he (or she, or [singular] they, but let's be honest, probably he, at least in that for most of recorded history only men got to record their thoughts in any durable way. So probably he, though who knows if he got it from his wife or sister or mom?) who passed it on from distant antiquity? But how distant? 

Helpfully, once Merton has spent many pages (in the form of a letter to Bernard Bailyn, whom I chiefly know as a the author of The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution***, a book beloved of libertarians, both with and without the capital L) teasing out the history and provenance of the phrase all the way back to the 12th century and perhaps to even earlier, he presents us with a helpful table suitable for copying out and hanging on the wall to remind us all that no idea is truly original, that immature artists borrow from the mature artists who originally stole them from Oscar Wilde, etc.

But so, OTSOG would really seem to have no business being as entertaining as it is, but the fact remains: this is the most fun I have had with a piece of non-fiction in years. This is because Merton, while a serious scholar, indeed the "father of modern sociology" (who has a lot of fun in one of this book's many digressions considering this matter of intellectual fatherhood of things like anatomy and physiology and many other arts and sciences) is also a very funny and playful writer, at least in this work, which, after all, takes its subtitle from the novel that was post-modern before there was any modern of which to be post-, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is a very Shandean work with its wide-ranging and curious approach to its subject, its willingness to stray off its mapped-out path (but always to find its way back. Eventually) and its overall tone, which, get ready for that.

Consider this, a meditation on the word "stand" into which Merton enters after spending some time comparing versions of the aphorism, in English and other languages, some of which are ambiguous about the position of the dwarfs in relationship to their giants -- standing versus sitting:

The OED**** requires 38 columns of tight-packed print to set out 104 meanings of the word and its various formations. After studying a few dozen of these meanings, one suffers and an attack of paranomasia. One doesn't know whether one is standing on one's head or on one's feet. In such cases, one must suppose, the only sound position is a stand-pat policy if one is to stand committed to truth and be prepared to stand the consequences. This may stand one a high price, but as things stand, to stand firm may stand one in good stead and may indeed be the only way to stand off abominable ambiguities. One must simply stand one's ground if one stands for something rather than nothing. If, I say, one stands for standards, if one is more than a stand-in for a scholar, if one wishes to preserve one's scholarly standing and to stand on good terms with one's peers, then one must take a strong stand. In the end each of us stands under the heavy obligation to stand guard and to stand to our guns in the face of the standing threat to single-sensed clarity. To stand upon ceremony in these matters or to stand much upon one's dignity would only mean that we have little else to stand upon. United we stand, provided that we do not stand upon our differences but stand together, side by side, rather than stand apart, aside or astrut. We must stand by not, not back, if we are to stand off the standing threat or at least bring it to a standstill. Only so, do we even stand a chance; only so, can we achieve a common understanding. This is no mean venture and the question is: can you stand it?"

This is merely my favorite example of the kind of writing to be enjoyed in OTSOG. There are so many others, so many fascinating nuggets of information and of speculation about the information he has found. When I first started reading OTSOG I was ashamed to realize that I had owned my personal copy for over 20 years; as I read, though, I found that only now, and maybe not even only now, had I the personal resources to appreciate its many pleasures: I already knew the names of most of the scholars Merton discusses, from my own academic studies and also from my repeated readings of things like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of novels teeming with historical figures, including Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Samuel Pepys, who figure so deeply in the middle sections of the delicious gossip on offer in OTSOG.

It even gave me a clue or two as to where some of my other favorite works of fiction may have gotten some of their ideas, including, of all things, that of Tim Powers! A detail from his The Stress of Her Regard was very likely taken from a source mentioned in OTSOG, which Merton discusses when quoting from Tristram Shandy as the hero's father, still awaiting Tristram's birth, is trying to clear up a footnote:

Should you think this is just another invention of Stern's parturient imagination, you would be badly mistaken. There actually was an ignorant physician and man-midwife, William Smellie, who did indeed... mistake the caption of the drawing of a petrified child just taken from its mother's womb as the name of an author.

How could I not think of the detail in The Stress of Her Regard about a baffling section of a medical text being mistaken for the removal of a petrified infant when it was "really" (in Powers' delightfully magic- and monster-riddled version of the early 19th century) instructions on how to implant a tiny statue into a human body, to create a link between Powers' stony monster race and humans, to allow to monsters free reign in our world?

I have no idea how easily a copy of OTSOG may be to find these days; my own I got at an out of the way used bookstore in the middle of Wyoming at the tail end of the 20th century. It was exactly the sort of weird medicine I needed right now as we begin a summer full of stupid foreboding and anti-intellectualism at levels not even the most hidebound clerical authorities of the "dark ages" seem to have striven for. I needed its reminder that it is fun to be smart, that knowing things can be a source of enjoyment second only to finding things out. Your own joke about dwarfs and giants and seeing far here.

*Eco, you may note if you can read the crummy scan of the cover art that I had to use here, wrote an introduction to the edition that I own and it is every bit as charming and witty as we might expect from the god who created Causaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo.

**In a letter to fellow Baroque Cycle character Robert Hooke. I'm not going to pretend to be the intellect that Merton is; I first learned about Robert Hooke (and Samuel Pepys and many others besides) from Neal Stephenson.

***Who, based on copyright dates for the original editions of these two books, might well have been working on that very book while Merton was writing him this "letter." So yes, I might be reading that again soon...

****The Oxford English Dictionary, the latest edition of which runs to 20 volumes in print; it has since ceased to be published in print due to its mass, which is now measured in megabytes. Over 500 of them. 

Raymond St. Elmo's LETTERS FROM A SHIPWRECK IN THE SEA OF SUNS AND MOONS

To a certain degree, I'm still trying to figure out the freaking ocean of words I just swam through, as I contemplate the very unusual and ambiguous Letters From a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons, by Raymond St. Elmo. I mean, I know I had fun shaking my head over the combination of godpunk, sea adventure, star-crossed romance and epistolary interrogation it contained, but did I ever actually figure out what was going on? Enough to write a coherent post about on this here blog? 

Let's find out.

Interviewer: Describe how to kill Typhon.

Oh, there are as many ways to kill a god as there are to destroy a man. Personally my favorite is to melt him down in confusion and despair. 

Readers here who are also readers of Gene Wolfe have already raised their eyebrows at the mention of the ancient Autarch and god-king of the Whorl, but this Typhon is merely (?) a storm god, one of a cargo hold-full of mostly dead and/or forgotten deities being carried aboard the good ship Unicorn from San Francisco, at which point the last of them was collected, to the mysterious and uncharted island of Theodosia.

Typhon could also be our protagonist, cloaked in the body of Clarence St. Elmo*, the blind old sailor rousted out by the unknown Interviewer for purposes unknown but urgent for that entity.** A mad scientist on the island on which Clarence and a few of his crewmates from the Unicorn thinks Clarence is Typhon, anyway. 

Clarence has been adopted, though, not by Typhon, but by the Egyptian god, Thoth, who appears to him with advice and wry commentary in the form, usually, of a sea bird, though occasionally he's got a vaguely human form, shrouded in black.

But all of this is just distraction, as far as the Interviewer is concerned; they claim to have dredged up Clarence to help in a search for two green leatherbound books, one in Etruscan and the other a French translation of the first -- allegedly. As for Clarence... He's just this poet, you know? 

I saw some useful poetic fodder in the situation. It's just my nature. I considered putting seaweed in my hair and appearing to them as my own drowned ghost. The idea made me laugh, then the laugh made me check. I did have seaweed in my hair. Maybe I was my own drowned ghost. The idea scared me so I combed it out with my fingers and headed on.

To arrive at the above situation, shipwrecked and pondering how to approach some other castaways, Clarence first allowed his beloved's father and fierce, ancient aunts to chase him away from her, so very away that he left their hometown of Maidenhead, NJ for San Francisco and thence joined the crew of the Unicorn. Which brought him to a weird island complete with lighthouse, a seminary run by the aforementioned mad scientist, the Master of the Green, and many other features atypical of your standard Robinson Crusoe-esque fare. Like a bunch of gods and ex-gods rampaging around and wreaking havoc. Only some of whom seem to have been along for the ride on the Unicorn. I think. Were there already some feral gods or ex-gods on the island? I never decided for sure.

Meanwhile, back on the voyage, Clarence wrote his beloved K. (all we ever get is this initial, never a name) a series of longing letters which give the novel its title, and the Interviewer has only secured his cooperation by convincing him they have a way of seeing that she gets them, since she didn't in real life? 

Except what is the reality of any of this, here?

While trying to figure all of this out may feel like too much work to some (my own dear personal mother, who spotted this book in our shared ebook library and was intrigued by the title, started it before I did but DNF'd it for this reason), it is a fun exercise for the Wolfe-pilled who actively seek out this sort of thing -- but it's not the only reason to give this book a try! 

There's also the enjoyment of watching perhaps the most ill-advised sea voyage since Ishmael signed on to the Pequod. The Unicorn, we learn, is a perfectly fine ship but its crew mostly abandoned it long before it reached San Francisco; they were terrified of its cargo of statues of forgotten gods, you see. Also, the captain is kind of a freak show. The result is that the ship can attract no kind of competent or experienced crew, so nobody has the first idea what to do when things immediately start going wrong in ways both predictable and un-.

I'm bouncing around in chronology, here, but guess what: so does the novel! It's all part of the puzzle box, one which I'm not sure I've solved yet. Truly, I am not sure I understood this novel. 

But the experience of reading it was fun enough to make me more than willing to try it again sometime. So maybe stay tuned...

*As though we are perhaps meant to wonder if he is not an ancestor of the author of the novel Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons? Except I think "Raymond St. Elmo" is a pseudonym? But who knows. All I could find poking around in the wreckage of the internet was that St. Elmo has written a bunch of other books that seem even weirder than this one. But few biographical details.

**Or entities. Sometimes the Interviewer uses plural pronouns in referring to itself/themselves. And frequently sounds, as does Clarence sometimes, too, like a piece of software or otherwise artificial being.

Jared Pechaček's THE WEST PASSAGE (Narr by Steve West)

Ok, bear with me here. Things are gonna get weird. I know, I know, when are they not? But this is in the upper reaches of the kind of weird that I really, really like and often find it very difficult to adequately describe. This risks me accidentally talking you out of giving this book a try, which is one of the reasons I didn't blog about this book when I first read it back in December*. And I'd almost rather just leave you stumbling around and maybe happening upon it by chance than accidentally talk you out of trying it. 

But this is a really weird, really cool, really unusual book. Even by my standards. 

So.

The West Passage, Jared "By the Bywater" Pechaček's debut novel, is kind of the answer to "what if we could return to the great castle of Gormenghast centuries after Titus Groan rode off to become Mervyn Peake, and the Bright Carvings and everything else were left to rot, and no new Master of Rituals had been appointed, and so everybody had just sort of half-assedly continued some half-remembered versions of all the ceremonies and customs... but those customs actually all turned out to have, like, existentially important functions. Like keeping terrible, deadly eldritch beings in check? And making the seasons happen? Which, the castle is so big that different parts of it experience different seasons?"**

Can you imagine that?

Ok. Now imagine that instead of the Earls and Countesses of Groan there were... bizarrely shaped, multiply-eyed, terribly powerful, inscrutable, gigantic eldritch "ladies" in charge of it all, but they seem to have mostly gone mad or lost interest in doing whatever it is they do when they're not conferring arcane and possibly pointless forms of authority and/or literally changing the minds of whatever puny, hapless humans happen to blunder into their presences?

Oh, and here and there are bits of really odd technology and whatnot still in use, baroque and Rube Goldbergian and not necessarily being put to their originally intended uses. They kind of remind me of some of the contraptions of, say, the goblins in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. 

So that's the setting. How about the story?

It's a bit simpler. A bit.

We meet two apprentices from the Grey Tower (the only tower that's no longer under the direct control of a Lady). Kew was the apprentice to the tower's late Guardian, who trained him pretty well in Protecting (against what? Nobody seems sure anymore) but died without passing on the title and whatnot that would give him the authority to take over for her. There is only one way for him to get what he needs to do the job now, and that's to go find a Lady. And give her a cryptic message from his late boss: something or other is waking up. And it sounds like that might be bad?

Maybe?  

Our other apprentice-about-to-rise, Pell serves with the Grey Women (not Ladies, human women) who perform the rites and duties associated with death and birth. Pell helped with the services for Kew's mistress, witnessed one error, committed some others herself, and is now pretty sure that it's her fault that winter has come way too early to the Gray Tower and she must travel to other parts of the Castle to find out how to put it right. Is she correct in this?***

Maybe?

The West Passage, then, is kind of a double quest narrative, though one in which neither of our plucky young heroes really have any idea about the nature of their world, their rulers, or what they're supposed to be doing. Kind of like everybody else.

And the quests? Might not really be the point anyway. 

The atmosphere in which all of this takes place is deliciously strange and borders on the nonsensical, Lewis Carrol as interpreted by Jeff Noon via Mark Lawrence. It's not exactly hostile but it's not not hostile. Everybody remembers different bits of lore differently (delightfully, the old lore is referred to as coming from "story times," and the really, really old lore from "song times"), and many are desperately, jealously clinging to different bizarre privileges that may or may not be actually important to the overall survival of this world. 

What I'm still not adequately conveying here, though, is the sheer mad inventiveness of it all. For instance, at one point, thinking that a bee is merely something somewhat like what you and I would also call a bee, Kew, sure that he's done for, gasps to it "Tell them I tried," just to say some last words to something, if not someone. Only moments later, the bee turns out to have treated those words as a message, and to have delivered them to someone "with the face of a trout." Which Kew is not at all surprised by, and I don't think it's just because it's more surprising that someone is there at all than that it has a fishy head. And before we know it, Trout Mask Replica (not his real name, but come on) is asking Kew, who is still surrounded by hungry jackals, if he has seen any lizards about. "You'd know a lizard if you saw one. Big suckers. Teeth like boats."

There are tons of weird little one-offs like this, sending the message to us that this world really really isn't ours, that pretty much all the nouns should be in scare quotes, or at least the animate nouns should be, and that the more you pay attention to what's going on, the less certain you should be that you understand what's going on. I'm not going to accuse Pechaček of deliberately misleading his readers, but I'm not going to absolve him of this, either.

Let's just say that never has a book seemed more dissimilar  from my first to my second reading - and it was only a few months between them. I need a lot longer than that to forget things. But I was definitely watching the wrong pair of hands the first time around. 

So of course I'm thinking about Gene Wolfe, here. And you know I don't mention him lightly. And also of Jeff Vandermeer, of whose Area X this world could be a descendant, the Palace a thousandth mutant iteration of the Lighthouse, the Ladies and other creatures the descendants of Ghost Bird and her dolphin-husband.

But, of course, maybe it's always been this way, here. Beehives have always been things you can saddle up and ride out to someone's rescue. Fancy cakes were always made and decorated, not to be served and eaten, but to be tipped immediately out onto a midden heap almost as high as the Castle is tall. Butterflies have always been part of funeral rites in which they suck the corpse dry.

Adding to the fun is the book's habit of breaking up the narrative with odd passages that, say, invite us to consider what mistakes a character has already made in the course of a quest. It's again hard not to think of Labyrinth, which adds a lighthearted bit of whimsy here and there to leaven the heavy duty strangeness. 

If she'd gone that way, she'd be headed straight to that castle. 

And yes, sometimes, just sometimes, things hit that level of cute.

Believe it or not, all of this insanity comes to a very satisfying conclusion, one of the best I've encountered in recent years of reading weird fiction and Weird Fiction. While I would gladly spend much, much more time exploring this Palace and the world in which it exists, there aren't any cliffhangers, plot holes or loose ends leaving me clamoring for a sequel. Sometimes it's okay to write a stand-alone.

But I'm sure hoping Pechaček's got something else in the hopper that'll be ready to show us soon. I really get the feeling that, as many other reviewers have commented,  including my boys over at Death//Sentence, Pechaček is only getting warmed up.

This is cause to celebrate. And maybe to create an elaborate cake for... reasons.

 *Which, I mean, it was December, but also, caveat listener: narrator Steve West has a very deep and rich voice, distractingly so. He's like Jot Davies on a diet of virgin's blood and truffled chocolates. 

**As in when it's summer in one wing, it's fall in the next one over. Probably. But it's not quite as big as that suggests. Though it does take a few days' walking to get from one wing to another, so, still pretty big.

***Oh, by the way, both of these questing characters get new names in the course of the story, and one of them switches gender. Because this world is just like that, yo.

Adam Erlich Sachs' THE ORGANS OF SENSE

It was well known at that time that meteorological conditions in Prague were usually connected to conditions in the Emperor's mind, a phenomenon that certain churchmen as well as the vulgar attributed to the action of demons flitting in and out of the emperor's head, which evidently they could, on this theory, enter at will - "anything of course can be explained by recourse to a head entering demon."

While the title and stunningly odd cover art of Adam Erlich Sachs' stunningly odd The Organs of Sense suggest that this weird little novel will chiefly concern itself with how we apprehend the world directly, the text is occupied with a very different but related matter: how most of what we say we "know' about the world actually comes at many removes from such direct apprehension. 

Told as an encounter between a young Gottfried Leibniz (he of the monads and the famous dispute with Isaac Newton over which of them could claim to have invented calculus*) and an elderly, blind astronomer, The Organs of Sense never lets the reader forget the chain of custody through which the facts and ideas being discussed are coming to us. We are constantly reminded, for instance, that our knowledge of what happened in this encounter and what was said comes to us via later writings of Leibniz.** And very, very often, we are also reminded how various anecdotes the astronomer shares with Leibniz reached the astronomer, as when he relates a story in which the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II punked his art agent over how dumb it was for that agent to hold forth for an absurd length of time over the various technical and art historical qualities of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's painting, Water, without having once mentioning fish. I mean... Look.

Anyway, the astronomer originally heard the story from Emperor Rudolf's Court Chamberlain, who presumably had to oversee clean-up efforts after Rudolf convinced his art agent that he was facing severe punishment for being a phony and a blowhard and the art agent wet himself. 

So yes, there are some amusing moments in this otherwise very serious book. 

But why has Leibniz traveled out of his way, right after being denied his doctorate for his first learned publication, to meet an unnamed blind astronomer in his remote mountain observatory? 

Because not only does this astronomer claim to have invented the telescope (a feat usually credited, in a prefiguring of Leibniz' future in the calculus dispute, to someone more famous) and has in fact built the longest one then in existence, but he also claims that doing so led directly to the loss of his eyes (he is not only blind but has empty hollows where his eyes were, but, as we soon learn, his tear ducts are still intact and functional); and not only has he invented and built the greatest of telescopes but lost his eyes, but he also claims he can still see through said telescope***, and that in doing so he, alone in all the world, has predicted a total solar eclipse for the very day and location on which and to which Leibniz has made his scientific pilgrimage. 

Leibniz wants to be there to see whether or not the old guy is right.

And meantime, they have a few hours to kill. During which the astronomer relates his story to Leibniz and makes a frequent show of putting an empty eye socket to the viewfinder of his telescope, "looking" for a moment, and then jotting something down with a quill. He is adding to his catalog of stars, which he is determined will be longer than anybody's.

Of course I thought of this scene from what is perhaps my very favorite movie of all time, Peter Greenaway's**** Drowning by Numbers:

Will the eclipse actually happen? Will we find out how the astronomer still "sees?" Will we get to find out what he's been writing down? Will his dad ever realize his dream of being re-appointed the Imperial Sculptor?

Speaking of the astronomer's dad, fans of a fictional trope that's turning up a lot in late 20th and early 21st century fantasy fiction makes an appearance of sorts here: that of an actual, physical city that is a tangible representation of a human creator's memory palace. I'm speaking mostly of Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City and of Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft and maybe also Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog and Ludluda. Is that enough to call it a trend or a trope? I feel like Christopher Priest and Susanna Clarke may have played with it, too. At any rate, the Vienna of Emperor Maximilian's day, the astronomer insists to us via Liebniz, via Liebniz' translator, was a physical representation of the mind of the astronomer's father, who had designed most of its facades and buildings and sculptures during his time as Imperial Sculptor to Maximilian. Who was later fired by Rudolf when Rudolf dumped all of Maximilian's functionaries and moved to imperial court from gold and marble Vienna to "black-spired" Prague.

And it is in Prague that the astronomer, or so he tells Leibniz, who tells us via his unknown translator, loses his eyes and loses credit for inventing the telescope and loses his dignity to become, well, the punchline of a shaggy dog story, the point of which really seems to be that "learning math is important, actually."

To the point where I almost think that conveying this is, actually, the point of this novel, for all that it mostly consists of amusing scenes of Hapsburg court politics and pseudoscience and discovery and madness, feigned and un-.

By the way, this is also very much an alternate history in addition to its other attributes: the Rudolph II of The Organs of Sense seems much the same as our historical Hapsburg, but book-Rudolph  had fewer children with his mistress and gave them different names, though the Prince Heinrich of the novel shares the outlines if not the details of the real eldest son's, Julius', main claim to fame, as a murderer. Heinrich comes to relate this story in considerable and exhausting detail to the astronomer while the astronomer is disguised as a priest come to hear Heinrich's confession, adding yet another layer of indirect storytelling to the text. 

Which Sachs' continues to emphasize, so at least once we are reminded that one of the princesses told something to Heinrich, who told the disguised astronomer, who years later told Liebniz while they awaited an eclipse that may or may not happen, who relayed the tale as part of a journal article, which a translator then rendered into English, from which Sachs derived the story he is telling us. 

Got that?

*A significant factor in the vast and convoluted plots of Neal Stephenson's incredible trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, a perennial favorite for re-reads, chez moi.

**And yes, adding still further to the chain of custody through which this story has passed, our actual narrator for this overall account is the unnamed translator of this fictional account of this fictional event in the life of the very real Leibniz.

***Yes, of course I'm thinking of how Paul Atriedes can still "see" in Dune Messiah. This astronomer's "vision," too, may be "oracular."

****Duh!

Rick Harsch's THE MANIFOLD DESTINY OF EDDIE VEGAS

Did you ever wonder what kind of books our culture would have to enjoy if, instead of ho-hum Europe, the Old World, James Joyce had spent his expat years in the United States? Specifically the western United States? Specifically specifically the years when this part of the world still mostly belonged to its indigenous inhabitants and there were no railroads or interstate highways or even JC Penneys? Which, sure, that means Joyce would have needed access to a time machine, but I'm already deep in the realm of counterfactual conjecture here, so, why not?

But so anyway, did you ever wonder that? Because I think I have the answer. So, did you? Wonder that? No?

Oh dear. 

Well, anyway, I want to tell you about Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a book that I've already mentioned twice on this here blog, which I was insanely excited to read while awaiting my copy but, yes, also dreading a bit because it's another maximalist  chonk of a novel that is only available in print. Meaning yep, another On-Dead-Tree-Despite-The-Pain read for Your Humble Blogger.

I first learned of the existence of this novel, of author Rick Harsch, and of the cult publishing phenomenon, corona/samizdat, when I saw a few BookTube videos about Philip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic, which, on the most pathetic level of reality at least, is about what happens to a writer and illustrator while they are waiting for a copy of The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas to get shipped to them from faraway Slovenia.

Which means I was expecting another heavy dose of crazy, extremely post-modern meta-fictional shenanigans. But that's not quite what I got.

Not that I am in any way disappointed by what I did get. Far from it!

Because this is not the quintessential American experience, for that is too grand a theme. This perhaps is the quintessential endangered American experience. Canada, Mexico, the entire south - that will define the American experience over time. This will all be seen as excrescence, rude corruption of being hyper-aware, vapid, utterly disconnected from enduring life. This America, this United States of, has been making last stands from the beginning, practicing the last stand until they get it right and finally can indeed stand for the last time. No, this scene here, this man and his undershirt oiling his gun before a silent television, this scene has nearly been perfected to extinction.

The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a much more conventional narrative, more in the vein of, say, Cryptonomicon than of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots or any of the other, weirder fare I tend to favor. Like Cryptonomicon, the narrative is more or less divided into two sections, taking place in different eras of history. We get a lot of background on some of one of our main characters' ancestors, who had colorful and thrilling adventures in the USA's frontier/Old West period (and one of whom was an Indigenous woman) in one narrative, while the other traces that character's, Donnie Garvin's, travels with his brand-new best friend, Drake Fondling, in early 21st century Europe and the United States, while also following a bit of Donnie's father's efforts to catch up with the duo. And since a decent amount of the novel takes place in and around good old Las Vegas, there's also more than a little bit of a more grounded/mundane Last Call here, too.

There now, I've mentioned two of my favorite, most fun reads of all time, so that must mean that Eddie Vegas* is fun, too, right? Well, yes and no. As I said, the narrative is pretty straightforward, even mundane, for all that at one point one of Eddie's ancestors gets lifted into the air and bodily flung at a grizzly bear, whether as a weapon or as a distraction doesn't really matter, and somehow survives to become one of Eddie's ancestors. But what one really reads this novel, and, I suspect, most of Harsch's work for, is the over-the-top wordplay. I have a lot of examples of this, and the text includes several lists that other reviewers have correctly categorized as "Rabelasian", but here are some passages that I marked with my little book darts (one of the pleasures I'd almost forgotten of reading a physical book that I own is using these cunning little tools) and then more or less just flipped to at random.

For instance, raw recruits looked at him and thought "Sure is rough out thar"; Douglas Stompett, Chief Factor and father figure for future factoti for a fee (fie!) (Foe of fumblers) and Friends of the Hudson's Bay Company...

And

On the walls of the spaces where the politics of his parents and their friends were diminished by upright plastered scorn were thematic reproductions, a Chinese room, a surrealist room, an impressionist room -- What of a childhood that renders Dali trite? a Dalit rite? a trolley ride, a trollop's rights, a flop all right, a polite oversight, a maggot white, a dollop bright, a scallop of shite, a pallette of, a mallet of... on the fucking head...

And

The Sick Man of Europe was such a healthy metaphor, diseased body parts still being sold off a century later, the moribund fellow fascinating in his decrepitude, shrinking as they do like healthy verdure under a too intense dry sun, the regimen of the new model of health was ignored until it was too late, the doctors all gone psychotic like any Freudian subject over-thrilled with the death of the other.

That last passage is from a whole chapter of profoundly insightful musings Harsch attributes to the character of Ethel Gravel, another of Eddie's formidable female forebears (I couldn't resist), a woman of profound historical imagination whom one might fear is going to waste in a still-backwater-ish Reno, Nevada of the early 20th century, but whose business acumen, general intelligence and indomitable will have assured her descendants' the kind of start in life that will allow sons to become dilettante scribes and professors who marry improbably named poets and have children whose own potential seems poised to be harnessed to ridiculous business ventures by heirs to mercenary company fortunes and oh, you just have to read this book to see all of the unlikely but compelling goings on. I haven't even begun to describe the compelling small figure of Nordgaard, or of Setif, or of Hermione, or of...

But as this all comes to an end, what The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is really about is just plain old love, especially that between a son and a father, against whose relationship the entire world has seemed to conspire but who have chosen to care about each other anyway, to share their thoughts and feelings in the least toxic example of masculinity I've encountered in this sort-of-genre of maximalist "Brodernism." Even if the hundreds of pages preceding the novel's satisfying denouement weren't as entertaining as they are, it would all be worth it just to enjoy this at the end. Bravo, Mr. Harsch. I'm already looking forward to my next read from you.

*Eddie Vegas is the name a character assumes in the novel, but we don't know which character takes on this alias until about halfway through. This adds the pleasing note of ambiguity that perfects many a book, in my opinion.