Tag Archives: American fiction

Pygmy

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Pygmy [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Chuck Palahniuk.

Palahniuk Pygmy

Not nearly in the running to be one of my favorite Chuck Palahniuk books, Pygmy still had the author’s twisted sense of humor in evidence. The first-person narrative voice — attributed to the protagonist, terrorist exchange-student infiltrator “Pygmy” — shuns standard English, which, if not a deal-breaker for me, makes it unlikely that I will enjoy a novel much. So I guess it succeeded in that uphill struggle. A representative sentence: “Horde scavenger feast at overflowing anus of world history” (146).

The whole story is over-the-top and not at all believable, but it scores a few obvious criticisms of American culture, while instating (on a more fundamental and tacit level) a defense of that same culture. It amplifies the cartoonish elements evident in earlier Palahniuk work like Survivor. I don’t regret having read it, but I can see how many readers would.

Neveryóna

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Samuel R Delany, part of the Return to Nevèrÿon series.

Delany Neveryona

The second book of Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon sequence has for its protagonist a teenage girl who flies into the story on a dragon. It is one large, very whole tale, unlike the interwoven “Tales” of the previous volume, but it does see the return–in legend or in person–of a few of the earlier characters. The girl Pryn’s chief virtue, besides a certain indomitability, is that she is literate. She moves southwards through Nevèrÿon, from her home village of Ellamon, to the city Kolhari and its suburbs, and then beyond, nearly to the ruins of the Vygernangx Monastery. Her adventures give her the opportunity to witness and reflect on the deployments of power, the development of technologies, and the mutation of economies. Despite these large themes, and notwithstanding the single numinous myth that anchors the story at both ends, the book retains a personal scale. It details the confusion and challenges of a very young woman at large in a dangerous world.

In the book’s first appendix, Delany carries forward the scholarly conceit he had established for the “Culhar’ Fragment” that is supposed to be the ancient basis for these stories. This time he adds to his fictional scholars the participation of an actual academic Charles Hoequist Jr., who wrote a response to the appendix of the first volume. Hoequist telegraphs that he is “in on the joke” by means of a passing reference to the Necronomicon in his first letter!

There is also a second appendix, where Delaney is unusually open and detailed (for a novelist) regarding not only his sources but the particular uses he has put them to. I would never have guessed that the book took its principal structure from a film, given how very concerned it is with text and inscription, and how it explicitly and repeatedly references the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy.

I observe the remark in another review that these Return to Nevèrÿon books reward re-reading, and I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I have it notably in mind to go back and re-read “Ashima Slade and the Harbin-Y Lectures” from Delany’s Triton, which is an earlier segment of the semiotic experimentation in Nevèrÿon.