Amelia slipped closer to them, closer to the flames, intent on watching the conflagration. It seemed something akin to a pagan ritual, but then, the kids wouldn’t have known anything about this. It was simple mayhem to them
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“Why do you think it does work? It’s not as if any of this stuff is true.” “Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do,” she said.
China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris: A Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
“You think one of the two’s yours—joy or misery,” Margaret said, “or both. Why, if you don’t, should you mind?”
Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Briefing for a Descent Into Hell [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Doris Lessing.
This novel is beautifully written. I felt like it was very demanding of my attention, because although styles and speakers vary in the course of the text, there are no full page-stop chapter breaks. In the absence of dialogue, paragraphs tend to run for multiple pages, and the prose (sometimes breaking into poetry or incantation) has an insistent restlessness in keeping with its subject matter–especially in the first half, where a narcotized sleep is an ambivalent power for desired healing or feared imprisonment.
“I never learned to live awake. I was trained for sleep. Oh let me sleep and sleep my life away. And if the pressure of true memory wakes me before I need, if the urgency of what I should be doing stabs into my sleep, then for God’s sake doctor, for goodness sake, give me drugs and put me back to dreaming again.” (139)
This waking/sleep dialectic is one of the features that insinuates a mystical subtext throughout. Others include the intimation of people destined for companionship, the foreboding of illusion in consensual phenomena, and reflections on the urge to engender praeterhumanity in our children.
There are many different levels of storytelling involved, of which the outermost is a set of clinical notes and correspondence surrounding the hospitalization of a man with what seems to be traumatic amnesia. Within that setting are conversations, and within those are dreams and memories. In one dream an entire governance of the solar system is set forth as background to the protagonist’s sense of dislocation and urgency. In an unreliable memory, guerrilla warfare becomes the setting for a tragic encounter with idyllic nature.
Others have noted that this is a book worth re-reading, and I’m inclined to agree.
We’re spaceward bound tomorrow But there’s no grief or sorrow Alone in the sky. The moon’s riding high. You ripe ears of barley, goodbye.
Victor Pelevin, trans. Andrew Bromfield, Omon Ra [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Then suddenly everything changed. That is, everything was just the same as before—I was crawling along the corridor in just the same way—but the pain and fatigue, passing beyond the level of endurance, seemed to switch something off inside me. Or else just the opposite—they switched something on.
Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moonwalker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter?
Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him
Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
