Steve Erickson's Amnesiascope

[ Okay first let me note: this isn't going to be terribly coherent. Sorry. Second let me note I might never get as coherent about this stuff as I want to. Which sucks. So. Let's just agree to blame it on the sticky heat of Cleveland and hope for the best. I promise I'll try harder when this is all done and over with. ]

--

There's moments of impossible beauty in this book. There's stretches of surprising humor. There's periods of obscure essay. There's chunks of, like, whatever, I didn't get it.

But most importantly, there's moments of impossible beauty in this book.

I'm not sure I can recommend everyone do what I think I'm doing right now, which is reading every novel Steve Erickson's published in one stretch, because, really, he's not writing books for everyone; and, based on what I know now, three down and four to go, I really don't think Amnesiascope should be the first novel someone reads by him, though that might be the bias of someone coming back to the book, having read it once who knows when, and reading it again after reading the two books that followed it. Really, I think Our Ecstatic Days is the book I'd say you'd have to read, of the three I've read so far. Of course, if you like that one, I can safely say you'll enjoy The Sea Came In At Midnight, and, then, you might like Amnesiascope which is altogether less experimental (I mean, one consistent narrator!) but still somehow slippery; his ideas like water molecules, rubbing against each other, the physics change the more you put together, the more you scale up.

Sorry if that makes no sense. I'm still kind of dizzy.

What else I'll say though is that I think I've mentioned that I read Amnesiascope a while back and then promptly forgot every single thing about it, which it turns out was a flat-out lie. There's chunks that, ok, seemed like strangers on a bus, for all I knew them. Then there's chunks where I could just about quote the sentences before I read them. Or when I read them I realized I'd been quoting them in my mind ever since, even without having a better understanding of the framework around them. Re-reading this book now convinces me that Steve Erickson, as much or more than most writers whose writings I've read, writes books that benefit, hell, vastly improve with re-reading. And if that's true, god knows what kind of hyperbole I'll be spewing when I someday come back to Our Ecstatic Days.