Soooooooooooooooooooooooo

I'm a quarter turn through Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions. After walking around the book, examining it from various angles, sometimes stooping over to poke it with a sharp stick to see how it would react, I decided it was time to give it a shot. (Plus it's only fair to have read the book I'm rooting for to win the National Book Award.)

What's most interesting to me right now is how reading the book is more disorienting than I'd expected. Going into it, you know you're going to be flipping the book and reading back to front and vice versa (whatever those terms mean in a book with neither front nor back--though I do wonder, were the U.S. Census Bureau to take up the case, what percentage of readers naturally begin with which character, because I bet the results would be interesting), and after a couple eight-page blocks you have a feel for how the two characters' stories will mesh and overlap and diverge. But it still feels brilliantly weird, and sometimes I can feel my head trying hard to wrap itself around what's going on, and not in a self-conscious "This Is Art" way, but in a weirdly personal, gets-inside-your-head-and-stays-there way similar to some of the finest moments of House of Leaves. It's sort of like having the magician come out on stage to draw big day-glo circles on all the mirrors before he does the trick, and then still being dumbfounded when, hey, look: bunny.

As for the poetry itself, it certainly has a particular, yet wildly uneven, music. It can be quite stirring and startling one moment, and then it can be blisteringly opaque the next. I've seen it referred to as "free verse" in some reviews, which I suppose is true enough, but it doesn't quite communicate that there are plenty of formal constraints, however unobvious and seemingly minor they might be. This isn't "any word any which way or wherever" verse. But while it's of course not Petrarchan iambic pentameter, it does place extra weight on, if not all the words, then certainly most of them. Or to put it another way: however unpoetic it sometimes feels, it still demands to be treated as poetic stuff.

I'll confess that I've given up on reading the timeline on each page, with the intent of leaving the deciphering of it and its connection to the main narrative to a future reading. I haven't puzzled out its importance yet, what it offers or what it does, and I'm not prepared right now to spend two months on this book. Perhaps it's all more obvious or simple than I'm expecting it to be. Likewise many other elements of the text. I'm sure there's far more going on that I'm willing to see, right now, this week.

I know from my experience with House of Leaves not to expect to "get it" all on a first reading. Still, even disregarding the time line and whatever else I've disregarded (for the time being), there's enough of those exciting moments throughout the main narrative in which things click--when you see something done for the first time and you wonder how many times you've missed it so far, when you see something done again and the meaning of it becomes somehow amplified for it--that the book has stayed plenty interesting so far. I remain intrigued.