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May. 29th, 2009 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA couple months ago, when walking through the basement stacks at the bookstore where I volunteer, a title caught my eye: Drive-By Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition, by Amir Parsa.
"I think I need that book," I said.
Then I went on amazon.com and read the summary, which described revolutions, satire, and meta about character creation and storytelling, and decided that it was no longer a 'think', that I did, in fact, need this book.
Sadly, I forgot to take into account the other summary, which gleefully described it as a post-national read, a post-categorical writing, a post-immigrant thought. He is post about anything and everything! Or rather, I saw it, but I forgot that I do not actually like books that are trying very super hard to be post-anything-and-everything.
Basically, this book can be summarized as: "Disgruntled suburban post-teenagers stage a hostile takeover of the town from the mall and then fight over who gets to be dictator. Meanwhile, NOBODY CARES." (I am not exaggerating here! It is of major significance to the book that nobody cares! Because it a Satire, you see, about Our Society.)
Perhaps I am shallow, but I feel that a book featuring:
- suburban revolutionaries luring passersby to their doom with shouts of "OSTRICH IN A CADILLAC!"
- cannibalistic revolutionary feasts; also, orgies
- tragic gay love affairs between cannibalistic revolutionaries that dissolve in battles over who stole an especially juicy thigh, and end in MURDER
- no less than three hostile revolutionary takeovers from within
- an incestuous romance (that kicks in forty pages from the end, because apparently you can't have a revolution without one!)
might at its best be cracktastically amazing and at worst be cracktastically terrible, but it should not be hard to get through and kind of dull, in its own cracktastic way! And yet! I am sorry, postmodernist movement in general and Amir Parsa in specific, I appreciate what you are trying to do, but sometimes I cannot cope with the chapter-long smugly satirical digressions on the beauties of parking lots and long pseudo-poetic recitations of makes and models of cars and how they are parked in the parking lots. And this book, I am afraid, marks one of those times. (I did in fact finish it. But mostly out of stubbornness. BOOKS WILL NOT DEFEAT ME.)
"I think I need that book," I said.
Then I went on amazon.com and read the summary, which described revolutions, satire, and meta about character creation and storytelling, and decided that it was no longer a 'think', that I did, in fact, need this book.
Sadly, I forgot to take into account the other summary, which gleefully described it as a post-national read, a post-categorical writing, a post-immigrant thought. He is post about anything and everything! Or rather, I saw it, but I forgot that I do not actually like books that are trying very super hard to be post-anything-and-everything.
Basically, this book can be summarized as: "Disgruntled suburban post-teenagers stage a hostile takeover of the town from the mall and then fight over who gets to be dictator. Meanwhile, NOBODY CARES." (I am not exaggerating here! It is of major significance to the book that nobody cares! Because it a Satire, you see, about Our Society.)
Perhaps I am shallow, but I feel that a book featuring:
- suburban revolutionaries luring passersby to their doom with shouts of "OSTRICH IN A CADILLAC!"
- cannibalistic revolutionary feasts; also, orgies
- tragic gay love affairs between cannibalistic revolutionaries that dissolve in battles over who stole an especially juicy thigh, and end in MURDER
- no less than three hostile revolutionary takeovers from within
- an incestuous romance (that kicks in forty pages from the end, because apparently you can't have a revolution without one!)
might at its best be cracktastically amazing and at worst be cracktastically terrible, but it should not be hard to get through and kind of dull, in its own cracktastic way! And yet! I am sorry, postmodernist movement in general and Amir Parsa in specific, I appreciate what you are trying to do, but sometimes I cannot cope with the chapter-long smugly satirical digressions on the beauties of parking lots and long pseudo-poetic recitations of makes and models of cars and how they are parked in the parking lots. And this book, I am afraid, marks one of those times. (I did in fact finish it. But mostly out of stubbornness. BOOKS WILL NOT DEFEAT ME.)
