alessandro_ajm's review
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
4.0
finalgirlfall's review
4.0
it took me a while to get the hang of this book, and to understand the writing style. but it all tied together very well in the end, which i appreciated.
docpacey's review
1.0
Not for one second did i care about any of the characters, nor understand the jumps between the world of the narrator and the world of the comic book alter-egos. i could only hate-read about a hundred pages before tossing it away.
colin_cox's review
3.0
The process of reading Eugene Lim's deeply disjointed novel, Dear Cyborgs, was not necessarily a pleasant one. However, in the days since I finished it, I find that I have thought about it more and more. Structured by theme rather than plot, Dear Cyborgs offers a thoughtful meditation on the efficacy of public protests and arrives at a profoundly ambivalent place by asking a simple but thoughtful set of questions about how we engage with public forms of discourse.
The novel ends with something approximating a diagnostic of what the reader just experienced. Here, Kim defines Dear Cyborgs as a "fractal" and "confessional" work that "mutated and yet duplicated its shape by my changing focus and perspective on it" (155). This language helps to codify what seems, at first glance, so disarming about this book: it constructs itself within itself, leaving the playfully incoherent plot a product of the mutated content that perpetually invents what appears on each page. Frankly, the sentence I just wrote sounds like babbling nonsense, but that is the impression of Dear Cyborgs, a rambling book that aspires, while simultaneously succeeding and failing, to articulate something profound.
The novel ends with something approximating a diagnostic of what the reader just experienced. Here, Kim defines Dear Cyborgs as a "fractal" and "confessional" work that "mutated and yet duplicated its shape by my changing focus and perspective on it" (155). This language helps to codify what seems, at first glance, so disarming about this book: it constructs itself within itself, leaving the playfully incoherent plot a product of the mutated content that perpetually invents what appears on each page. Frankly, the sentence I just wrote sounds like babbling nonsense, but that is the impression of Dear Cyborgs, a rambling book that aspires, while simultaneously succeeding and failing, to articulate something profound.
carmenere's review
2.0
."Today's puzzler. Enforced inescapable automatic insidious complicity. On the horizon no viable just alternative and no path toward one. All proposals thus far fanciful, impossible, doomed." And so opens the story of Vu and his friend, the unnamed narrator, two Asian kids living in Ohio and feeling like outcasts at school. Facing bigotry and xenophobia, they find solace in comic books. Up to the narrator moving out of the neighborhood, it was a run of the mill coming of age story. What happened after that, I'm not quite sure. I truly believe there is a story within these pages but the fog is so dense I wasn't able to see it. The story became confusing and ungrounded. The names of new characters were dropped but seemed one dimensional. Without connections, the remainder of the story consisted of words. If you remain for the conclusion, you may come to realize, as I did, that there is, indeed, a story within these pages. Now, that the reader feels as if there is a foundation, a second read may reveal the entire story.
cythera15's review
3.5
The book that I felt was unready to appreciate. Ursula's Curse, however, I will think about for a long time.
This painting cannot be bought or sold for more than the total wages of six months full-time employment at the minimum wage as determined by the state of New York. If this painting should be sold for greater than this amount, may both the buyer and seller be considered shit by the entire world and by themselves, and may they spend the afterlife as sad and angry and hungry and hopless as poverty makes. (29)
staticdisplay's review
3.0
this book was too High Art for me. I'm the kind of reader where what I enjoyed about this was the gentle reveal that all the seemingly unrelated vignettes were, in fact, all connected. I found the characters' monologues interesting and at times disturbing, because they made me think too much about this wretched world in which we live. I think from the summary of the book I was expecting more whimsy than performance art. the writing was at times impenetrable, I think deliberately so. an interesting and worthwhile reading experience.
bear_'s review
adventurous
challenging
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
hreed7's review
3.0
I'd like to give this book 3.5 stars, a fulcrum point balancing the timely critique of capitalism and genuinely thrilling conceptual art woven through this novel against the truly inscrutable experimentation with form.
If I'm being honest, I read this book in a few hours in part because it is very short, and in part because I was just trying to blaze through and get a feel for it so I could understand why it won against Manhattan Beach in The Morning News Tournament of Books. So when, 85% of the way through, I couldn't be sure who the narrator(s) had been or who several of the characters even were, I figured it was just that I was being a nimrod and resolved to just enjoy the half-dozen or so screencap-worthy soundbites that the book provided. But once I clarified that my malunderstanding of the book was only partly my fault, and Dear Cyborgs had been intentionally crafted to obscure the narrator, the characters ("real" or imagined in a comic-within-a-story), the question of whether or not anyone actually was maybe a cyborg, and other basic narrative benchmarks, it actually made me mad...
Because its true, there's some good shit here! Lim describes art projects that I found tantalizing: a famous painting that features text admonishing anyone who buys or sells it for more than a year's living wage; an artist who 'sells' her entire ongoing art oeuvre (12 art pieces, the oldest destroyed every time a new one is created) in the form of purchasing ownership over the shifting collection, uncertain of the impending new works.
There are also numerous and effective soliloquies about late capitalism, social movements, and other de rigueur topics. One especially memorable one is given as follows:
"I think that a protest, like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protester for the protester...Of course one hopes and please for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some other level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protester it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can cal it hokum if you wish, but for the protester, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide."
This is a clear-eyed and powerful statement about the intrinsic value of acting out your morals, and one that I could easily see reading in a middle- to high-brow magazine article written by a person I have never and will never hear of again. That level of dislocation is exactly what this novel provides: ideas unmoored from the baggage of having a character state them.
As Trump might spew, "I like books that do have plots." That, in a word, is what holds back this idealistic collection of often-pleasing vignettes. Your mileage may vary.
If I'm being honest, I read this book in a few hours in part because it is very short, and in part because I was just trying to blaze through and get a feel for it so I could understand why it won against Manhattan Beach in The Morning News Tournament of Books. So when, 85% of the way through, I couldn't be sure who the narrator(s) had been or who several of the characters even were, I figured it was just that I was being a nimrod and resolved to just enjoy the half-dozen or so screencap-worthy soundbites that the book provided. But once I clarified that my malunderstanding of the book was only partly my fault, and Dear Cyborgs had been intentionally crafted to obscure the narrator, the characters ("real" or imagined in a comic-within-a-story), the question of whether or not anyone actually was maybe a cyborg, and other basic narrative benchmarks, it actually made me mad...
Because its true, there's some good shit here! Lim describes art projects that I found tantalizing: a famous painting that features text admonishing anyone who buys or sells it for more than a year's living wage; an artist who 'sells' her entire ongoing art oeuvre (12 art pieces, the oldest destroyed every time a new one is created) in the form of purchasing ownership over the shifting collection, uncertain of the impending new works.
There are also numerous and effective soliloquies about late capitalism, social movements, and other de rigueur topics. One especially memorable one is given as follows:
"I think that a protest, like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protester for the protester...Of course one hopes and please for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some other level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protester it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can cal it hokum if you wish, but for the protester, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide."
This is a clear-eyed and powerful statement about the intrinsic value of acting out your morals, and one that I could easily see reading in a middle- to high-brow magazine article written by a person I have never and will never hear of again. That level of dislocation is exactly what this novel provides: ideas unmoored from the baggage of having a character state them.
As Trump might spew, "I like books that do have plots." That, in a word, is what holds back this idealistic collection of often-pleasing vignettes. Your mileage may vary.