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mattlefevers's review
3.0
This book was my white whale, the lurking nemesis at the edge of my vision. It should tell you everything you need to know about how intimidating this novel is to begin that it managed to sit on my shelf collecting dust for eight years despite House of Leaves being a life changing favorite of mine. I bought this one off the strength of its author's name and my love for House of Leaves, but every time I thought about starting it, I'd take one look at the first few pages and cringe.
To clarify - it's not the formatting that I find off-putting about Only Revolutions. The way it reads as two parallel narratives upside down from each other, back to front and front to back, is awesome. The crammed margins of unrelated, cryptic historical dates and numbers are perhaps unnecessary but kind of cool. Everything about the layout is carefully planned and very impressive. I read it (at the publisher's recommendation) one chapter at a time from each end, and experienced a strange thrill of vertigo when my bookmarks crossed in the middle and up became down for a second.
No, it's the avant-garde poetry of the actual writing that took a lot of warming up to for me. This isn't really a novel so much as a very long beat poem, and the scattershot language is sometimes intelligible and sometimes looked like word salad to me. To be super honest, if anyone but Mark Z. Danielewski had written this book I would have read fifty pages and thrown it away. But I bore with it, and these are my findings.
It's actually pretty good. Hailey and Sam, thinly sketched as they are in the freewheeling word fireworks that make up the text, have some deeply poignant moments together, and the ending that each half of the story builds towards left me shaken and impressed. Whether or not I could follow the specific ins and outs of their travels through this opaque prose, the arc of their relationship felt true and I found myself caring a lot how it ended. It's almost unfortunate (to me, admittedly not a poetry lover) that the reader has to fight through the thorns and brambles of almost deliberately irritating language to learn what happens to them.
I really can't rank this below three stars though, just based on the elegance of the physical presentation. The way the pages incrementally change in font size from the beginning to the end was fun to watch and gave me a good barometer of my progress, and other little quirks (like the two sets of page numbers, which spin around each other if you flip the pages quickly) show just how lovingly crafted this weird, intimidating book is. However difficult I (and I'm guessing many others) may find it, no one can say Danielewski and his presumably long-suffering publishers and book binders didn't give it their all.
To clarify - it's not the formatting that I find off-putting about Only Revolutions. The way it reads as two parallel narratives upside down from each other, back to front and front to back, is awesome. The crammed margins of unrelated, cryptic historical dates and numbers are perhaps unnecessary but kind of cool. Everything about the layout is carefully planned and very impressive. I read it (at the publisher's recommendation) one chapter at a time from each end, and experienced a strange thrill of vertigo when my bookmarks crossed in the middle and up became down for a second.
No, it's the avant-garde poetry of the actual writing that took a lot of warming up to for me. This isn't really a novel so much as a very long beat poem, and the scattershot language is sometimes intelligible and sometimes looked like word salad to me. To be super honest, if anyone but Mark Z. Danielewski had written this book I would have read fifty pages and thrown it away. But I bore with it, and these are my findings.
It's actually pretty good. Hailey and Sam, thinly sketched as they are in the freewheeling word fireworks that make up the text, have some deeply poignant moments together, and the ending that each half of the story builds towards left me shaken and impressed. Whether or not I could follow the specific ins and outs of their travels through this opaque prose, the arc of their relationship felt true and I found myself caring a lot how it ended. It's almost unfortunate (to me, admittedly not a poetry lover) that the reader has to fight through the thorns and brambles of almost deliberately irritating language to learn what happens to them.
I really can't rank this below three stars though, just based on the elegance of the physical presentation. The way the pages incrementally change in font size from the beginning to the end was fun to watch and gave me a good barometer of my progress, and other little quirks (like the two sets of page numbers, which spin around each other if you flip the pages quickly) show just how lovingly crafted this weird, intimidating book is. However difficult I (and I'm guessing many others) may find it, no one can say Danielewski and his presumably long-suffering publishers and book binders didn't give it their all.
scheu's review
2.0
I have learned that something can be structurally interesting and yet completely unappealing. I read about 24 pages each direction before I realised that reading more would be a chore and not worth my time.
casualdarings's review
2.0
As pretty and lyrical as I found most of the writing, the plot (what little of it there was) was hard to follow and the characters (what little of them we learn), were hard to care about. It's another interesting experiment from Danielewski with whatever rules define what makes a novel, but unlike House of Leaves which was riveting and complex, this feels more like a gimmick than a cohesive story.
simonrtaylor's review
1.0
Only Revolutions is a bitter disappointment.
Telling the story of lovers Sam and Hailley, who are “always” sixteen and inexplicably transcend both time and location, it is split into two narratives; one by each.
The layout of the book is clever. Start at one end and you get Sam’s account taking up most of the page, with Hailley’s upside down in small text at the bottom. Flip the book and it’s the inverse, leading you through the entire novel twice. There’s some other jumbo jumbo in the margin. The letter O is always coloured green or yellow, dependent on the writer.
The publisher suggests alternating the reading of the accounts, which are in no way divided into chapters or other discernible sections, eight pages at a time. It’s good advice; the symmetry between the accounts is obvious in these well-portioned chunks; complimentary and contradictory.
The issue is that the prose itself is completely incoherent. It literally makes no sense. The occasional profound thought or rhyme might well be worth sticking on a fridge magnet, but adds nothing to the story. Indeed, it’s quite impossible to work out what the story actually is. It feels like Johnny Truant. Danielewski’s drug-addled occasional-narrator in House of Leaves, has gotten utterly off his face and written a whole novel himself.
I love it when authors experiment and do something different, and Leaves is such a respected cult classic that I had high hopes for Revolutions. Sadly, it seems it wasn’t me that was high. It’s utterly unreadable, cannot be understood and a slog of Herculean promotions to make it to the end. This should have been fantastic.
Telling the story of lovers Sam and Hailley, who are “always” sixteen and inexplicably transcend both time and location, it is split into two narratives; one by each.
The layout of the book is clever. Start at one end and you get Sam’s account taking up most of the page, with Hailley’s upside down in small text at the bottom. Flip the book and it’s the inverse, leading you through the entire novel twice. There’s some other jumbo jumbo in the margin. The letter O is always coloured green or yellow, dependent on the writer.
The publisher suggests alternating the reading of the accounts, which are in no way divided into chapters or other discernible sections, eight pages at a time. It’s good advice; the symmetry between the accounts is obvious in these well-portioned chunks; complimentary and contradictory.
The issue is that the prose itself is completely incoherent. It literally makes no sense. The occasional profound thought or rhyme might well be worth sticking on a fridge magnet, but adds nothing to the story. Indeed, it’s quite impossible to work out what the story actually is. It feels like Johnny Truant. Danielewski’s drug-addled occasional-narrator in House of Leaves, has gotten utterly off his face and written a whole novel himself.
I love it when authors experiment and do something different, and Leaves is such a respected cult classic that I had high hopes for Revolutions. Sadly, it seems it wasn’t me that was high. It’s utterly unreadable, cannot be understood and a slog of Herculean promotions to make it to the end. This should have been fantastic.
mkean's review
3.0
When I first read this, I hadn't read anything like it. I was completely blown away and immediately gave it five stars. I thought that it was clever instead of gimmicky, that the language was poetic and perfect for the subject, and fell in love with it.
Now, upon a second read for a school assignment, it's just... not that great. I find myself saying, "can I stop now?" The rhythm of the poetry itself is infuriating and it's just not gripping me like it did before. Now it just seems gimmicky. The characters are obnoxious. I'm going to correct my score to three stars because that's how I feel now.
Now, upon a second read for a school assignment, it's just... not that great. I find myself saying, "can I stop now?" The rhythm of the poetry itself is infuriating and it's just not gripping me like it did before. Now it just seems gimmicky. The characters are obnoxious. I'm going to correct my score to three stars because that's how I feel now.
ferris_mx's review
3.0
An interesting but ultimately failed experiment. The text has a high degree of symmetry, with the same story told twice, once along the top of the page, and once along the bottom, backwards. The stories are quite similar but not identical because they are different perceptions. Each page's top and bottom contains a symmetrical reference. The text of both stories starts big but shrinks. In the margins there are historical facts from a time period that is centered on the Kennedy assassination, and covering a period from the civil war until the date of publication. A lot of care was taken to create this symmetrical experimental "story".
But the story is half gibberish. And the half that is not gibberish does not make much of a story. That's the big chink in this story's armor.
Some reviews have said that readers take away very different perspectives from this book. So here's mine. The two stories are bifurcations of the U.S., geographical across the Mississippi (referred to as Mishishishi), north/south, and possibly others. Much of the story takes place in St. Louis, pretty near the geographic center of the U.S., and on the Mississippi.
But the story is half gibberish. And the half that is not gibberish does not make much of a story. That's the big chink in this story's armor.
Some reviews have said that readers take away very different perspectives from this book. So here's mine. The two stories are bifurcations of the U.S., geographical across the Mississippi (referred to as Mishishishi), north/south, and possibly others. Much of the story takes place in St. Louis, pretty near the geographic center of the U.S., and on the Mississippi.
argorden's review against another edition
2.0
Interesting idea, and fun use of language, but I couldn't stay interested long enough to finish.