jdglasgow's review
1.0
When I finished STARLIGHT IN TWO MILLION: A NEO-SCIENTIFIC NOVELLA, I wrote that I was giving it a 1-star rating with the heart of a 3-star rating. If you’d asked me 30 pages in, I would have given it a full-throated and zealous 1-stars and was entirely prepared to call it the worst book I have ever read. Don’t get me wrong—it’s still very bad, but by the end I was persuaded that there is a kernel of a fascinating idea at work in the work which makes me think of the book (NOVELLA!!!) with some fondness in spite of how angry it made me throughout most of its brief 100 pages.
I learned of this novella while searching specifically for writings by graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’ve come across a few authors who were part of that program and I’ve found their writing is typically sharp even if maybe the whole doesn’t come together. The title of this book really intrigued me, so I requested it through Inter-Library Loan as my local library did not have a copy… it came to me all the way from the Texas Tech library (approximately 1,450 miles away)!
Before I began, I read the blurbs on the back of the book and they immediately made me uneasy. The first, from Andrew Joron, describes the book as “a decomposition of the music of the spheres” in which “narrative flow becomes a kind of quantum fluid, bifurcating into systems and poetry”, and where “[t]inctures of the inhuman spread . . . causing language to convulse in forms as vivid and varied as the multiverse itself.” This description struck me as pretentious, meaningless bullshit and it worried me that I was in for more of the same inside the book. The other blurb is no better. From Bhanu Kapil: “Amy Catanzano’s writing is a vector, releasing sparks. To read her work is to emit/receive—something . . . To ‘predicate’. To ‘devolve’. To ‘shimmer’. In a book that is like a nerve.” Again, these are beautiful words that communicate literally nothing. And indeed, once I began reading, I did find that the book itself was written in the same vein.
From the start, I was struck by how nonsensical and haughtily self-satisfied the language of the book is. There’s a thin veneer of a narrative, about two characters named Aletheia and Epoché (who are not so much characters as they are embodiments of abstract concepts), lovers who become enmeshed in a Pandora’s Box-like world engine/spaceship (called the iEpiphany, ::shudder::) which is itself a poem or novella. First of all, making the battery/brain/spaceship at the center of the story a novella or a poem is so incredibly heavy-handed and narcissistic that it’s embarrassing. Second, the content of the book is meaningless drivel that has the air of poignancy while expressing nothing. I found myself writing down quote after quote because I was awed by how incredibly stupid it all was. Almost immediately we are treated to stuff like this:
This is the future, I respond. Love is the hybrid of us all.
I want to live like that, she claims. In particular, when you exist, you live like the trees, bifurcated, and then like the storms, uncertain.
The rebel strikes, I mouth. From the discordian shore, ripple the edge in my direction. Let the vantage fever. Until its root.
She hesitates. Non-locality aside, much of the difficulty is in the assumption, she says. It always is.
Catanzano is a poet first and foremost, and this is definitely supposedly poetry. I’ve talked about it many times before, but despite being a poet myself I loathe reading others’ poetry because it so often seems exactly like this: slapped together, striving for depth it doesn’t come close to achieving. And if that beginning wasn’t enough, the book just gets dumber and dumber, less and less comprehensible. I thought it hit a low point with page 20, titled “Earth, Redux, Majesty”. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that each page has a title, the better to signal that this is POETRY(!), and of course the titles are as empty as the text. Anyway, here’s the entirety of page 20:
Dear Aletheia, Epoché writes.
Are spirals also questions?
Epoché
I learned of this novella while searching specifically for writings by graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’ve come across a few authors who were part of that program and I’ve found their writing is typically sharp even if maybe the whole doesn’t come together. The title of this book really intrigued me, so I requested it through Inter-Library Loan as my local library did not have a copy… it came to me all the way from the Texas Tech library (approximately 1,450 miles away)!
Before I began, I read the blurbs on the back of the book and they immediately made me uneasy. The first, from Andrew Joron, describes the book as “a decomposition of the music of the spheres” in which “narrative flow becomes a kind of quantum fluid, bifurcating into systems and poetry”, and where “[t]inctures of the inhuman spread . . . causing language to convulse in forms as vivid and varied as the multiverse itself.” This description struck me as pretentious, meaningless bullshit and it worried me that I was in for more of the same inside the book. The other blurb is no better. From Bhanu Kapil: “Amy Catanzano’s writing is a vector, releasing sparks. To read her work is to emit/receive—something . . . To ‘predicate’. To ‘devolve’. To ‘shimmer’. In a book that is like a nerve.” Again, these are beautiful words that communicate literally nothing. And indeed, once I began reading, I did find that the book itself was written in the same vein.
From the start, I was struck by how nonsensical and haughtily self-satisfied the language of the book is. There’s a thin veneer of a narrative, about two characters named Aletheia and Epoché (who are not so much characters as they are embodiments of abstract concepts), lovers who become enmeshed in a Pandora’s Box-like world engine/spaceship (called the iEpiphany, ::shudder::) which is itself a poem or novella. First of all, making the battery/brain/spaceship at the center of the story a novella or a poem is so incredibly heavy-handed and narcissistic that it’s embarrassing. Second, the content of the book is meaningless drivel that has the air of poignancy while expressing nothing. I found myself writing down quote after quote because I was awed by how incredibly stupid it all was. Almost immediately we are treated to stuff like this:
This is the future, I respond. Love is the hybrid of us all.
I want to live like that, she claims. In particular, when you exist, you live like the trees, bifurcated, and then like the storms, uncertain.
The rebel strikes, I mouth. From the discordian shore, ripple the edge in my direction. Let the vantage fever. Until its root.
She hesitates. Non-locality aside, much of the difficulty is in the assumption, she says. It always is.
Catanzano is a poet first and foremost, and this is definitely supposedly poetry. I’ve talked about it many times before, but despite being a poet myself I loathe reading others’ poetry because it so often seems exactly like this: slapped together, striving for depth it doesn’t come close to achieving. And if that beginning wasn’t enough, the book just gets dumber and dumber, less and less comprehensible. I thought it hit a low point with page 20, titled “Earth, Redux, Majesty”. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that each page has a title, the better to signal that this is POETRY(!), and of course the titles are as empty as the text. Anyway, here’s the entirety of page 20:
Dear Aletheia, Epoché writes.
Are spirals also questions?
Epoché
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