A review by offmessage
Nymphomation by Jeff Noon
4.0
I don't often revisit books, and when I do it's extremely rare that I revisit them from this particular period: the mid to late nineties were quite culturally specific (by which I mean druggy, let's be honest), and I fear the Suck Fairy here more than anywhere else. But my recent interest in the poetry of Shakespeare led me to want to retry a book that I remembered, hazily, as being spectacularly rhythmic.
Sadly midway through I told someone I thought it was a "load of torrid nonsense". Here Noon is at the very beginnings of his experiments with his Cobralingus method; you can feel him finding his way with "remixing" text, and at about halfway through it all becomes a bit too much, too disjointed. For my taste he relies too much on this method in later books and I feared that Nymphomation was going to turn out to be a naïve early example.
But! Unlike later novels he slowly backs away from linguistic experimentation as the book progresses and starts to focus more traditional language on a plot that, while making little external sense (I wouldn't dare to try to summarise here), remains entirely internally consistent and gripping for the reader.
So, yeah. Actually pretty damn good. I really enjoyed it. And he keeps the mad shit at just the right level.
Sadly midway through I told someone I thought it was a "load of torrid nonsense". Here Noon is at the very beginnings of his experiments with his Cobralingus method; you can feel him finding his way with "remixing" text, and at about halfway through it all becomes a bit too much, too disjointed. For my taste he relies too much on this method in later books and I feared that Nymphomation was going to turn out to be a naïve early example.
But! Unlike later novels he slowly backs away from linguistic experimentation as the book progresses and starts to focus more traditional language on a plot that, while making little external sense (I wouldn't dare to try to summarise here), remains entirely internally consistent and gripping for the reader.
So, yeah. Actually pretty damn good. I really enjoyed it. And he keeps the mad shit at just the right level.