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A review by hreed7
Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
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.