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A review by mattlefevers
Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski
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.