Scan barcode
A review by colin_cox
Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim
3.0
The process of reading Eugene Lim's deeply disjointed novel, Dear Cyborgs, was not necessarily a pleasant one. However, in the days since I finished it, I find that I have thought about it more and more. Structured by theme rather than plot, Dear Cyborgs offers a thoughtful meditation on the efficacy of public protests and arrives at a profoundly ambivalent place by asking a simple but thoughtful set of questions about how we engage with public forms of discourse.
The novel ends with something approximating a diagnostic of what the reader just experienced. Here, Kim defines Dear Cyborgs as a "fractal" and "confessional" work that "mutated and yet duplicated its shape by my changing focus and perspective on it" (155). This language helps to codify what seems, at first glance, so disarming about this book: it constructs itself within itself, leaving the playfully incoherent plot a product of the mutated content that perpetually invents what appears on each page. Frankly, the sentence I just wrote sounds like babbling nonsense, but that is the impression of Dear Cyborgs, a rambling book that aspires, while simultaneously succeeding and failing, to articulate something profound.
The novel ends with something approximating a diagnostic of what the reader just experienced. Here, Kim defines Dear Cyborgs as a "fractal" and "confessional" work that "mutated and yet duplicated its shape by my changing focus and perspective on it" (155). This language helps to codify what seems, at first glance, so disarming about this book: it constructs itself within itself, leaving the playfully incoherent plot a product of the mutated content that perpetually invents what appears on each page. Frankly, the sentence I just wrote sounds like babbling nonsense, but that is the impression of Dear Cyborgs, a rambling book that aspires, while simultaneously succeeding and failing, to articulate something profound.