A review by matthewcpeck
Age of Wire and String: Stories by Ben Marcus
4.0
A really odd book to which it's difficult to assign a star rating, 'The Age Of Wire And String' is a technically a book of short stories in the way that 'Revolution 9' is technically a Beatles song. It's written like an almanac or encyclopedia of the rituals, history, and jargon of an America in a parallel dimension. The idea of a normal sentence or image is tossed out into the abyss as one reads clinical descriptions of musical legs and angels in the grass. (I read the 2013 Granta version with abstract illustrations by Catrin Morgan that make everything that much more disorienting.)
In between the short, encyclopedia-entry-like works are 2 longer pieces that are more recognizable stories, albeit really weird stories. 'The Weather Killer' recounts an apocalypse-cum-origin myth in spare, Biblical prose that heightens the hallucinatory madness of the events described. And 'The Animal Husband' is a distorted, seemingly personal account of childhood that maybe is a key to understanding the whole of the book, in which nighttime is when the 'bird eats black air' and writing is 'scratching away the white'.
'Wire And String' is hard to describe - at times it reminded me of the playful Irish genius triptych of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O'Brien. At other times it reminded me of LSD-fueled 60s rock lyrics. But one of Marcus's greatest feats is making this book a lot of fun to read, from start to finish. I even laughed out loud at times, simply at the surprise of a word or name used in a unorthodox way. I can only hope that a thousand years from now, after some kind of cataclysm has erased all traces of our society, an archaeologist will dig up 'The Age Of Wire And String' and believe it to be a historical document.
In between the short, encyclopedia-entry-like works are 2 longer pieces that are more recognizable stories, albeit really weird stories. 'The Weather Killer' recounts an apocalypse-cum-origin myth in spare, Biblical prose that heightens the hallucinatory madness of the events described. And 'The Animal Husband' is a distorted, seemingly personal account of childhood that maybe is a key to understanding the whole of the book, in which nighttime is when the 'bird eats black air' and writing is 'scratching away the white'.
'Wire And String' is hard to describe - at times it reminded me of the playful Irish genius triptych of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Flann O'Brien. At other times it reminded me of LSD-fueled 60s rock lyrics. But one of Marcus's greatest feats is making this book a lot of fun to read, from start to finish. I even laughed out loud at times, simply at the surprise of a word or name used in a unorthodox way. I can only hope that a thousand years from now, after some kind of cataclysm has erased all traces of our society, an archaeologist will dig up 'The Age Of Wire And String' and believe it to be a historical document.