A Greater Monster by David David Katzman
My rating: 3/5 cats
basically, what i learned from this book is if you accept drugs from a homeless fellow, you will be subjected to a very long headache.
everyone seems to have looooved this book more than i did. and it’s not that it isn’t a fun book or an enjoyable book, it really boils down to my values as a reader. i like story. it doesn’t bother me if the story is multi-narrative or even fragmented, as long as i have a chance to situate myself. this one is just too frenetic for my poor reader-brain. it is stream of consciousness AND surreal/bizarro AND stylistically playful with phonetics and fun with fonts AND philosophical battering. and the scene changes and character’s mutations all take place in this alice in wonderland world populated by animal-people and the capital-w weird. my poor brain.
i can stomach the bizarro, in small doses, but when i have to read nearly 400 pages of it (although it is oddly-spaced and there are pictures so it is not as daunting as it might sound), my brain just starts to be sad. i don’t know where i am and i don’t like it.
again—if you like this kid of writing, you will probably dig this—everyone else seems to. and i didn’t hate it, it just left me feeling defeated, in the sense of “why doesn’t my brain work within this context??”
or as one character says near the end:
“I am weary of this”
“You just aren’t creative enough.”
which is, i suppose, my curse.
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