Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot
My rating: 4/5 cats
here is my page!
isn’t is awesome when a power outage eats your book review?? i think so.
let me try this again. i understand greg’s difficulties in reviewing this, what with not wanting to give anything away, because this is a book constructed in such a careful way, it could only be spoiled by a careless reviewer.
mfso has threatened to write a “word-limit breaching review” of this, and greg’s is pretty long too, once you hack into all his nested spoilers. i am going to try to do this tantalizingly, so you guys actually want to go out and read it, instead of reading whatever watered-down summary i could come up with. they will probably do better jobs reviewing here than i will.
WHY NO FIVE STARS CATS???
i knew i was getting into dangerous waters with this decision. i can completely understand why greg and mfso are cutting holes on this book and making sweet love to it. it is the perfect food to feed their philosophical and cerebral appetites. not that i’m a dummy – i swear i am not – but in this case, the “what is man’s purpose” ruminations; while completely instrumental to the book, took me away from the parts i was more emotionally invested in: finding out about the “fucked-up shit” and learning more about this new reality. my reality is that i frequently have difficulties with the slipstream, the speculative. i don’t have a strong background in science fiction (which i plan to change this year) and i like my magical realism in the vein of jonathan carroll – just slightly tweaked. this book does an amazing job of world-building, or “reality-building,” but it is very much in the vein of dfw, where a lot is left out. this is definitely a book that needs to be read a second time, and it might get that fifth star cat after a second pass, when i am more secure in my footing and i know what i am meant to be looking for. it is a fantastic story, all my personal failings aside, and if i had read this before those dudes, i would have immediately put on my readers’ advisory helmet and informed them of its perfection for their particular tastes.
to play a quick readers’ advisory game, since the helmet is already on: if you like david mitchell, try ryan boudinot. this is me basing my judgment on having only read Ghostwritten, but i know mitchell likes to do the scattershot split narrative and temporal murkiness that is all over this book. (murkiness is not a bad word, here, but there is some confusion, for me anyway, as far as when events are occurring. but that is actually a strength of the book, and i like that he makes the reader work a bit)
but let me try to give a better sense of what this book is about.
shit.
okay. it is about clones and “embodiments” and the enduring cult of celebrity and dishwashing and scientific triumphs and mistakes and mudslides and chewbacca and intellectual promise and moral responsibility and a giant floating head and an endless red carpet and the expectations and limitations of organized religion and trying to fix the mistakes of the past while maybe misinterpreting which parts actually were the mistakes. i am dancing around stuff here. but none of the above is a lie – it is just a tricky book to pin down without crushing its pretty pretty wings.
i could have read another 400 pages of this story without tiring of it.
and what’s the story?? one “character” character with the illustrations from Doré’s Inferno tattooed on her forearms, one with the illustrations from purgatorio – but never one with the paradisio – you are killing me, boudinot – why can’t we have our paradisio?? i suppose the book might answer that question.
“fucked up shit,” indeed…
i did a bad job here, but being careful will have that result sometimes.
