The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara
My rating: 5/5 cats
i need to read this again
i need to read this again
i need to read this again.
i can see it up there on my shelves, trapped between Songdogs and Brightness Falls and in my “i should review all my favorite books, especially the ones it will be frustrating for people to track down,” burst of energy, here we all are.
and i am wanting desperately to read this again.
this book should be among the seven wonders of the modern world. yes, we all love the chunnel—it is superfast and all, but this is a superfast chunnel of words. this book will make your mind come. it is astonishing.
but it is not for everyone, truly.
it is not a tidily told tale that will wrap up at the end. it is a book you have to both work with and work for. but it isn’t complicated in the way that finnegan’s wake is—i personally never got the sense that someone was deliberately trying to make me angry. it is more ambitious in the way that house of leaves is, or infinite jest. it sprawls, massively, like a panda bear on its back showing you its goods. but it isn’t going to perform for you—you are going to be responsible for making a lot of the connections yourself. i found it way more satisfying than house of leaves, and pretty much the equal of IJ, although i have only read this one the one time. (i need to read this again.) it has a lot of that lynchean “why don’t you tell me what this is about” attitude, which makes it both a taunt and a challenge, and leaves a rush of accomplishment singing through the veins.
reading this is like when you are young and stoned, and you are walking down the street, overhearing snippets of conversation, reading graffiti, hearing lyrics of songs coming from out of windows of cars going by and you start picking up on patterns, man, and how all of this surrounding noise relates to you—the center of the universe, naturally, and you start coming up with silent theories about what everything you are seeing and hearing is trying to tell you. only this time, it’s all real. this is carefully balanced. this is like a game of memory, and these are echoes and reverberations throughout, like in the sea came in at midnight. but this book is more disjointed, more of a mist of words you just happen to find yourself in. i have a pretty big aversion to clever for clever’s sake, and this one never felt that way to me, it is simply clever. it is a book i discovered and read on my own, and the experience felt so life changing and necessary that it spooked me a little. i read it pretty much right when it came out, attracted by the title and premise alone, and it was only years later that i realized what a cult this book had surrounding it, and what mysteries lay cloaked around its authorship.
i need to read this again.
i should stop writing this and go read it, but i gotta read a couple of other books first…
but i vow to read this again before the end of the month. one of you people should track it down and read it with me.
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