Book 2 of 2018

Sometimes I miss working in the book industry. I'll stop simply meandering through whatever books I happen to have decided to read, and suddenly I'll choose to read a buzz book--something that's hot and current. The kind of book I miss because I'm not stacking it in mass quantities on a table or end cap display, and because I don't listen to NPR or watch C-SPAN book shows anymore.

And THIS? THIS is a hot book? THIS?

Synopsis: A whiny, entitled, pseudo-intellectual European dripping with privilege sets about recording his youth and young adulthood and how banal and empty everything is, except for exposure to some art, music, and writing. Everyone is fake and meaningless. We all inhabit a bleak Bergman film where the characters each get to shred themselves and their personae in 15-minute monologues filmed in stark black-and-white close-ups. He calls his work what Hitler called his work in order to underscore some devastating truths or realizations which actually never materialize in the text.

The suburbs are soul-sucking. The middle class are adrift and alienated from their labor, their families, and nature. The death of God and tradition has been replaced with the ascendance of death and materialism unto death.

Yawn.

MY struggle was getting through this monstrosity. And yet there are some quite good passages, passages where Karl Ove is really honest and his writing (in translation) has conveyed a common experience of our era in an interesting way.

But there's not enough there here. And more volumes? Really? FOUR more? Oh hell no...

Book 1 of 2018

I read some short fiction by Bell back in the 80s--I believe in the Best American Short Stories series? The stories were of an obvious quality, so I wanted to read his more dense work, and of course there was All Souls' Rising...a novel with some substantial accolades and strong sales for literary fiction, and which I purchased in a thick quality paperback.

But several in-person interactions with the author proved him to be such an irredeemable arsehole--we're talking sexist and narcissistic and borderline sociopathic behavior--that I returned my purchased copy of that novel without reading it. I usually do my best to separate the art from the artist, but in his case I thought "fuck that guy and his novels!"

But still, I imagine some day I'll read the Haitian trilogy because the era and the history fascinate me, and as many writers and artists have proven over the years, one can be a dickhead and still create lasting works of merit.

While thinking about re-purchasing and trying All Souls' Rising, I noted Bell had published a shorter book with a tantalizing blurb about shamanism and entheogens in the modern Southwest. I thought I would try this first and see.

Bell I imagine read some Terrance McKenna or Dan Pinchbeck and scored some online mescaline powder or psilocybin spores, or maybe he took a ride on the salvia divinorum express and got woke to the thin membrane separating reality from Reality. The forgotten youthful proclivities of his generation came back--he re-read Castaneda and after binge-watching Breaking Bad one weekend Behind the Moon popped out of his aching skull.

The novel is pretty good. The way the alternate realities bleed together and coexist is done with technical skill and efficiency. The characters are confronted by layers of consciousness and reality and dreamworld as the post- or hyper- modern becomes fractured in a way that allows the eternal to bleed through.

But is Behind the Moon better than the books and authors linked and mentioned above? Is this novel capturing something happening in the continuing dawning of Aquarius? Is it exploring new understandings of the perennial philosophy or the necessity of a return to the sacred?

No. I have re-read Castaneda, and McKenna, and Pinchbeck. I found nothing worth the trouble of re-reading in Behind the Moon. But it may lead you to fruitful research if you fall down its bear-haunted cave.