Michael CiscoRecensioni

Michael Cisco vient, désormais, de déplacer tous mes curseurs. Mon top 10 de tous les temps vient d'être chamboulé. Définitivement. Putain de claque.

More adventures of [b:The Divinity Student|1508685|The Divinity Student|Michael Cisco|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1184448668s/1508685.jpg|1500248] as he is dug up by resurrection detectives and reanimated (with more formaldehyde). He soon escapes the two detectives and goes on a quest to become Viktor Frankenstein and build a Golem of himself to do his bidding, as he is too decrepit now to do many things on his own. The Golem's only duty is to capture and woo a female magician as a sort of Bride of Frankenstein for the Divinity student. All sorts of symbolic and surrealist mayhem ensues and it's often difficult to distinguish nonsense from the important things to keep track of the plot. Eventually all is sort of well again.

If you don't see parts of these novels as largely comic and picaresque then you'll be missing the point. Like a surrealist [b:The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|76527|The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|Laurence Sterne|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1309202864s/76527.jpg|2280279]. Cisco is going to throw a lot of real but unusual, and just plain made-up, words at you and the book requires extraordinary attention to detail by the reader or you miss a lot; the kind of book you might have to read twice just to "get it."

I didn't like it quite as well as The Divinity Student but it might be because I sort of knew what to expect and there wasn't as much wonder of discovery.

For those of you that feel a need to put this in a slot, let us call this Gothic horror surrealism. Like all good surrealism the reader is going to want to assign meaning and connection to things that are meant to be meaningless and unconnected. On the other hand there is definitely somewhat of a linear plot here. In some places it is downright funny. The body snatching scenes are derivative of the usual cliches.

What else can you say about a book where the Divinity Student is eviserated and stuffed full of paper in the first few pages? Our fearless protagonist, a word-finder by trade, has to distill the essence of twelve dead word finders to finish the catalog of lost words. He will scamper through a surrealist background while he tries to finish his mission.

This is the only book I have read that has a large dose of surrealism and actually became a page turner for me. The Centipede Press hardcover is also beautiful and the illustrations are marvelous. I have not read anything except a few short stories by Cisco but I will definitely be dipping into this the rest of this box set from time to time.

"...The disaster is that the end has already happened, and we have survived it, no one knows when or what it was, there was no *event* — over time, the world ended, and yet here we all are with no world."

A lot of the writing is beautiful, though occasionally too bogged down in stream-of-consciousness weirdness. But the plot doesn't make much sense overall--why is he the Tyrant and why does he do what he does, where does the doctor come from, what is the Tyrant's goal in the end? Maybe asking for reasons is too much from a book that wants to follow dream logic, and maybe from the author's point of view it doesn't matter, but I prefer internal consistency in my surrealism.

I think the narrator was intentionally written to be very unsympathetic, but the problem with that is it doesn't give you much reason to care about anything that happens to him. The run-on and repetitive style of the writing was unique and fit the situation the narrator was writing in, but tedious at length.

The San Veneficio Canon joins under one cover two short novels by Michael Cisco: his lauded 1999 debut The Divinity Student and its 2004 sequel The Golem. These are splendid deployments of the "new weird," most comparable in my reading history to Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. San Veneficio is the imaginary city where most of the story here transpires.

The book never clarifies its over-arching title, which allows the word "Canon" to be read either as an approved collection of scripture (the Holy Book which is the chief magical tool of the nameless Divinity Student and/or Cisco's book bearing the title) or as a minor clergyman (the Divinity Student himself). In his dream-like setting, Cisco has put into the foreground religious signifiers for places and persons: Seminary, Cathedral, Divinity Student, High Priest, etc. But the religion in question, while having some passing features and jargon of Christianity, is never specified in terms of creed or theology.

Although the book fairly thoroughly maintains a third-person omniscient narrator, there are two tiny uses of the grammatical first person in The Golem: "From horizon to horizon the only light comes from San Veneficio. I feel that spiced breath from mummified lungs once more" (130), and later--more tellingly--"her pointed* lips and nails are scarlet as the red of my binding" (182). The second of these suggests that the speaker is in fact a book; the Holy Book?
* Sic. This "pointed" would make more sense as "painted," and I suspect a typo.

The imagery of this text is kaleidoscopic. In fact, Cisco twice uses "kaleid" as a verb indicating the revolving transformation of light and vision. The Divinity Student who is--on some level, at least--the protagonist of both novels is occasionally horrifying, and becomes more than a little bit of a necromancer. The closing of The Golem embraces a type of metafiction that I identify with The Neverending Story, though certainly not in the juvenile register used by Ende! Despite that gesture at a summation, nearly any chapter of The San Veneficio Canon could stand alone as an enigmatic short story--no more enigmatic than the composite whole, really.

recommended by Nick Mamatas here: http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1550768.html

Compared to Cisco's The Narrator and The Divinity Student (hereafter referred to as Cisco's "other works"), The Traitor is much easier to follow and much less strange. It's also much less interesting- the nightmarish qualities of Cisco's other works are decidedly less pronounced in this book, the inexplicable aspects of the world are mostly relegated to the periphery of the world and the asides of the narrator rather than being put front-and-center. Now, on its own, a strange but more standard narrative compared to Cisco's other works isn't a problem, as it allows for Cisco to tell a more cohesive story than he did in his other works. Unfortunately, the story that Cisco tells through The Traitor suffers from issues of pacing and structure that keep it from being compelling, with some short passages being the exceptions.

Through the narrator, Nophtha, we are introduced to the strange world of this story and the profession of Spirit Eater, an exorcist that can use the energy of consumed spirits to aid others or, in what society considers a darker path, use that energy for personal benefit (thus developing superhuman powers and becoming classified as a Soul Burner). After a torturous childhood Nophtha rises to the position of a high-ranked Spirit Eater, and as a part of that duty Nophtha is tasked with hunting down the Soul Burner Wite. Up until this point I've no big complaints, The Traitor does a good job of establishing the world and what I took to be the main conflict of this book. It's the middle act that I found lacking (spoilers ahead):

Instead of hunting down Wite, Nophtha witnesses Wite kill the entire party of men hunting him with ease, and instead of being killed himself he chooses to join Wite and aid him. From this point through the rest of the middle third of the book (and, really, beyond), Nophtha becomes incredibly passive, merely a recorder of Wite's actions. Not that Wite is particularly active- besides some brief action segments, which make up some of the high points of this book for me, Wite spends the majority of his appearance in the book at his cousin's house, professing his desire for death but hesitating before his plan's execution. While Wite mopes, Nophtha kills time with Wite's cousin. This section is really the heart of the book, but, despite being of the greatest narrative importance, it's a slog. Eventually, and much earlier in the book than I expected, Wite dies. At this point Nophtha gets even more passive than before, his narration even acknowledging this, writing "[t]his is idle talk. This is only idle talk." Wite, despite being physically dead, becomes something elemental, haunting the mountain where his corpse was placed, and in death he becomes even more powerful than he was in life. Under his influence, Nophtha becomes a missionary for Wite, converting the marginalized throughout the land, a series of events that eventually leads to a revolution of sorts. Eventually, Nophtha is captured, and writes his account while dying in his cell.

The problem with this narrative is that it is largely rudderless. The first third had a clear purpose, but, as already mentioned, the middle third is meandering and seems pointless at times. The final third features actions that seem of little importance to the narrator, and which reach an eventual climax that was not built up and that does not feel important even as it is occurring. The main character is passive for the majority of the book, and Wite, who serves as perhaps the true main character, is largely relegated to the status of an ominous presence even while he's still alive, and doubly so when he's dead.

There are interesting parts here- I appreciate how the eating of spirits is not framed as an etherial and spiritual pursuit, but a visceral one. Other authors would frame this story as one of an unreliable narrator of questionable sanity, who may have just imagined the supernatural things occurring- not Cisco, though, who gives us a narrator that clearly doesn't have all his marbles but who nevertheless is experiencing things that are true in the context of this world. Though I've not gone into them in this review, it's the random asides Cisco peppers throughout the book that I find the most intriguing, like an anecdote about a people that can only die on the soil of their homeland, or the beastial Alak minister. There are fewer of these segments in The Traitor than in Cisco's other works, which is why reading The Traitor was a less interesting experience for me than Cisco's other works have been.

I'd consider this a lesser work of Cisco's, though still interesting. Still, I'd recommend both The Narrator and The Divinity Student over this one.

Threaded by confusion that compels you to wander until you ... reach the end. Lovely words, ideas mingle, brackishness throughout. So many things, so many of them amazing, so many cofounding. Interpretation is critical and it is only yours. We are all economists of our own reality.

The Narrator rewards careful reading. Pay it less attention than it deserves and you are bound to be tripped up, confused, and too lost to continue without going back. It is a challenge and well worth the effort. Cisco is a superb writer, able to spin a story that stimulates the imagination, steals your attention, and leaves the reader swimming in that amazing, unique prose of his. Read it or perish with the knowledge that you fail.

http://epbth.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/the-narrator-michael-cisco/

The Tyrant is slightly more accessible than Cisco's critically-acclaimed 2007 novel The Traitor, but still incredibly rich - both in terms of the language (my god, it's full of words!) and in terms of imagery. In fact, aesthetically, it's a bit reminiscent of J. K. Huysmans, albeit a good deal less self-indulgent and with more meta. There were many moments that stopped me dead to just marvel at a sentence or a paragraph...

More!

2.5 Stars

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