Will Chancellor

I enjoyed this one a lot and think Chancellor may be somebody to watch. Part of my enjoyment is no doubt because I'm a sucker for books about art, and this one ticks that box. I'm also a sucker for absurdity, paradoxes, and at least a fairly accessible veneer of erudition, and the book has those in varying degrees as well.

I think it could be an interesting book to do a proper study of sometime. There are enough recurring notions (paradoxes, the liminal, the monstrous, exploitation, memory and environment, what it means to be political, the role of things like sport and art in culture, and surely others) that there's plenty to latch onto for study. I'd also be curious to better understand the book's structure; it seems like the sort of book that might be meticulously structured according to some myth cycle, for example, but that's just a shot in the dark with no basis in actual study of the structure.

Chancellor writes good sentences and weaves scenes together reasonably well. The story stretches credibility in a number of ways, especially in the last quarter or so, but I was willing to look past that given the book's other merits.
… (altro)