Reza Negarestani

If there is an award for unreadable fiction, this book should get it.

To begin with, it is a collection of incoherent essays that attempt to create a new mysticism based on oil and the Middle East. By incoherent I mean that not only are the chapters independent of one another, but that the paragraphs of these chapters are unconnected, and indeed many times the sentences within each paragraph bear no relationship to each other. It's a pretty basic aspect of writing, but one which modern authors seem to have forgotten, that each sentence follows from the previous, grouped as a sequence into coherent paragraphs, and that each paragraph is a consequence or a clarification of the preceding paragraph, unless an explicit transition is provided. There are various justifications for not doing this, such as subverting the narrative expectation of the reader, breaking the constraints of traditional structure, making the reader aware that they are reading a book, and so on - but really it is just bad writing.

It's hard to tell whether the bad writing on display here is intentional, or the writer is incompetent. This is because the contents are presented as a "found work" with some introduction and footnotes by the actual author(/protagonist, but ultimately who cares), so making the thing unreadable makes it more realistic. Except that the found-work is an academic study of another source-work, so already we're at two removes from the incompetent writer (assuming academics can write well, which I am inclined to believe despite ample evidence to the contrary). This source work, written by yet another Mad Arab, is quoted liberally throughout, but the inept typesetting and the refusal to use traditional methods of quoting makes it difficult to tell where the source-work ends and the found-work begins. Is this intentional, or incompetent? Who cares! It's rubbish either way.

The content itself, that is the ideas, are the sort of nonsense you see plastered to lamposts or left in laundromats. The sort of etymologically-ignorant ("what do bugs have to do with anything?") and rhetorically-suspect word association used in Five Percent Nation building and second-wave feminism ("history is HIS-story and should be replaced with HER-story") makes great propaganda, but poor argumentation. This is buttressed by the most inept numerology one is likely to encounter outside of Madonna's Kabbalah circle: if the numerical values of a word's component letters cannot be coerced into a desired value or combination,then change the spelling of the word, and claim without evidence that this is the true spelling of the word (before or after transliteration from the original alphabet, as needed)!

But yeah, okay, oil is a Force, Gog and Magog are two ends of an Axis (unclear why these names were chosen), Decay is a Mystic Process, and so on. There is a lot of asserting in this book, but very little explaining, and ultimately no conclusions. X is this. Y is that. Why should we care? Nobody bothers to say, nor to provide any evidence that the scholar isn't just making all of this up as he goes along (and if that's intentional, does that really improve things?).

An attempt is made at the beginning to provide a framing story, like in House of Leaves: a preface describing, however unbelievably, the discovery of the scholar's manuscript, followed by an exchange of views in the footnotes. This exchange peters out pretty early on, and eventually is replaced by footnotes that are in code. It's not a hard code, just a simple substitution cipher, one you could probably do in your head, though after determining about 1/3 of the words in a footnote it becomes clear this is just more garbage, so why bother finishing. The narrative supposedly winds up in the end notes, but spoiler, it doesn't, they are just more garbage, and the book has no narrative after the prologue.

So why 3 stars instead of 1? Good question. I did enjoy reading a few of the schizoid rants, such as the Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards The Sun and Decay (the Excursus sections were all borderline unreadable, and the stuff on geopolitics was pretty naive). Usually while smoking a cigar outside on a sunny day; they were somewhat amusing to contemplate as possibilities. So, for those that want to mix things up at the expense of enjoyment, reading this is an option.

I want to be clear though: I do not in any way recommend or endorse reading this book. Maybe it's an art project attempting to re-create the unreadable work of a schizophrenic, maybe it's a collection of drug-addled screeds written in the timeless small hours, maybe it's the catalogue to accompany an unidentified modern art exhibit. Regardless of the author's intended purpose for this work, absolutely no indication is given of why this should be considered reading material.… (altro)

The greatest /x/ schizopost of all time?
This is a pretty interesting book and a hard one to rate. Certain sections of this were really exciting and thought provoking (I loved the section on anonymous group writing) while others were unconvincing or didn't make any sense. It's inconsistent, but I get the feeling that which parts you love or hate are going to differ a lot depending on the person. And even though they don't all hit, the amount of concepts Negarestani creates in this book is really impressive. The glossary at the end is really fun.
Recommended for fans of A Thousand Plateaus, Jorge Luis Borges, and House of Leaves… (altro)