Daniel Pinchbeck

An overwritten, self-indulgent and sometimes incoherent mess of a book, but oddly engrossing at the same time. (I read it in a few sittings.) 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl gets its structure from Daniel Pinchbeck's own peripatetic interests and self-absorption. That's both good and bad: it prevents 2012 from becoming a dry academic treatise because it's deeply (sometimes cringingly) personal, but it also flits from topic to topic, depending on the author's level of enthusiasm or disillusionment.

Contrary to popular perception, 2012 won't necessarily be apocalyptic; it's a movement into a different stage of consciousness. Pinchbeck plunges into a wide-ranging examination and comparison of cross-cultural (and atemporal) phenomena and theory that deal with the eschatological; social scientists (and physicists too, probably) would fling the book against the wall early on, but it's fascinating regardless. It's not often you find one place that discusses the Mayan calendar, alien abduction, Terence McKenna, crop circles, quantum physics, Teilhard de Chardin, Burning Man and ayahuasca at the same time -- well, if you were at Burning Man, maybe.

It's all fun until the whining takes over. There's nothing wrong with all this self-reflexivity in a memoir, but Pinchbeck later justifies his cold behavior towards his family through his theory that polyamory as a more "evolved" form of interrelationships. Sure, we're carefully led through his process of self-realization, but it smacks the reader of self-aggrandizement at this point in the narrative. (And I won't reveal the ending concerning the author's role in all this, but let's just say it concerns the subtitle.)

There's no relation to the Roland Emmerich disaster movie 2012, which is a good thing, but at least the movie had a better sense of humor.… (altro)