“When you read experimental, literary shit, there’s a definite fear of looking stupid because you didn’t get it.
This is a fear I have confronted on many occasions, so I have no problem telling you that I did not get this book. Like, at all.
I vaguely understood what it was, what it referenced, and the plotline, moment-to-moment action I generally understood. What I didn’t understand was what this is about.
I’ve been really trying to explain how confusing this book was, and I think it’s best said like this: If I wrote something like this, I don’t know how I would know that it was done.
At what point do you step away and say, “Yes, that’s it!”?
Maybe this is like that part of the art museum that some people really dig, where the art is like…there’s this thing they had at the Denver Art Museum, it was part of a cultivator with a big skull on it or something. I guess you see it and feel things, but nothing definable, and what you feel and I feel are going to be totally different.
If you really like that part of the art museum, maybe this book is for you.
It’s weird, I’m not someone who feels like art has to “do” something or be “for” a purpose or anything like that. It’s more that I feel the writer’s work is to show people something, and I’m not so sure I saw anything here.
I’m just not sure how to approach this as a reader or a writer, which are the two primary ways I look at books, and that leaves me with very little.
I googled a bit to read reviews other people had done, and I understood what they meant when they said things like “The blank frames in the book force the reader to be complicit” and stuff about the grotesque and everything. And I’ve felt that way about other books. But this one I think I just found a frustrating experiment, and at times I felt like this was a joke being played on me, like everyone was pretending this was a deep masterpiece and then you open it up and it’s all potty humor. But, see, it’s on purpose potty humor, it KNOWS it’s being scatological (that’s the fancy word for potty humor), so it’s different.
I guess the biggest feeling I got reading this was that maybe this is a prank, and I fell into it. Maybe this is a huge prank on the literary world, and some folks are laughing their asses off at people grasping for deeper meaning in this text.
Or, maybe that’s how this book functions: Intentionally shallow, and therefore the reader has to create the connections for themselves.
Or, maybe this book is about the fact that things don’t always have deeper meaning, sometimes things just exist.
And where this ends up is me saying that the book could be interpreted any number of ways, and when a book can be interpreted in an unlimited number of ways, I have to bow out. That’s not my scene.”