Constance Squires's Blog - Posts Tagged "john-darnielle"

Black Sabbath Master of Reality by John Darnielle

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read this in one sitting. This book nails it--the great, ineffable quality of music that is so hard to write about without abstraction or sentimentality. This book gets it down. From the opening sentence: "Fuck You All Go to Hell," Roger Painter's voice in this epistolary novel is immediately alive, raw, real, and reaching. Roger talks about his own sad life around the edges of trying to explain the genius of Black Sabbath's Master of Reality to his counselor in an adolsescent psych ward, and then ten years later when he's grown up but still thinking about what happened to him, what that counselor's inability to understand cost him. Roger really is talking about Sabbath--it's no mere metaphor; it's gorgeous analysis--and you love him the way you love anybody who can lose themselves in something just because it's beautiful, not because he has anything to gain by it. As simple and direct as the voice is, the stakes are as high as you could ask--he's trying to live, and his explanations of how rock makes that possible are soaring.I kept thinking of how the modernists believed art was the only consolation in a fallen world and how Roger would agree even though he would probably hate T. S. Eliot. I am kicking myself because I didn't read this in time to put it in the lineup this semester for the Rock and Literature class I'm teaching--but I won't make that mistake again. Master of RealityJohn Darnielle



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Master of Reality