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An Argonaut Sails for Jerusalem
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ππ§πͺπ¨ππ‘ππ’ is both a Southern Gothic and a novel of war, set in a near-future Texas and parts of a war-torn Iberian Peninsula. It follows protagonist and narrator Tracey Flowers, the son of an oilman who he never knew, as he uncovers a secret which will lead him into war, betrayal, hatred, desertion, murder, and ultimately forgiveness. God is at home. We are in the far country.
235 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2022
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June 22, 2023A dream happens when you have something to tell yourself, something you didn't know you knew, but that you couldn't keep fro yourself forever. Like a secret.
This feels like something that sarah shaw on instagram might have said. But in a good way, of course. Something happens when the bolts are loosened, when it doesn't rattle, surprisingly, but just sags a little. Like when you think about ways to break up with someone, or when you strategize when to do so, as if fate can wait for just a few weeks longer.
What does it mean to wrestle with God? To have your hip touched and fall out of place, sag a little, limp into the lilt, careen into something like meaning? Does it really matter that everything written is "just a heap of excerpts, a few selected passages copied and pasted onto a word document?" I don't think that's a problem, I think striving to be original is probably the source of all our problems, that and fat-free and sugar-free foods. The book's short chapters (often only a page long?) felt like individual bites, or even smaller than bites, a single cheeto chip, the crumbly broken bits rustling in the bottom of the bag. I know aircraft carriers have short runways, but these chapters felt even shorter. I guess if you have Harrier Jump Jets that's fine, but here we have prop planes. And I can only hear them splash into the water so many times before I get seasick.
I hope you're not mad at me hank, I just wasn't ready for the book's mood. I listened to deftones on a run the morning that I finished the book. I listened to Around the Fur for the first time, and it was heavier than I expected, in a good way. Chino's voice seems to echo something from this book, something of that disconnect between people in the same room, under the same moon-roof, people eating from the same carton of fries. I've never been to In-n-Out nor P. F. Changs, but I have been to Sonic, and I got made fun of for wanting to eat there of all places on my birthday. Apparently Jeannette McCurdy's mom chose to eat at Wendy's on her birthday, even after her daughter got rich, to show "how modest she was." I've never had Wendy's, and I kinda like the mystique of never having had it. A virginity no one cares about. Sonic tastes better when you still smell like chlorine from the pool. I would assume In-n-Out tastes better when you're not trapped in the last 20 seconds of a deftones song, like the characters in this book. I didn't like them. I really didn't like them. They tasted salty, sea-foamy, crusted with brine on their hard exteriors. None of them got along. There was no Mrs. Ramsey to hold it all together. At least when she died in To the Lighthouse the whole world had an excuse to fall apart. This world felt like it had perforated lines along which to tear toward apocalypse, like a california faultline threatening to make Maynerd James Keenan happy.
And that's perhaps the fault of our Weltanschauung, our perpetual breath-holding, waiting for an end which never comes. Like sand through the hourglass, so is our dream deferred. But instead of sand its a marian pendant stolen from the counter of a shop. "She laughs, slowly pours out the long chain and pendant from one hand into the other like sand. 'Idiot!'" Is this Dostoevsky's Idiot, a Cervantes-flavored protagonist, a holy fool? Or does "fool" ring more like the Christ-proscripted "Raka!," something closer to "idya nahuey," or, in spanish, "No me Jodas?" Why do all descriptors like "idiot" and "dumb" tranmute from a medical diagnosis (devoid of reason, mute) to an insult on our tongues? And why does the protagonist slither around like a snake, hiding in the tall grass, never able to say what he means, always calculating, always acting? Are we doomed to this distance, the impossibly narrow but unbridgable distance between an actor and their character? Or is there a way to escape? Is war able to purge anymore, or does it merely pile up, backing up the meatgrinder until it starts smoking?
It was only upon his return to the front that I understood why Trace deserted his comrades. Not when he originally ran away. This backwardness feels like the sort of predestination that Zizek talks about, where, instead of a prophesy telling us what the future will be, the present moment preaches that the past couldn't have been anything else; it must be that way. In our hyper-aware state, life is experienced in reverse, our fears of the future make inevitable a fearful past, and the present merely acts as a catalyst for this mobius-strip-flipping.
What this book needed was a release valve, some ballast tanks filled with air so we can ascend, so we don't get crushed at the ocean floor like that submarine I don't care to learn anything about. I shun the news almost as much as the narrator shuns explaining what war he is fighting, who he is killing, why they are dying. I suppose Tennyson said it better. Maybe I expected too much to assume that the entire battle map should be laid out for me, a lowly foot soldier in God's army.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
This feels like something that sarah shaw on instagram might have said. But in a good way, of course. Something happens when the bolts are loosened, when it doesn't rattle, surprisingly, but just sags a little. Like when you think about ways to break up with someone, or when you strategize when to do so, as if fate can wait for just a few weeks longer.
What does it mean to wrestle with God? To have your hip touched and fall out of place, sag a little, limp into the lilt, careen into something like meaning? Does it really matter that everything written is "just a heap of excerpts, a few selected passages copied and pasted onto a word document?" I don't think that's a problem, I think striving to be original is probably the source of all our problems, that and fat-free and sugar-free foods. The book's short chapters (often only a page long?) felt like individual bites, or even smaller than bites, a single cheeto chip, the crumbly broken bits rustling in the bottom of the bag. I know aircraft carriers have short runways, but these chapters felt even shorter. I guess if you have Harrier Jump Jets that's fine, but here we have prop planes. And I can only hear them splash into the water so many times before I get seasick.
I hope you're not mad at me hank, I just wasn't ready for the book's mood. I listened to deftones on a run the morning that I finished the book. I listened to Around the Fur for the first time, and it was heavier than I expected, in a good way. Chino's voice seems to echo something from this book, something of that disconnect between people in the same room, under the same moon-roof, people eating from the same carton of fries. I've never been to In-n-Out nor P. F. Changs, but I have been to Sonic, and I got made fun of for wanting to eat there of all places on my birthday. Apparently Jeannette McCurdy's mom chose to eat at Wendy's on her birthday, even after her daughter got rich, to show "how modest she was." I've never had Wendy's, and I kinda like the mystique of never having had it. A virginity no one cares about. Sonic tastes better when you still smell like chlorine from the pool. I would assume In-n-Out tastes better when you're not trapped in the last 20 seconds of a deftones song, like the characters in this book. I didn't like them. I really didn't like them. They tasted salty, sea-foamy, crusted with brine on their hard exteriors. None of them got along. There was no Mrs. Ramsey to hold it all together. At least when she died in To the Lighthouse the whole world had an excuse to fall apart. This world felt like it had perforated lines along which to tear toward apocalypse, like a california faultline threatening to make Maynerd James Keenan happy.
And that's perhaps the fault of our Weltanschauung, our perpetual breath-holding, waiting for an end which never comes. Like sand through the hourglass, so is our dream deferred. But instead of sand its a marian pendant stolen from the counter of a shop. "She laughs, slowly pours out the long chain and pendant from one hand into the other like sand. 'Idiot!'" Is this Dostoevsky's Idiot, a Cervantes-flavored protagonist, a holy fool? Or does "fool" ring more like the Christ-proscripted "Raka!," something closer to "idya nahuey," or, in spanish, "No me Jodas?" Why do all descriptors like "idiot" and "dumb" tranmute from a medical diagnosis (devoid of reason, mute) to an insult on our tongues? And why does the protagonist slither around like a snake, hiding in the tall grass, never able to say what he means, always calculating, always acting? Are we doomed to this distance, the impossibly narrow but unbridgable distance between an actor and their character? Or is there a way to escape? Is war able to purge anymore, or does it merely pile up, backing up the meatgrinder until it starts smoking?
It was only upon his return to the front that I understood why Trace deserted his comrades. Not when he originally ran away. This backwardness feels like the sort of predestination that Zizek talks about, where, instead of a prophesy telling us what the future will be, the present moment preaches that the past couldn't have been anything else; it must be that way. In our hyper-aware state, life is experienced in reverse, our fears of the future make inevitable a fearful past, and the present merely acts as a catalyst for this mobius-strip-flipping.
What this book needed was a release valve, some ballast tanks filled with air so we can ascend, so we don't get crushed at the ocean floor like that submarine I don't care to learn anything about. I shun the news almost as much as the narrator shuns explaining what war he is fighting, who he is killing, why they are dying. I suppose Tennyson said it better. Maybe I expected too much to assume that the entire battle map should be laid out for me, a lowly foot soldier in God's army.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
February 7, 2025
Some parts of this book were profound, passionate, relatable, and poetic. The others I donβt remember.
3.5/5
3.5/5
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