What do you think?
Rate this book
The Empty City
The Empty City is a story about awakening to universal truths and one’s true self. It is told in short episodes that describe a place, a dream, a question, a memory, a fantasy or an event.
Urban explorer and lucid dreamer Brandon Minamoto discovers that outside his thoughts and emotions exists a world that is silent and open, surrounding him and everyone else.
The silence starts picking him apart and makes him question his sense of self and his past. But behind all the noise and the stories, there is something constant and unchanging.
About the
Berit Ellingsen is a Norwegian literary and speculative fiction author whose work has appeared in various online literary journals and print anthologies.
Urban explorer and lucid dreamer Brandon Minamoto discovers that outside his thoughts and emotions exists a world that is silent and open, surrounding him and everyone else.
The silence starts picking him apart and makes him question his sense of self and his past. But behind all the noise and the stories, there is something constant and unchanging.
About the
Berit Ellingsen is a Norwegian literary and speculative fiction author whose work has appeared in various online literary journals and print anthologies.
Kindle Edition
First published July 25, 2011
2 people are currently reading
155 people want to read
About the author
Berit Ellingsen
24 books123 followersBerit Ellingsen is the author of three novels, Now We Can See The Moon (Snuggly Books 2018), Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio 2015), and Une ville vide (PublieMonde 2014), a collection of short stories, Beneath the Liquid Skin (Queen's Ferry Press), and a mini-collection of dark fairy-tales, Vessel and Solsvart (Snuggly Books). Her work has been published in W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International, SmokeLong Quarterly, Unstuck, Litro, Lightspeed, and other places, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Berit is a member of the Norwegian Authors' Union. http://beritellingsen.com.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
Did Not Finish
May 10, 2021"When the scraping started, he realized it was a ghost. He tried to peer through the metal. What did a ghost look like? He had always wondered about that."
DNF at 42%.
I try to be careful with using the term 'pretentious', as it is overused, but this book definitely feels pretentious.
It feels like it's trying to be J.G. Ballard and fails at it. The writing is suggestive but ultimately empty. Worse, it's boring.
DNF at 42%.
I try to be careful with using the term 'pretentious', as it is overused, but this book definitely feels pretentious.
It feels like it's trying to be J.G. Ballard and fails at it. The writing is suggestive but ultimately empty. Worse, it's boring.
October 3, 2011
I will leave it to others to explain the philosophical content of this novel. I have never understood novels of ideas. I'm a sensualist.
What attracted me to it was the very smooth quality of the prose. It's like the still surface of a lake, as smooth as glass, reflective but full of depths. That's why this book really needs its cover. Together they are a beautiful work of art.
The sentences, the paragraphs and the chapters have a rhythm as subtle as the finest poetry. The novel breathes. The author pays close attention to the physical properties of things and she evokes them carefully with precise and sensuous language. She writes, in fact, with her senses, which are finely tuned.
It's tempting to quote a few passages. The novel is very quotable and my fingers are positively itching to do it. But I think it's better if you go to the author's website and see for yourself. You can read many sample chapters there.
Better still would be to buy the book. You need to be able to touch it and put it on your table and stroke the cover when you are stressed and are seeking a moment or two of calm in your busy life.
It's not a book to read once and forget. You can read it often. It refreshes you when you are tired and it offers, very modestly and tenderly, a landscape of absolute peace.
What attracted me to it was the very smooth quality of the prose. It's like the still surface of a lake, as smooth as glass, reflective but full of depths. That's why this book really needs its cover. Together they are a beautiful work of art.
The sentences, the paragraphs and the chapters have a rhythm as subtle as the finest poetry. The novel breathes. The author pays close attention to the physical properties of things and she evokes them carefully with precise and sensuous language. She writes, in fact, with her senses, which are finely tuned.
It's tempting to quote a few passages. The novel is very quotable and my fingers are positively itching to do it. But I think it's better if you go to the author's website and see for yourself. You can read many sample chapters there.
Better still would be to buy the book. You need to be able to touch it and put it on your table and stroke the cover when you are stressed and are seeking a moment or two of calm in your busy life.
It's not a book to read once and forget. You can read it often. It refreshes you when you are tired and it offers, very modestly and tenderly, a landscape of absolute peace.
July 12, 2012
Most of the books about zen are non-fiction: biographies, introductions, collected lectures - but recently i arrived at a zen-novel, writen by Berit Ellingsen. It was an interview in Nonduality Magazine that made me curious for it, in it, Berit explains:
"The Empty City is a short novel about nondual awakening, becoming comfortable with silence and letting go of the past. Connected themes are questioning your own beliefs and what you regard as yourself. .. I wanted to write a novel about nondual awakening, where that was central to the story. There's a lot of nondual nonfiction and poetry, but little fiction. I was curious to see if it was possible to write at all." (interview link)
reading this, of course, made me curious for the narrative of Empty City. i finished it a week ago - it's a thought-provoking, vivid read, with short chapters that move through to different level of consciousness - there are dream sequences, past memories, the present - together, the chapters form a larger mosaic. it was one of the books that i didn't want to end yet, to move on, and on. i looked for a quote to put here, but like with physical mosaics, pulling out a single piece only hints briefly at the larger image.
reading through it also points out how used we are to the established forms of narrative, and it's both refreshing and at the same time perplexing in the best of senses to follow another format - the concept of the Koan comes to mind, the riddle-like stories or notes used in Zen-pracitce to provoke the mind ... (the full review is up here in my blog, it starts with some notes on a non-fiction zen book and leads from there to Empty City: http://virtual-notes.blogspot.de/2012... )
"The Empty City is a short novel about nondual awakening, becoming comfortable with silence and letting go of the past. Connected themes are questioning your own beliefs and what you regard as yourself. .. I wanted to write a novel about nondual awakening, where that was central to the story. There's a lot of nondual nonfiction and poetry, but little fiction. I was curious to see if it was possible to write at all." (interview link)
reading this, of course, made me curious for the narrative of Empty City. i finished it a week ago - it's a thought-provoking, vivid read, with short chapters that move through to different level of consciousness - there are dream sequences, past memories, the present - together, the chapters form a larger mosaic. it was one of the books that i didn't want to end yet, to move on, and on. i looked for a quote to put here, but like with physical mosaics, pulling out a single piece only hints briefly at the larger image.
reading through it also points out how used we are to the established forms of narrative, and it's both refreshing and at the same time perplexing in the best of senses to follow another format - the concept of the Koan comes to mind, the riddle-like stories or notes used in Zen-pracitce to provoke the mind ... (the full review is up here in my blog, it starts with some notes on a non-fiction zen book and leads from there to Empty City: http://virtual-notes.blogspot.de/2012... )
August 31, 2015
This is an enigmatically compelling book. It seems so straightforward, but there is a strangeness lurking in the empty spaces that imbued reading with a particular urgency. There is a sense of comfort at the same time that I felt vaguely alarmed, though there was nothing alarming. The book details a journey that is both simple and wandering at the same time that it is highly purposeful and difficult to pin down. I enjoyed reading immensely.
November 26, 2012
The Empty City is like a lucid dream. We follow the narrator as he wanders about a nameless and largely empty and silent city, and we many time we are not sure what is real, what is a hallucination, and what is a dream.
Her character is either going crazy or becoming enlightened. Ellingsen understands that the road to the enlightened state is a close cousin to the road to insanity, and you are never sure which ground her character is on - maybe it is both.
Many of the scenes have a nighmarish quality, which rungs true too, as a person in the grips of a remorseless enlightenment process can feel like they are losing their grip. Despite the lack of a plot per se, you are drawn in by the language itself, which makes you want to read more and more. Berit Ellingsen's voice and narration are tightly controlled and precise so that you never lost your way in her poetic, evocative language. I found myself wanting to quote different passages to friends.
This book is the best evocation of NonDuality I have ever read in fictional form.
Her character is either going crazy or becoming enlightened. Ellingsen understands that the road to the enlightened state is a close cousin to the road to insanity, and you are never sure which ground her character is on - maybe it is both.
Many of the scenes have a nighmarish quality, which rungs true too, as a person in the grips of a remorseless enlightenment process can feel like they are losing their grip. Despite the lack of a plot per se, you are drawn in by the language itself, which makes you want to read more and more. Berit Ellingsen's voice and narration are tightly controlled and precise so that you never lost your way in her poetic, evocative language. I found myself wanting to quote different passages to friends.
This book is the best evocation of NonDuality I have ever read in fictional form.
November 25, 2012
This book is about something very near and dear to my heart: silence. It's the driving force behind all of my writing and it's inspiring and depressing to see it done so well by someone half the world away.
The prose is simple and straightforward yet deceptive, in that our journey into the dream world and the empty city weave in and out of reality without any tells. The surreal and hypnotic world we inhabit through these pages appears normalised.
It's a short and beautiful book.
The prose is simple and straightforward yet deceptive, in that our journey into the dream world and the empty city weave in and out of reality without any tells. The surreal and hypnotic world we inhabit through these pages appears normalised.
It's a short and beautiful book.
September 1, 2014
This book is very nicely written, it's just too bad there isn't an actual story.I kept hoping that, at the end, something would happen that would suddenly congeal the whole thing into one coherent narrative, but that didn't happen. I did get to the end though, which says something about the writting since there was no story.
February 27, 2021
"The city and the world revealed itself as empty, with a silence that stretched from eternity to eternity, rendering time and sequence of events meaningless. There was only a never-ending now."
A beautiful and unique book about awareness, silence and stillness. Sheer brilliance. 5 Star+
A beautiful and unique book about awareness, silence and stillness. Sheer brilliance. 5 Star+
September 28, 2015
Ehhhhhhhhh. It was a book about nothing.
September 12, 2012
Imagine what it would be like to begin awakening to universal enlightenment without looking for it.
That's what happens to Brandon Minamoto in this introspective book.
The story happens in small vignettes that tell us about this event of that which effected Brandon's world view and state of mind. The author presents dreams and waking events with equal seriousness, and sometimes it's not clear which is which. In one example, Brandon can see the sun high in the sky despite being far underground, exploring. Dreaming? Awake? Unreliable memory?
The story takes place in a city, as the title suggests. It's not named, nor are the country of residence, paternal country, or maternal country of Brandon. The story could take place in the past, the future, or tomorrow. The setting really doesn't matter.
This book is very different from my normal reading fare, but I enjoyed it a lot. Brandon's experience reminded me of descriptions of enlightenment, god consciousness, and Universal Truth from belief systems I have studied. The experiences themselves are well realized, and feel very realistic to the reader.
I gave this book a 4 instead of a 5 simply because the writing becomes rough in places, and the flow of the text is disrupted. In a more granular system, I'd give it a 4.5, at least.
That's what happens to Brandon Minamoto in this introspective book.
The story happens in small vignettes that tell us about this event of that which effected Brandon's world view and state of mind. The author presents dreams and waking events with equal seriousness, and sometimes it's not clear which is which. In one example, Brandon can see the sun high in the sky despite being far underground, exploring. Dreaming? Awake? Unreliable memory?
The story takes place in a city, as the title suggests. It's not named, nor are the country of residence, paternal country, or maternal country of Brandon. The story could take place in the past, the future, or tomorrow. The setting really doesn't matter.
This book is very different from my normal reading fare, but I enjoyed it a lot. Brandon's experience reminded me of descriptions of enlightenment, god consciousness, and Universal Truth from belief systems I have studied. The experiences themselves are well realized, and feel very realistic to the reader.
I gave this book a 4 instead of a 5 simply because the writing becomes rough in places, and the flow of the text is disrupted. In a more granular system, I'd give it a 4.5, at least.
May 20, 2022
Three and a half stars.
A quick, contemplative little read that does its best to capture the idea of nonduality. It reminded me a bit of Siddhartha by Hesse and Indelicacy by Amina Cain which I read earlier this year. Clean and simple prose just carries you into almost meditative states like the ones being described in the book. Some of the character’s experiences mirror descriptions of PTSD and trauma that I’ve read about in books like The Body Keeps The Score.
I noticed the author uses the word “grinned” a lot, and I felt some of the human interactions were the weaker parts of the book. The prose felt clunkier in these sections, more repetitive. But then again, maybe that makes sense for the character and what they’re experiencing.
A quick, contemplative little read that does its best to capture the idea of nonduality. It reminded me a bit of Siddhartha by Hesse and Indelicacy by Amina Cain which I read earlier this year. Clean and simple prose just carries you into almost meditative states like the ones being described in the book. Some of the character’s experiences mirror descriptions of PTSD and trauma that I’ve read about in books like The Body Keeps The Score.
I noticed the author uses the word “grinned” a lot, and I felt some of the human interactions were the weaker parts of the book. The prose felt clunkier in these sections, more repetitive. But then again, maybe that makes sense for the character and what they’re experiencing.
June 3, 2015
Deceptively simple prose that hides something deeper and more beautiful underneath, like a frozen lake with life teeming beneath its surface. It weaves in and out of dreams and reality to beautiful effect. Reminded me a bit of Murakami.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews