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By Evan Dara The Easy Chain (F First Edition) [Paperback]
--So what's the book about? --It about this British guy who goes to The University of Chicago? --Nah. And it really isn't about his getting this, like, social illness-- --The one where... Come it's impossible to become allergic to lying-- --Exactly -- the book isn't about that at all...One of the best novels of the decade... The magic of his writing and what he accomplishes through it is...manifested in how mesmerizing, hypnotic and just plain readable Evan Dara is. --The Quarterly ConversationIt's good to know that writers like Dara exist, capable of bravely carrying the flame [with this] very intricately crafted and grandly conceived postmodern novel. --The Review of Contemporary FictionRecalls David Foster Wallace's Infinite both books offer a jigsaw puzzle of different styles, and construct a remarkably clever and complex plot with many mysteries embedded for the reader to discover after multiple readings. --American Book Review, Stephen J. BurnIf there is any literary justice [The Easy Chain] will appear sometime around 2050 in a New York Review of Books Classics edition with a forward by the aging Dave Eggers. --Conversational ReadingIn a just world, this would be the literary event of the year. --The Reading ExperienceJust brilliant...a testament to [Dara's] incredible skill. This is, without a doubt, my favorite book of the year. This is a great book. --Triple R Radio (Melbourne, Australia)This masterpiece left us drooling for days on end. We couldn't put it down. --Lowdown Magazine (Germany/UK)Uncommon and outstanding. As surely as there will always be an avant-garde, Dara will be there and whatever new guard emerges, they will be sure to have read his books. --The Front Table
Unknown Binding
First published August 8, 2008
14 people are currently reading
873 people want to read
About the author
Evan Dara
6 books109 followersEvan Dara is an American postmodern novelist. In 1995, his first novel The Lost Scrapbook won the 12th Annual FC/2 Illinois State University National Fiction Competition judged by William T. Vollmann. Evan Dara currently lives in Paris.
Dara's second novel, The Easy Chain, was published by Aurora Publishers in 2008.
A third novel, Flee, was published by Aurora, Inc. in late summer 2013.
Dara's second novel, The Easy Chain, was published by Aurora Publishers in 2008.
A third novel, Flee, was published by Aurora, Inc. in late summer 2013.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
June 17, 2020
quick edit three years later to say that i love that when you look up "easy chain" here on goodreads, the second-place match is "the holy bible" by anonymous. pretty perfect, since evan dara is my anonymous deity, and his books are my bibles. meaning, "they give me my faith, but i probably haven't read them as thoroughly as i should." but i digress.
evan dara is not for everyone, but he is one of my all-time favorites. which of course means all of his books are difficult to get ahold of, because that's how the world treats things that appeal to me. he writes huge muddled messy nonlinear whooshes of books that become like a duststorm consuming the reader and leaving us all (even the people not actively reading the book - all of us) breathless and dizzy but crying "when will you write again??"
but he is stubborn and mysterious and no one really knows much about him, although people say he is actually one of many different, already-established authors: richard powers, william vollmann, thomas pynchon, david foster wallace - for someone who very few people have read, he has developed a cult following of amateur detectives/stalkers who would love to read his diary...this is what it says about him on wikipedia.org. its brevity makes him even more mysterious. me, i don't care about the mystery part; or i do, because it is cool, but it's not relevant. whoever he is, i want him to keep writing. or at least i want him to fight to get The Lost Scrapbook back into print, and making this one easier to get. no one likes an author who is withholding.
i should write this when i am able to make more sense. right now, it is not a strength of mine. i will fix this tomorrow. but feel free to put it on your to-read shelves for now.
in short, and for now. it is untidy, in a really compelling way, and is perfect for people who hate a predictable book.
(i should not write book reviews at work - naughty)
come to my blog!
evan dara is not for everyone, but he is one of my all-time favorites. which of course means all of his books are difficult to get ahold of, because that's how the world treats things that appeal to me. he writes huge muddled messy nonlinear whooshes of books that become like a duststorm consuming the reader and leaving us all (even the people not actively reading the book - all of us) breathless and dizzy but crying "when will you write again??"
but he is stubborn and mysterious and no one really knows much about him, although people say he is actually one of many different, already-established authors: richard powers, william vollmann, thomas pynchon, david foster wallace - for someone who very few people have read, he has developed a cult following of amateur detectives/stalkers who would love to read his diary...this is what it says about him on wikipedia.org. its brevity makes him even more mysterious. me, i don't care about the mystery part; or i do, because it is cool, but it's not relevant. whoever he is, i want him to keep writing. or at least i want him to fight to get The Lost Scrapbook back into print, and making this one easier to get. no one likes an author who is withholding.
i should write this when i am able to make more sense. right now, it is not a strength of mine. i will fix this tomorrow. but feel free to put it on your to-read shelves for now.
in short, and for now. it is untidy, in a really compelling way, and is perfect for people who hate a predictable book.
(i should not write book reviews at work - naughty)
come to my blog!
March 3, 2022
La literatura siempre está buscando nuevos caminos: con Cervantes que inventa la novela, con autores decimonónicos como Balzac que le dan su forma clásica, y con otros como Joyce, Virginia Woolf o Gaddis, que la deconstruyen. Hay una renovación constante en la fórmula de contar historias y Evan Dara está en ello.
La mayor parte de esta experimentación posmoderna tiene lugar en inglés, más concretamente en los USA, lo cual es una barrera para nosotros, porque muchas de esas obras se basan en un juego con el lenguaje que hace que la traducción en muchos casos sea poco menos que imposible. El ejemplo clásico es el Ulises de James Joyce, que este año cumple los cien y que todo el mundo conoce, aunque sea de oídas. Pero hay mucho contenido más reciente que no nos llega porque representa un gran esfuerzo editorial - sobre todo de traducción - y no son obras comerciales. Y aquí entra José Luis Amores, traductor y creador junto con su mujer de la editorial Pálido Fuego, que se mueve con soltura en el desafío de publicar autores como William T. Vollmann, Steve Erickson, David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover y muchos otros.
El protagonista de esta obra es Lincoln Selwyn, un joven británico criado en Holanda que aparece en Chicago en el año 2000 para estudiar Humanidades. Comienza de una manera bastante clásica, hablando de sus primeros años y luego la narración se disuelve en una serie de comentarios anónimos sobre el personaje que nos transmiten la impresión que causa en los círculos sociales de la ciudad y cómo se va convirtiendo en una especie de influencer, aunque nadie sabe muy bien lo que hace. Es como verlo reflejado en un espejo roto en mil pedazos y creo que la ilustración de la portada es un gran acierto, con esa especie de retrato desenfocado. Porque en realidad, no se está retratando al personaje, sino a la sociedad del siglo XXI y los mecanismos que mueven la economía y las relaciones.
Es una lectura compleja, con partes más experimentales - como hojas en blanco o frases en columna - pero que en general es accesible y está llena de ideas interesantes sobre nuestra época.
La mayor parte de esta experimentación posmoderna tiene lugar en inglés, más concretamente en los USA, lo cual es una barrera para nosotros, porque muchas de esas obras se basan en un juego con el lenguaje que hace que la traducción en muchos casos sea poco menos que imposible. El ejemplo clásico es el Ulises de James Joyce, que este año cumple los cien y que todo el mundo conoce, aunque sea de oídas. Pero hay mucho contenido más reciente que no nos llega porque representa un gran esfuerzo editorial - sobre todo de traducción - y no son obras comerciales. Y aquí entra José Luis Amores, traductor y creador junto con su mujer de la editorial Pálido Fuego, que se mueve con soltura en el desafío de publicar autores como William T. Vollmann, Steve Erickson, David Foster Wallace, Robert Coover y muchos otros.
El protagonista de esta obra es Lincoln Selwyn, un joven británico criado en Holanda que aparece en Chicago en el año 2000 para estudiar Humanidades. Comienza de una manera bastante clásica, hablando de sus primeros años y luego la narración se disuelve en una serie de comentarios anónimos sobre el personaje que nos transmiten la impresión que causa en los círculos sociales de la ciudad y cómo se va convirtiendo en una especie de influencer, aunque nadie sabe muy bien lo que hace. Es como verlo reflejado en un espejo roto en mil pedazos y creo que la ilustración de la portada es un gran acierto, con esa especie de retrato desenfocado. Porque en realidad, no se está retratando al personaje, sino a la sociedad del siglo XXI y los mecanismos que mueven la economía y las relaciones.
Es una lectura compleja, con partes más experimentales - como hojas en blanco o frases en columna - pero que en general es accesible y está llena de ideas interesantes sobre nuestra época.
March 12, 2023
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022...
"Hubo rumores de que un cometa había llegado a Chicago el pasado octubre. Al Observatorio Yerkes le pasó desapercibido. Pero, en cuestión de semanas, la bola de fuego conocida como Lincoln Selwyn sacudiría, transformaría y acabaría prendiendo la antaño decrépita esfera social de la ciudad, insuflando nueva vida en varias empresas y proyectos importantes dejando una estela llameante a su paso."
No sé si empezar diciendo que Evan Dara es como una explosión, y lo digo porque es lo primero que leo suyo y no sé si el resto de su obra será tan explosiva, pero realmente este libro ha funcionado como una bomba de energia imparable, inagotable, que es imposible leer dándote el atracón porque es tan brillante en tantos momentos, que hay que apartarlo de vez en cuando, ir hacia atrás, releer algunos pasajes, carcajeantes, divertidísimos, demoledores… para avanzar de nuevo. No hay capítulos, aunque si hay secciones estilísticamente separadas que suponen un cambio de registro, un cambio de personalidad y de ritmo, de estado de ánimo, porque es un Libro que tiene vida propia, está continuamente en movimiento… y relacionado con ese estado de ánimo a través de sus páginas, casi que hay momentos en que tenía la impresión de que el mismo Libro, físico, estuviera hablándote, como un ente propio.
"-O sea, él... como que hace que te sientas a gusto.El...
-Es un gran oyente, escuchar se le da...
-Siempre te deja que aportes algo...
-O sea, no le encuentro especialmente divertido, ni extraordinarmente inteligente, pero el caso es que está como presente, como...
-Te parece, o sea, cuando hablas con él eres la única persona de la habitación, la única persona del continente.
-Es como...como si buscara tu sonrisa."
El conductor de esta novela es Lincoln Selwyn, un británico que procedente de Bélgica llega a la universidad de Chicago, un chico mágico, un aparente prodigio, que desde una primera y breve etapa en la universidad pasa directamente a abanderar la escena social de Chicago. Lincoln es carismático y seductor, y durante esta primera parte del libro lo vemos pasearse por un Chicago de altísimo nivel, siempre impresionando y siendo adorado por la multitud. La gracia está en que Lincoln no tiene voz propia en el sentido de que esta primera parte es una continuidad de voces imparables que nos transmiten sus impresiones sobre Lincoln, todos hablan sobre él, todos le han creado una imagen pero ¿quién es realmente Lincoln??? Quizá en un principio el lector a través de la verborrea brillantísima de Evan Dara, de la agílidad y del ritmo se deje llevar y crea conocer a Lincoln, pero llegado un punto piensas ¿dónde está la voz de Lincoln?? Evan Dara construye toda esta amalgama de voces interrumpidas y ansiosas soberbiamente, en el sentido de que lo vemos todo desde el punto de vista de estas voces, idiotizadas por el humo de una sociedad de apariencias… ¿qué hubiera pasado si la perspectiva hubiera sido la de Lincoln?? En este sentido me parece brillante esta construcción de narradores continuos. Quizá la gracia esté no tanto en la historia de Lincoln “como hacer dinero sin dar un palo al agua”, sino en todas esas voces/historias que son las que realmente te están contando la hecatombe que supone este capitalismo “hipermegaevolucionado”.
"Sigo buscándole a diario en los periódicos."
(...)
"¿Estuvo siquiera aquí? ¿Existió en realidad?"
De la misma forma que Lincoln aparece en la escena social de Chicago, de repente se produce un colapso, y desaparece totalmente, siguiendo una serie de páginas en blanco, sí, páginas en blanco (increible que estos riesgos se publiquen), unas páginas en blanco que ya te están contando que al interrumpirse y desaparecer las voces y los cotilleos que lo ensalzaban, también desaparece Lincoln…, ya digo que ¡¡soberbia construcción!
Tras estas páginas en blanco, todo se pone en marcha de nuevo pero ya la luminosidad ha explosionado y la historia de Lincoln entra en otra etapa quizá más densa que la primera parte, pero tal como cuenta el editor en el prólogo, no inaccesible. Hay que tener paciencia, perseverar, y dejarse llevar por los diferentes cambios estilísticos, narrativos, porque las variaciones en la estructura del texto, y en la ortografía es lo que hace que el texto tenga vida propia, pero siempre hay pistas que van conduciendo al lector. No es inaccesible del todo porque hay una trama, y es una trama que se va enlazando camuflada entre la multitud de historias, de monólogos, de chismes que van iluminado la lectura.
"Bien, dijo Auran. Hablemos de números, Recuerda: llama a 22 personas al día. Aunque no tengas nada que decir. Esa es la cifra mágica para una ciudad con la población de Chicago. Así que encuentra el tiempo. Tírales los tejos, métetelos en el bolsillo. Luego quítate de en medio..."
La Cadena Fácil funciona como una sátira o parodia perfecta de la sociedad que nos hemos construido y que sigue encaminada a la imbecilidad a la velocidad de la luz, y Evan Dara la describe incluso con unos vocables que se merecerían un diccionario “evandariano” aparte porque, palabras como filfa o promosexual (y aquí la labor de traducción tiene que ser remarcada especialmente), con todo lo que eso implica a la hora de que se defina la sociedad de postureo en la que vivimos, hacen de este libro una experiencia nueva en todos los sentidos, aunque es cierto que Gaddis también lo ha abordado, pero aquí todo se hace más cercano. Empecé esta reseña hablando de que este libro me recordaba a una explosión continua, y quizá lo digo porque me ha recordado mucho al momento crucial en una película, Zabriskie Point, (cosas mías porque a veces visualizo un texto comparándolo a una película, y aquí me ha vuelto a pasar). En definitiva, es también una novela muy divertida y brutal en su desenmascaramiento de nosotros como zombies, y aunque densa en algún momento, también es perfectamente accesible y cálida en muchos momentos. Soberbia experiencia como lectora, que cómo viene siendo habitual, tengo que volver a agradecer a Pálido Fuego el que ponga estos libros a nuestro alcance. La traducción es de José Luís Amores.
“...por tanto decidí, vale, modificar las cosas un poco, ¡contentar a Todo el Mundo!- ya sabes, darles sólo lo que Quieren- facilitárselo y dulcificárselo ¡decirles tan sólo lo que quieren Oir!- o sea ¿no es eso lo que hace funcionar el Cotarro?- Todos en TODAS partes, dar al cliente lo que Quiere, una cultura entera basada en la prostitución...”
"Hubo rumores de que un cometa había llegado a Chicago el pasado octubre. Al Observatorio Yerkes le pasó desapercibido. Pero, en cuestión de semanas, la bola de fuego conocida como Lincoln Selwyn sacudiría, transformaría y acabaría prendiendo la antaño decrépita esfera social de la ciudad, insuflando nueva vida en varias empresas y proyectos importantes dejando una estela llameante a su paso."
No sé si empezar diciendo que Evan Dara es como una explosión, y lo digo porque es lo primero que leo suyo y no sé si el resto de su obra será tan explosiva, pero realmente este libro ha funcionado como una bomba de energia imparable, inagotable, que es imposible leer dándote el atracón porque es tan brillante en tantos momentos, que hay que apartarlo de vez en cuando, ir hacia atrás, releer algunos pasajes, carcajeantes, divertidísimos, demoledores… para avanzar de nuevo. No hay capítulos, aunque si hay secciones estilísticamente separadas que suponen un cambio de registro, un cambio de personalidad y de ritmo, de estado de ánimo, porque es un Libro que tiene vida propia, está continuamente en movimiento… y relacionado con ese estado de ánimo a través de sus páginas, casi que hay momentos en que tenía la impresión de que el mismo Libro, físico, estuviera hablándote, como un ente propio.
"-O sea, él... como que hace que te sientas a gusto.El...
-Es un gran oyente, escuchar se le da...
-Siempre te deja que aportes algo...
-O sea, no le encuentro especialmente divertido, ni extraordinarmente inteligente, pero el caso es que está como presente, como...
-Te parece, o sea, cuando hablas con él eres la única persona de la habitación, la única persona del continente.
-Es como...como si buscara tu sonrisa."
El conductor de esta novela es Lincoln Selwyn, un británico que procedente de Bélgica llega a la universidad de Chicago, un chico mágico, un aparente prodigio, que desde una primera y breve etapa en la universidad pasa directamente a abanderar la escena social de Chicago. Lincoln es carismático y seductor, y durante esta primera parte del libro lo vemos pasearse por un Chicago de altísimo nivel, siempre impresionando y siendo adorado por la multitud. La gracia está en que Lincoln no tiene voz propia en el sentido de que esta primera parte es una continuidad de voces imparables que nos transmiten sus impresiones sobre Lincoln, todos hablan sobre él, todos le han creado una imagen pero ¿quién es realmente Lincoln??? Quizá en un principio el lector a través de la verborrea brillantísima de Evan Dara, de la agílidad y del ritmo se deje llevar y crea conocer a Lincoln, pero llegado un punto piensas ¿dónde está la voz de Lincoln?? Evan Dara construye toda esta amalgama de voces interrumpidas y ansiosas soberbiamente, en el sentido de que lo vemos todo desde el punto de vista de estas voces, idiotizadas por el humo de una sociedad de apariencias… ¿qué hubiera pasado si la perspectiva hubiera sido la de Lincoln?? En este sentido me parece brillante esta construcción de narradores continuos. Quizá la gracia esté no tanto en la historia de Lincoln “como hacer dinero sin dar un palo al agua”, sino en todas esas voces/historias que son las que realmente te están contando la hecatombe que supone este capitalismo “hipermegaevolucionado”.
"Sigo buscándole a diario en los periódicos."
(...)
"¿Estuvo siquiera aquí? ¿Existió en realidad?"
De la misma forma que Lincoln aparece en la escena social de Chicago, de repente se produce un colapso, y desaparece totalmente, siguiendo una serie de páginas en blanco, sí, páginas en blanco (increible que estos riesgos se publiquen), unas páginas en blanco que ya te están contando que al interrumpirse y desaparecer las voces y los cotilleos que lo ensalzaban, también desaparece Lincoln…, ya digo que ¡¡soberbia construcción!
Tras estas páginas en blanco, todo se pone en marcha de nuevo pero ya la luminosidad ha explosionado y la historia de Lincoln entra en otra etapa quizá más densa que la primera parte, pero tal como cuenta el editor en el prólogo, no inaccesible. Hay que tener paciencia, perseverar, y dejarse llevar por los diferentes cambios estilísticos, narrativos, porque las variaciones en la estructura del texto, y en la ortografía es lo que hace que el texto tenga vida propia, pero siempre hay pistas que van conduciendo al lector. No es inaccesible del todo porque hay una trama, y es una trama que se va enlazando camuflada entre la multitud de historias, de monólogos, de chismes que van iluminado la lectura.
"Bien, dijo Auran. Hablemos de números, Recuerda: llama a 22 personas al día. Aunque no tengas nada que decir. Esa es la cifra mágica para una ciudad con la población de Chicago. Así que encuentra el tiempo. Tírales los tejos, métetelos en el bolsillo. Luego quítate de en medio..."
La Cadena Fácil funciona como una sátira o parodia perfecta de la sociedad que nos hemos construido y que sigue encaminada a la imbecilidad a la velocidad de la luz, y Evan Dara la describe incluso con unos vocables que se merecerían un diccionario “evandariano” aparte porque, palabras como filfa o promosexual (y aquí la labor de traducción tiene que ser remarcada especialmente), con todo lo que eso implica a la hora de que se defina la sociedad de postureo en la que vivimos, hacen de este libro una experiencia nueva en todos los sentidos, aunque es cierto que Gaddis también lo ha abordado, pero aquí todo se hace más cercano. Empecé esta reseña hablando de que este libro me recordaba a una explosión continua, y quizá lo digo porque me ha recordado mucho al momento crucial en una película, Zabriskie Point, (cosas mías porque a veces visualizo un texto comparándolo a una película, y aquí me ha vuelto a pasar). En definitiva, es también una novela muy divertida y brutal en su desenmascaramiento de nosotros como zombies, y aunque densa en algún momento, también es perfectamente accesible y cálida en muchos momentos. Soberbia experiencia como lectora, que cómo viene siendo habitual, tengo que volver a agradecer a Pálido Fuego el que ponga estos libros a nuestro alcance. La traducción es de José Luís Amores.
“...por tanto decidí, vale, modificar las cosas un poco, ¡contentar a Todo el Mundo!- ya sabes, darles sólo lo que Quieren- facilitárselo y dulcificárselo ¡decirles tan sólo lo que quieren Oir!- o sea ¿no es eso lo que hace funcionar el Cotarro?- Todos en TODAS partes, dar al cliente lo que Quiere, una cultura entera basada en la prostitución...”
November 3, 2021
Imaginad un disco de Radiohead producido por Cleaners from Venus, es decir, la visión distópica, pesimista de la sociedad de consumo pero que se combina con un tono irónico, incluso desenfadado. En unas coordenadas similares podríamos ubicar a este La cadena fácil, en absoluto un bocado tierno de consumo sencillo, al contrario, se demuestra casi en cada sección una obra literaria que disfruta retando al lector mientras esboza un gran lienzo satírico de nuestra época.
A grandes rasgos cuenta la historia de Lincoln Selwyn, su adolescencia en Ámsterdam y su llegada a Chicago para ingresar en la facultad de Humanidades de la universidad de esa ciudad. Tras un breve período depresivo motivado por su falta de pericia en los estudios, Lincoln se reengancha en la vida social y asciende progresivos escalafones en la sociedad de esta ciudad hasta convertirse en el chico de oro, la gran atracción de fiestas y recepciones, se le abren las puertas a una agencia inmobiliaria que gestiona los bienes de las familias más ricas, donde se destapa como el vendedor estrella, incluso pone sus pies en la política. Lo tiene todo. Entonces revienta y adiós. De ahí a la segunda fase del libro.
Si esa primera parte se inicia con gran brío, con un alud de comentarios de oradores no identificados que se relacionaron o contactaron con Lincoln, progresivamente aparecen testimonios que se alargan, desvían la historia del protagonista a divagaciones cada vez más rebuscadas y extrañas acerca de temas tan dispares como la filfa. No se trata de un capricho: efectivamente esa "filfa" se refiere a la hipocresía, la falta de objetividad, lo superfluo, engañoso y demás hierbas que componen el panorama en el que se mueve Lincoln. Intuimos que los elogiosos comentarios, que lo ponen poco menos que como un dios dorado, es de gente acomodada, de los que se benefician de la economía global o por lo menos su posición es lo bastante segura como para observar con despreocupación estos fenómenos pasajeros.
Al final de esta primera parte hay un gran espacio en blanco, un gran silencio ocasionalmente interrumpido por personas que creen reconocer a Lincoln en ámbitos muy alejados de los oropeles de la alta sociedad de Chicago, y que suponen vagas pistas que el autor deja para los más atentos. Se construye entonces una historia que, salvo unos pequeños detalles aislados, parece no tener conexión con lo abordado en la primera sección. Hasta que sospechas que se están dibujando la otra cara de la moneda. Se nos presenta la historia de alguien que trabaja en un pequeño restaurante, uno de esos artesanales negocios pocos empleados y trato próximo con el cliente que muchas veces los columnistas neoliberales fingen apoyar. Por un revés relacionado con el arrendatario de su local, el negocio se ve perjudicado por una subida excesiva del alquiler y al igual que otros negocios de la zona, se aboca a la desaparición, narrada por cierto desde la salida de sus principales bienes hasta desintegrarse en la última porción de átomo. Una locura de Dara.
José Luis Amores menciona en el prólogo que el texto adquiere ciertas cualidades de la música minimalista de Philip Glass y Steve Reich, y siendo Reich un artista que aprecio bastante, en buena parte de la lectura pensaba que se trataba un elogio gratuito destinado a exagerar las expectativas positivas del lector. Pero al inicio de la segunda sección nos encontramos con un tramo de unas cincuenta páginas que está narrado por frases cortas, que a veces se repiten de dos a cuatro veces, con algunas variaciones, y ahí te das cuenta que es dónde encaja la estética de Reich, un minimalismo reiterativo en el que el narrador repite algunas frases que ha escuchado, plasma también impresiones sensoriales de una mente que está claro sufre algún tipo de trastorno, plagado de inercias obsesivas, que vienen a dar cuenta de alguien que ha colapsado. Va por la calle y pasa al lado de un cordón policial que rodea el cadáver de alguien que se ha arrojado desde lo alto de un edificio, también las frases de alguien con quien ha coincidido en una biblioteca. No se menciona a Lincoln pero hemos de entender que seguramente se trata de él.
¿A qué se debe semejante colapso? La novela no lo aclara demasiado. Surgen entonces las voces de por un lado una periodista de investigación y por otro un grupo de policías que tratan de encontrar a Lincoln. Ninguno parece dar en el blanco, ahí la verdad se vuelve todavía más resbaladiza, se plantean ciertos problemas de Lincoln con la mafia, en otros puede tratarse del novio celoso de su fiel asistenta, en otra un suicidio... versiones que no atan cabos ni ofrecen un asidero demasiado sólido.
En todo caso, nos damos cuenta que hacen referencia al hecho de la percepción. Al igual que otras tantos novelistas posmodernos (cómo ahora Mark Danielewski), Dara también hace de ese tema su foco principal a la vez que, en formato microcosmos, nos muestra las paradojas de la composición social y económica. Un mundo ciertamente engañoso, pero no de forma inmediata y obvia, sólo cuando se observan a un nivel lo bastante amplio o lo bastante concentrado.
Dara maneja todos estos ambientes y personajes con gran soltura y mucho humor, hablando con precisión tanto del mantenimiento de circuitos eléctricos como se nos menciona a figuras de la electrónica como Dj Spooky cuando se celebran selectas fiestas para los elegidos de la ciudad o de la ciudad de Ámsterdam, todo lo que surge es como si formara parte de su ambiente. Todas las elecciones de Dara tienen una intención muy específica. Sin ir más lejos, también podemos fijarnos en el hecho que la novela se sitúe en Chicago, específicamente en la universidad de Chicago, dónde también se integra la Chicago school of economics, de dónde surgieron todas esas luminarias, influenciadas Milton Friedman, que han conformado las teorías que han dado paso al fundamentalismo del libre mercado, concepto que sin duda forma parte del trasfondo temático. Y así con todo, todo está hilado con una finura incuestionable, propia de un escritor muy dotado.
Si bien hay ciertas secciones que se hacen algo pesadas, sobre todo hacia el final de la primera y el final de la segunda, considero que La cadena fácil si que aporta cosas a cambio. No sólo una visión estimulante, tan humanista como sardónica, también una forma de interrogar la realidad y despojarla de sus engañosas máscaras. No sé si este libro supondrá un antes o después para mí, probablemente no, pero sí que es cierto que tras leerla, si se ha leído adecuadamente, es imposible, a nivel literario, continuar acatando visiones conformistas e ingenuas de la posmodernidad.
January 23, 2025
Skonktastic! D Kirk = LinSel; haha..
"Lincoln Selwyn, a young Briton, set Chicago ablaze. Over the course of the last nine months, this charismatic blond with the irresistible accent vaulted to the top of Chicago's social hierarchy, slept with the majority of its first daughters and racked up an unimaginable fortune. Then he walked away, leaving a dazzled city to grieve, and to figure it all out." (There's whiff of Gaddis "JR" up/down locus - jabber start jabber finish.)
And 'figure it all out' you'll be going as this thoroughly engaging the reader, come along slashing prose that bounce steps POVs, lit device & splice technique sometimes full-on 4:33 Cage whiteouts sometimes pages of chopped dio or clipped & spiced Dickensian hyphenated sprawl; a truly mixed blend of pomo fusion pipping at "skonk" and/or "truth" and/or ... Cogito ergo sum, some.
Reread status = affirmative. Should add, this 5star rating hot from just-read really liked book, I'm a Chi-towner of origin know all the places in book and so, am favorably biased. But still!
"Lincoln Selwyn, a young Briton, set Chicago ablaze. Over the course of the last nine months, this charismatic blond with the irresistible accent vaulted to the top of Chicago's social hierarchy, slept with the majority of its first daughters and racked up an unimaginable fortune. Then he walked away, leaving a dazzled city to grieve, and to figure it all out." (There's whiff of Gaddis "JR" up/down locus - jabber start jabber finish.)
And 'figure it all out' you'll be going as this thoroughly engaging the reader, come along slashing prose that bounce steps POVs, lit device & splice technique sometimes full-on 4:33 Cage whiteouts sometimes pages of chopped dio or clipped & spiced Dickensian hyphenated sprawl; a truly mixed blend of pomo fusion pipping at "skonk" and/or "truth" and/or ... Cogito ergo sum, some.
Reread status = affirmative. Should add, this 5star rating hot from just-read really liked book, I'm a Chi-towner of origin know all the places in book and so, am favorably biased. But still!
Read
April 26, 2015Please.
Read.
Evan.
Dara.
Read.
Evan.
Dara.
August 14, 2024
CW:
The principle product of the west is self-hate...
Took me another whole read to even begin articulating, and I'm still finding it a difficult book to talk about... I still maintain that this Does push a little hard on its experiments and I wouldn't be all too put out if someone couldn't stomach some of the more hyper-pomo indulgences here, but it is clearly an avant-garde work from the beginning and there is very obviously a ton of deliberation into why the book is laid out the way it is, even if a lot of it still goes over my head [bad thematic pun partly intended]. But either way, none of it takes away from my overall enjoyment, the textual anarchy in the second half only contributes to establishing the mind-boggling universe Dara builds in this book, and I'm extremely grateful it exists as it does even with its blemishes. Bizarro social satire [with a Very Weird sort of mystery slant] that somehow constantly maintains equilibrium between the outrageous and the subtle, with a literary world built clearly on vast knowledge on metaphysics, philosophy, sociology etc, and it is a Colossal Art Object as much as it is a gripping narrative [if an extremely unconventional one]. Overall it just does what all my favorite works of art do on its own terms, which is feel like a boundlessly imaginative and rich world to get endlessly lost in the labyrinths of, it is not perfect but in my mind there's no doubt Dara created something here that is incredibly special and specific despite how vast and complex all its moving parts are. And thematically speaking this may have been one of the most gripping rereads I've yet done of a novel... the first read was fun, but now that I understand more of what is driving the artistic vision here [no matter if some of its deeper linguistic mechanics go over my head], it becomes clear that this is a fucking stellar work of anti-capitalist satire and finds its greatest successes in that department above all.
Like Dara's first novel, "The Easy Chain" is a novel that is very much about the relationship of language to community, the world, the collective conscious etc. and how these concepts can be explored through zeroing in on a specific community, and in this case satirizing one of the most damaging types of community to the state of the world [the mega-rich, the socialites, and petit-elite basically, and higher]. In fact as a whole this really kind of helped me contextualize some of the thoughts I'd been having surrounding satire as a style while I was rereading The Recognitions earlier this year... there's no doubt a fifty-some odd year gap contributing to this, so I'll make no overly-qualified statements on Prescience, but I think just generally speaking Dara is a much better satirist than Gaddis was in R. I've always sort of associated satire with a kind of reactionary anger displaced toward The Masses at the expense of examining the underlying institutions that actually facilitate that Mass Bad Behavior... Gaddis' satire would improve immensely with J R, but his debut, while of course immensely funny and prophetic, was still marked by a kind of conservative pessimism and Sense of Superiority over those perceived less intelligent or cultured, and it kind of convinced me fully that this sort of satire is not really for me. But Dara's fingers are on the pulse of satire and this book nails it, they are instead completely directing their attention to the specifics in a way Gaddis overlooked... while this is also a very angry book that lampoons mass culture and our ignorance, it feels more appropriate and attuned to the gravity of its own anger and Moral Message than R did because Dara clearly pertinently understands neoliberal capitalism and the System of Abstractions [to borrow phrasing from the book] that uphold inherently disastrous and dehumanizing social orders that we've internalized into thinking are unchangeable. This is the basis of its commentary, and like I said, it tows a fantastic line between subtle and Direct, but always beautifully done no matter how heavy it gets. Like "The Lost Scrapbook", but in its own way, this is largely about our thorough lostness as individuals and the whole collective at once... It's about the beliefs we as a society are increasingly aware are keeping us down, but the fear giving up on those limiting and selfish beliefs that divide us all from the One due to a sort of sickness in our overall thought process that burgeoned from many of the evil, colonial and patriarchal values the proclaimed "west" was founded on. Through the proliferation of language and culture these ideas become Gospel Truths we feel we can't question and feel become ingrained in us... I unexpectedly read this in tandem with reading a great article [by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk] on the Algonquin belief in "Wetiko psychosis" which I won't talk about in detail and will leave it to people to read into themselves as it's very interesting, but the whole concept behind it is give-or-take parallel to what Dara is highlighting in this book with their portrayal of language and how this "mind virus" operates and spreads throughout generations and individuals, and Dara does very well in holding this all together thematically, narratively and structurally.
Something I'd been chewing on for my entire read was the apparent disparity between the first and second half of the book [and I'd argue it pretty clearly is intentionally supposed to be viewed this way given the Collapse Into Void that occurs during the middle]. At first I was thinking this could be accused of being two books in one, but along the way I realized there's actually a lot going on to justify the descent into the void following the chaotic first half - the 2nd is much slower, somehow subtler even when its pages and text are visibly falling apart and distorting, it feels like a sort of Evaporation of all the noise of part 1 into an unsettling dive toward uncertainty and Silence, though of course the book is so built on voices and its sense of omnipresent Sound/Space prevents it from ever completely coming apart no matter how much it bends and shifts. It's really bold, imo not every moment of it pays off [verse section is Fun but I think sort of drives The Point in a little too hard] but overall, it is a huge aspect of why the book works - if part 1 is the ascent, part 2 is the descent. The writing in this part is more conscious [really, this feeling starts with a monologue a little later near the end of part 1, but continues thru all of part 2] and is sort of a direct Inverse to the first part in terms of exploring the other end of the totem pole of class and collective existence, underlined by the surreal mechanics and ideas that hold up the novel. Its a daring volume 2 where Dara generally gets at some of the heaviest thematic and theoretic bulk of this whole thing, and it does so in a way that is heavily yet tastefully symbolic and really worth poring over and thinking on for a long period of time. I don't Understand much of this part still, but understanding has never been essential to my enjoyment of art, and it is really the feeling that Dara evokes in the second half that is most alluring to me ultimately; a moody and evocative atmosphere of a world of corporations and systems in decline, of that strange eerie dive toward alienation from each other and the feeling of disintegration-of-life through technology that keeps us more disconnected-while-connected than ever, and a dark feeling of collapsing toward some event horizon that humanity has been feeling the advent of for a long time now... At the end of the day, in both its strange mystery structure and the resulting Reality underlying all of the farce from part 1 into part 2, it's an undeniably excellent aesthetic work, and the second half is just as witty and sharp as the first but in its own hypnotic way. The novel as a whole is driven to even further heights by the final section, a very narratively and thematically illuminating monologue which, like the final part of "The Lost Scrapbook", delivers a kick to the reader's proverbial head that cements Dara as a biting critic of the worst tendencies in humanity and our systems underlying them, by the end of the second part the book holistically justifies itself both as a structural work and a well done, emotionally moving approach to social commentary. CW:
No matter what descriptors you could use for any of this, it is probably one of the most readable books I've ever read despite how difficult a lot of it is; it's a difficulty that feels naturally implemented, Dara isn't trying to transparently write obtusely and instead just comes off as their natural authorly voice, and there is clearly so much personality dripping from every pore of this work. I started rereading it on a bit of a whim and ended up completing its bulk only about a week later, it's proof that a completely avant-garde novel can still be a pageturner if it's just excellently done literature regardless of any labels... this is a special universe Dara crafted here, one that has plenty similarities to the post/modernist epics that comprise its lineage, but also a work in which the sincere innovations driving its creation are cogently communicated and totally singular to this specific author, whoever they are. Not a perfect novel, but in my view it pretty clearly reaches heights that qualify it for a modern masterpiece, and hopefully it gets wider attention one day.
The principle product of the west is self-hate...
Took me another whole read to even begin articulating, and I'm still finding it a difficult book to talk about... I still maintain that this Does push a little hard on its experiments and I wouldn't be all too put out if someone couldn't stomach some of the more hyper-pomo indulgences here, but it is clearly an avant-garde work from the beginning and there is very obviously a ton of deliberation into why the book is laid out the way it is, even if a lot of it still goes over my head [bad thematic pun partly intended]. But either way, none of it takes away from my overall enjoyment, the textual anarchy in the second half only contributes to establishing the mind-boggling universe Dara builds in this book, and I'm extremely grateful it exists as it does even with its blemishes. Bizarro social satire [with a Very Weird sort of mystery slant] that somehow constantly maintains equilibrium between the outrageous and the subtle, with a literary world built clearly on vast knowledge on metaphysics, philosophy, sociology etc, and it is a Colossal Art Object as much as it is a gripping narrative [if an extremely unconventional one]. Overall it just does what all my favorite works of art do on its own terms, which is feel like a boundlessly imaginative and rich world to get endlessly lost in the labyrinths of, it is not perfect but in my mind there's no doubt Dara created something here that is incredibly special and specific despite how vast and complex all its moving parts are. And thematically speaking this may have been one of the most gripping rereads I've yet done of a novel... the first read was fun, but now that I understand more of what is driving the artistic vision here [no matter if some of its deeper linguistic mechanics go over my head], it becomes clear that this is a fucking stellar work of anti-capitalist satire and finds its greatest successes in that department above all.
Like Dara's first novel, "The Easy Chain" is a novel that is very much about the relationship of language to community, the world, the collective conscious etc. and how these concepts can be explored through zeroing in on a specific community, and in this case satirizing one of the most damaging types of community to the state of the world [the mega-rich, the socialites, and petit-elite basically, and higher]. In fact as a whole this really kind of helped me contextualize some of the thoughts I'd been having surrounding satire as a style while I was rereading The Recognitions earlier this year... there's no doubt a fifty-some odd year gap contributing to this, so I'll make no overly-qualified statements on Prescience, but I think just generally speaking Dara is a much better satirist than Gaddis was in R. I've always sort of associated satire with a kind of reactionary anger displaced toward The Masses at the expense of examining the underlying institutions that actually facilitate that Mass Bad Behavior... Gaddis' satire would improve immensely with J R, but his debut, while of course immensely funny and prophetic, was still marked by a kind of conservative pessimism and Sense of Superiority over those perceived less intelligent or cultured, and it kind of convinced me fully that this sort of satire is not really for me. But Dara's fingers are on the pulse of satire and this book nails it, they are instead completely directing their attention to the specifics in a way Gaddis overlooked... while this is also a very angry book that lampoons mass culture and our ignorance, it feels more appropriate and attuned to the gravity of its own anger and Moral Message than R did because Dara clearly pertinently understands neoliberal capitalism and the System of Abstractions [to borrow phrasing from the book] that uphold inherently disastrous and dehumanizing social orders that we've internalized into thinking are unchangeable. This is the basis of its commentary, and like I said, it tows a fantastic line between subtle and Direct, but always beautifully done no matter how heavy it gets. Like "The Lost Scrapbook", but in its own way, this is largely about our thorough lostness as individuals and the whole collective at once... It's about the beliefs we as a society are increasingly aware are keeping us down, but the fear giving up on those limiting and selfish beliefs that divide us all from the One due to a sort of sickness in our overall thought process that burgeoned from many of the evil, colonial and patriarchal values the proclaimed "west" was founded on. Through the proliferation of language and culture these ideas become Gospel Truths we feel we can't question and feel become ingrained in us... I unexpectedly read this in tandem with reading a great article [by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk] on the Algonquin belief in "Wetiko psychosis" which I won't talk about in detail and will leave it to people to read into themselves as it's very interesting, but the whole concept behind it is give-or-take parallel to what Dara is highlighting in this book with their portrayal of language and how this "mind virus" operates and spreads throughout generations and individuals, and Dara does very well in holding this all together thematically, narratively and structurally.
Something I'd been chewing on for my entire read was the apparent disparity between the first and second half of the book [and I'd argue it pretty clearly is intentionally supposed to be viewed this way given the Collapse Into Void that occurs during the middle]. At first I was thinking this could be accused of being two books in one, but along the way I realized there's actually a lot going on to justify the descent into the void following the chaotic first half - the 2nd is much slower, somehow subtler even when its pages and text are visibly falling apart and distorting, it feels like a sort of Evaporation of all the noise of part 1 into an unsettling dive toward uncertainty and Silence, though of course the book is so built on voices and its sense of omnipresent Sound/Space prevents it from ever completely coming apart no matter how much it bends and shifts. It's really bold, imo not every moment of it pays off [verse section is Fun but I think sort of drives The Point in a little too hard] but overall, it is a huge aspect of why the book works - if part 1 is the ascent, part 2 is the descent. The writing in this part is more conscious [really, this feeling starts with a monologue a little later near the end of part 1, but continues thru all of part 2] and is sort of a direct Inverse to the first part in terms of exploring the other end of the totem pole of class and collective existence, underlined by the surreal mechanics and ideas that hold up the novel. Its a daring volume 2 where Dara generally gets at some of the heaviest thematic and theoretic bulk of this whole thing, and it does so in a way that is heavily yet tastefully symbolic and really worth poring over and thinking on for a long period of time. I don't Understand much of this part still, but understanding has never been essential to my enjoyment of art, and it is really the feeling that Dara evokes in the second half that is most alluring to me ultimately; a moody and evocative atmosphere of a world of corporations and systems in decline, of that strange eerie dive toward alienation from each other and the feeling of disintegration-of-life through technology that keeps us more disconnected-while-connected than ever, and a dark feeling of collapsing toward some event horizon that humanity has been feeling the advent of for a long time now... At the end of the day, in both its strange mystery structure and the resulting Reality underlying all of the farce from part 1 into part 2, it's an undeniably excellent aesthetic work, and the second half is just as witty and sharp as the first but in its own hypnotic way. The novel as a whole is driven to even further heights by the final section, a very narratively and thematically illuminating monologue which, like the final part of "The Lost Scrapbook", delivers a kick to the reader's proverbial head that cements Dara as a biting critic of the worst tendencies in humanity and our systems underlying them, by the end of the second part the book holistically justifies itself both as a structural work and a well done, emotionally moving approach to social commentary. CW:
No matter what descriptors you could use for any of this, it is probably one of the most readable books I've ever read despite how difficult a lot of it is; it's a difficulty that feels naturally implemented, Dara isn't trying to transparently write obtusely and instead just comes off as their natural authorly voice, and there is clearly so much personality dripping from every pore of this work. I started rereading it on a bit of a whim and ended up completing its bulk only about a week later, it's proof that a completely avant-garde novel can still be a pageturner if it's just excellently done literature regardless of any labels... this is a special universe Dara crafted here, one that has plenty similarities to the post/modernist epics that comprise its lineage, but also a work in which the sincere innovations driving its creation are cogently communicated and totally singular to this specific author, whoever they are. Not a perfect novel, but in my view it pretty clearly reaches heights that qualify it for a modern masterpiece, and hopefully it gets wider attention one day.
November 26, 2008
THE LOST SCRAPBOOK debuted dara's original technique of narrative splicing–a kind of collage work done in series, rather than in space. THE EASY CHAIN operates in similar fashion and, like THE LOST SCRAPBOOK, is a political novel, one made of principally two things: ideas–witty analysis of our inept and corrupt culture–and yarns. dara’s specialty is in fact the yarn, the almost wholesome tale, ending with a zinger or even a moral. on their own they would be nice bits of entertainment, strung together in series they make something else, at best it makes a convincing group portraiture of our rattled time… it’s a strange accomplishment, and the only one i could think to relate it to was the reaction had after watching linklater’s WAKING LIFE, where a series of undergraduate-y philosophical discussions, in aggregate, has the larger wallop of showing that we are a species of similar concerns, with similar self-designed thought experiments, and indeed similar fantasies.
it is a slightly lopsided novel–though i don’t think it’s at all the half loaf that one review had it. the first half has a better-defined gambit, which then disintegrates it’s not quite clear how effectively… its lead is a character who happens to be extremely charismatic. that’s his super-power–given without much of an origin story. and in the first half of the book we get to watch him wield this power against wealthier chicago. Lincoln “vaulted to the top of the city’s social hierarchy, slept with the majority of its first daughters and racked up an unimaginable fortune.” the second half of the novel then significantly drops the story of Lincoln, concerning itself only obliquely with him and his unexplained reversal. this half has some admittedly outrageous and not-always-successful gambits, including odd punctuation to denote voice stresses, a poor attempt at some kind of echo-affected poetry, and what i think was a long narrative from the POV of a piece of dust. i’m not sure. it gets a little wacky.
but there are really fantastic parts throughout, setpieces, yarns mostly, unsmug moral tales that show us both the hypocrisies and possibilities for hope in our consumerist endtimes. a fantastic one near the end about how a hippie food joint gets taken over and saved by a “one man Information Counterrevolution,” that is: a man of silence (324). another hilarious story concerns a pair of unsavvy buddhists trying to go into business (to practice right livelihood) and getting all kinds of screwed.
other idea riffs are almost equally engaging as his stories. a few eloquent rants about our advertising-based culture where dara defines terms–the “skonk” and “conicons”–needed to make it run; one extremely prescient bit about how markets reward response, not value (187); and here is dara on how progress has us lose sight of fundamental values, the big picture, in our driven chase to get granular:
“In the libraries, he had also seen the affinity between progress and reduction. Day after day, in one library after another, he had noticed the cadenzas of rapt attention played to minutiae, as larger concerns grew foggy with neglect. Increasing acuity of perception driving wider blindness, evident & necessary visions falling on eyes without feeling. It was evolutionary: to continue, to flourish & prosper, whittle yourself to the barest functional minimum, then pass this on. Again, reason has produced its flipside, history has worked its dull revenge” (429).
it is a slightly lopsided novel–though i don’t think it’s at all the half loaf that one review had it. the first half has a better-defined gambit, which then disintegrates it’s not quite clear how effectively… its lead is a character who happens to be extremely charismatic. that’s his super-power–given without much of an origin story. and in the first half of the book we get to watch him wield this power against wealthier chicago. Lincoln “vaulted to the top of the city’s social hierarchy, slept with the majority of its first daughters and racked up an unimaginable fortune.” the second half of the novel then significantly drops the story of Lincoln, concerning itself only obliquely with him and his unexplained reversal. this half has some admittedly outrageous and not-always-successful gambits, including odd punctuation to denote voice stresses, a poor attempt at some kind of echo-affected poetry, and what i think was a long narrative from the POV of a piece of dust. i’m not sure. it gets a little wacky.
but there are really fantastic parts throughout, setpieces, yarns mostly, unsmug moral tales that show us both the hypocrisies and possibilities for hope in our consumerist endtimes. a fantastic one near the end about how a hippie food joint gets taken over and saved by a “one man Information Counterrevolution,” that is: a man of silence (324). another hilarious story concerns a pair of unsavvy buddhists trying to go into business (to practice right livelihood) and getting all kinds of screwed.
other idea riffs are almost equally engaging as his stories. a few eloquent rants about our advertising-based culture where dara defines terms–the “skonk” and “conicons”–needed to make it run; one extremely prescient bit about how markets reward response, not value (187); and here is dara on how progress has us lose sight of fundamental values, the big picture, in our driven chase to get granular:
“In the libraries, he had also seen the affinity between progress and reduction. Day after day, in one library after another, he had noticed the cadenzas of rapt attention played to minutiae, as larger concerns grew foggy with neglect. Increasing acuity of perception driving wider blindness, evident & necessary visions falling on eyes without feeling. It was evolutionary: to continue, to flourish & prosper, whittle yourself to the barest functional minimum, then pass this on. Again, reason has produced its flipside, history has worked its dull revenge” (429).
Read
November 2, 2021Abandonado.
Imposible de calificar. Una lectura más que complicada, a pesar , de que realmente no cuenta nada más que la historia de la vida del personaje Lincoln Selwyn, además narrada por aquellos que le conocieron. He conseguido llegar hasta la página 150 y hasta ahí solo hablaba de cómo éste personaje pasó su infancia y adolescencia en Holanda y se marchó a Chicago (EEUU) a estudiar Humanidades y este propósito tampoco le irá bien, pero por azares de la vida conoce a alguien influyente y se convertirá en un personaje social y económicamente relevante.
Todo esto está narrado de forma muy peculiar y con muchos cultismos, además de tratar temas que me son muy lejanos (Nasdaq) en profundidad y exhaustivamente. Lenguaje muy pomposo y rimbombante.
Ya desde ahora os digo que no es una novela fácil de leer a pesar de lo que en su prólogo se comenta. Su extensión (509 páginas) también me desanima a seguir, teniendo tantas novelas esperándome.
No es para mí esta novela.
Imposible de calificar. Una lectura más que complicada, a pesar , de que realmente no cuenta nada más que la historia de la vida del personaje Lincoln Selwyn, además narrada por aquellos que le conocieron. He conseguido llegar hasta la página 150 y hasta ahí solo hablaba de cómo éste personaje pasó su infancia y adolescencia en Holanda y se marchó a Chicago (EEUU) a estudiar Humanidades y este propósito tampoco le irá bien, pero por azares de la vida conoce a alguien influyente y se convertirá en un personaje social y económicamente relevante.
Todo esto está narrado de forma muy peculiar y con muchos cultismos, además de tratar temas que me son muy lejanos (Nasdaq) en profundidad y exhaustivamente. Lenguaje muy pomposo y rimbombante.
Ya desde ahora os digo que no es una novela fácil de leer a pesar de lo que en su prólogo se comenta. Su extensión (509 páginas) también me desanima a seguir, teniendo tantas novelas esperándome.
No es para mí esta novela.
October 9, 2008
The publisher of The Easy Chain--which publisher I'm starting to think is author Evan Dara himself--shot me an email for a pre-release offer for a copy (officially released Aug 8, 2008; I got mine June 16 and read it in 10 days) I guess because I have a personal page for Dara's first novel The Lost Scrapbook. [I've since created a page for
The Easy Chain
as well.]
I enjoyed it a LOT and am already trying to figure out when I can get a re-read in.
The novel is the story of Lincoln Selwyn, a Briton who came to Chicago by way of The Netherlands, and who in a short time becomes the toast of the town's business and social scenes. Then something happens that blows the narrative to smithereens...
Now, I dig Harry Potter as much as the next guy :-) but my tastes can also run to the unconventional. (Not Age Of Wire & String unconventional, mind you, but House Of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Gold Bug Variations are all lifetime favorites.) Unresolved plotlines do not bother me too much, so long as I feel the writing is worth reading. The Easy Chain is not especially easy at all, and it might not satisfy readers who liked The Lost Scrapbook's satisfying resolution. (Although honestly, if a reader stuck with The Lost Scrapbook long enough to actually experience that resolution, he/she just might have the patience for The Easy Chain after all.) In this, his second novel, Dara goes nuts in eight different directions, and if you're up for it, I say DIVE IN. There's all sorts of cool fun to be had here. Stream of consciousness, whack-a-mole POV (Lost Scrapbook style), verse! (VERSE I SAY!)...heck, one section is written from the POV of friggin' dirt.
BUT...I've only read it once: there could be--I'm sure there is--much underlying structure that I missed (that big section at the end with the autistic girl??) as I did my first trip through each of the aforementioned lifetime favorites. Still a fascinating read for me. Like I said, it's already on my reread list.
=-=-=-
*MILD SPOILER ALERT: In one memorable scene, a guy just sitting in a restaurant triggers a chain of events that culminates with a large US town being erased from the earth's surface, person by person, building by building, brick by brick, molecule by molecule! (Even weirder for me, I happened to be visiting this very town while I was reading the book, and in fact was sitting on a bench in the very plaza I was reading about! One of the most bizarre experiences I've ever had! I mean, I'm sure that happens to New Yorkers all the time since so many stories are set there. But for a North Carolinian visiting Colorado?? What are the odds?)
I enjoyed it a LOT and am already trying to figure out when I can get a re-read in.
The novel is the story of Lincoln Selwyn, a Briton who came to Chicago by way of The Netherlands, and who in a short time becomes the toast of the town's business and social scenes. Then something happens that blows the narrative to smithereens...
Now, I dig Harry Potter as much as the next guy :-) but my tastes can also run to the unconventional. (Not Age Of Wire & String unconventional, mind you, but House Of Leaves, Infinite Jest, Gold Bug Variations are all lifetime favorites.) Unresolved plotlines do not bother me too much, so long as I feel the writing is worth reading. The Easy Chain is not especially easy at all, and it might not satisfy readers who liked The Lost Scrapbook's satisfying resolution. (Although honestly, if a reader stuck with The Lost Scrapbook long enough to actually experience that resolution, he/she just might have the patience for The Easy Chain after all.) In this, his second novel, Dara goes nuts in eight different directions, and if you're up for it, I say DIVE IN. There's all sorts of cool fun to be had here. Stream of consciousness, whack-a-mole POV (Lost Scrapbook style), verse! (VERSE I SAY!)...heck, one section is written from the POV of friggin' dirt.
BUT...I've only read it once: there could be--I'm sure there is--much underlying structure that I missed (that big section at the end with the autistic girl??) as I did my first trip through each of the aforementioned lifetime favorites. Still a fascinating read for me. Like I said, it's already on my reread list.
=-=-=-
*MILD SPOILER ALERT: In one memorable scene, a guy just sitting in a restaurant triggers a chain of events that culminates with a large US town being erased from the earth's surface, person by person, building by building, brick by brick, molecule by molecule! (Even weirder for me, I happened to be visiting this very town while I was reading the book, and in fact was sitting on a bench in the very plaza I was reading about! One of the most bizarre experiences I've ever had! I mean, I'm sure that happens to New Yorkers all the time since so many stories are set there. But for a North Carolinian visiting Colorado?? What are the odds?)
August 29, 2009
- well it's really something way beyond what anybody expe-
-it was and, yes, it did but don't let anybody tell you that this one has the glare suggested by...what? by last chances, or, no. It's the pages that are blank I'm talking about.
-But the book is more than that. This one somehow manages to glow from within, whereas the last scrapbook he wrote don't touch it at all like that. No, no. I'm only comparing to suggest what should be obvious. Dara
-Dara pops, rolls and rams this mo' fo' right down your throat and, b#@%#, it's not only the fact that he reveals a dude you only see through oth- you only/cause he makes Lincoln, the main dude, only be the projection of a disparate party of voices. So, see, as you read on and on beyond the notching and ratchelling that Dara is setting up via the "p[lot}", it almost does, yea, take on a light from within itself.
-but nobody understands that source of that light, even those who let Caspier whip them up into an epistemological fit of pleasure. Because this book hates the upper-class pleasures of Tom Wolfe and Andy Beathimulant. This book eat their breakfast and sans the Socratic epitaphs waiting for the sunday paper, baby. This book explodes right in the middle of its own excellence, kiddo. This book evokes only the cash, reversing the charges to change you won't ever give to the guy with his hand wispily and wastefully extended. Because this/yeabut/ no this book/ yea BUT/ NO BECAUSE THIS BOOK/
- YEA , but you're leaving out what. oh can't you, can't you see can't you know that this is over and beyond what you ever wanted. you wanted this to be an empty void or a space to praise and angry
and
a space a space to praise
without the shucks or locks or poses
a space a trace to praise
without the shills or shouts our roses
a space to praise a space
without the shocks or shouts or poses
...
.........
.......
a failed attempt to not mock but unlock and it's gross what just happened here
DAra's not failed the water in a city that want to give it to the $. Da 'a wants a pool in which expectations replace the desire to get tanner. 'ara is expecting us to lock down and let it get lit from the :]]]]]within.
-it was and, yes, it did but don't let anybody tell you that this one has the glare suggested by...what? by last chances, or, no. It's the pages that are blank I'm talking about.
-But the book is more than that. This one somehow manages to glow from within, whereas the last scrapbook he wrote don't touch it at all like that. No, no. I'm only comparing to suggest what should be obvious. Dara
-Dara pops, rolls and rams this mo' fo' right down your throat and, b#@%#, it's not only the fact that he reveals a dude you only see through oth- you only/cause he makes Lincoln, the main dude, only be the projection of a disparate party of voices. So, see, as you read on and on beyond the notching and ratchelling that Dara is setting up via the "p[lot}", it almost does, yea, take on a light from within itself.
-but nobody understands that source of that light, even those who let Caspier whip them up into an epistemological fit of pleasure. Because this book hates the upper-class pleasures of Tom Wolfe and Andy Beathimulant. This book eat their breakfast and sans the Socratic epitaphs waiting for the sunday paper, baby. This book explodes right in the middle of its own excellence, kiddo. This book evokes only the cash, reversing the charges to change you won't ever give to the guy with his hand wispily and wastefully extended. Because this/yeabut/ no this book/ yea BUT/ NO BECAUSE THIS BOOK/
- YEA , but you're leaving out what. oh can't you, can't you see can't you know that this is over and beyond what you ever wanted. you wanted this to be an empty void or a space to praise and angry
and
a space a space to praise
without the shucks or locks or poses
a space a trace to praise
without the shills or shouts our roses
a space to praise a space
without the shocks or shouts or poses
...
.........
.......
a failed attempt to not mock but unlock and it's gross what just happened here
DAra's not failed the water in a city that want to give it to the $. Da 'a wants a pool in which expectations replace the desire to get tanner. 'ara is expecting us to lock down and let it get lit from the :]]]]]within.
September 9, 2020
If for nothing else, The Easy Chain deserves five stars for a pivotal section that seems to be narrated by some sort of dust or lint or dirt particle. As it drifts around the city, the particle is sniffed up by a dog and shat out by said dog onto some grass in a park. The dog shit is then subsequently trod upon and tracked elsewhere, and as luck would have it the particle eventually finds itself in the hospital where the main character is being treated for wounds incurred in the process of searching for his mother.
If it sounds bizarre, well... that’s because it IS bizarre. This is wild stuff. Audacious, dangerous, bold, peculiar, occasionally borderline silly stuff. And yet somehow, Dara pulls it off beautifully. It’s really quite something to behold.
While I didn’t like it quite as much as The Lost Scrapbook, The Easy Chain is still a masterpiece in its own right. Highly recommended.
If it sounds bizarre, well... that’s because it IS bizarre. This is wild stuff. Audacious, dangerous, bold, peculiar, occasionally borderline silly stuff. And yet somehow, Dara pulls it off beautifully. It’s really quite something to behold.
While I didn’t like it quite as much as The Lost Scrapbook, The Easy Chain is still a masterpiece in its own right. Highly recommended.
September 4, 2013
While I think The Easy Chain is a little hairy with all its experiments in narrative and form, I can't help but admire it for taking the leap and diving head first into new territories. Don't miss this one.
January 31, 2020
3'5 aprox.
Es un libro interesante, pero que va de (mucho) más a (bastante) menos.
Si bien las ideas centrales son muy sugerentes -la fragmentación de la verdad, incluso la propia existencia del concepto "verdad", la visión múltiple de la realidad, la identidad propia, etc. , es decir pura posmodernidad-, en su primera mitad están desarrolladas de manera magistral, mientras que en su segunda mitad el libro pierde fuelle y se entra en cierto manierismo, y experimentación vacua -aunque con algunos aciertos- hasta que, en mi caso, terminas arrastrándote las últimas 25 páginas.
El libro arranca despistándote y hasta la página 45 uno no sabe exactamente qué está leyendo, pero entonces te golpea y te das cuenta que no estas leyendo una novela SOBRE la cháchara inane a la que nos sometemos diariamente para entender la verdad y el mundo que nos rodea, sino que estas leyendo LA cháchara inane que nos rodea, y es tu responsabilidad como lector recomponer esa charla inane y hacerte una idea de lo que la novela -ergo, la realidad- te está contando.
Desde ahí se suceden 200 páginas magistrales y muy divertidas de leer, en las que un ritmo frenético, de frases cortas e interrupciones, todo contado con diálogos banales, se ve salpicado con reflexiones más largas e interesantes que incluyen digresiones sobre el concepto de realidad de Descartes, o como los humanos de este final de siglo hemos aprendido a esconder pequeñas piezas de lo que creemos que es "la verdad" en un flujo -un mar- incesante de "bullshitting".
En esa primera parte el lector es un "yo" central que recibe toda la información de manera pasiva y reactiva, siendo "objetivamente subjetivo", dijéramos.
A partir de ese punto, y tras cinco paginas en blanco, la novela cambia y todo pasa a ser "subjetivamente objetivo", es decir, el lector se "encarna" en varios "elementos", desde el protagonista de la primera parte, hasta lo que parece ser una mota de polvo, o el tiempo, e incluso en un narrador omnisciente.
Los conceptos de realidad, verdad y personalidad siguen ahí pero están bajo una capa técnica literaria mucho más densa, y en ocasiones es difícil entender si estamos leyendo algo remotamente relacionado con la primer parte de la novela o no (yo creo que unas veces sí y otras no, pero ésta segunda parte es tan "juego técnico literario" que a veces me ha despistado muchísimo).
Es como sí en la primera parte te dijera "así se siente un receptor actual, perdido, fragmentado necesitado de contexto, así te sientes tú", y en la segunda parte trate de decirte "y es por esto por lo que los emisores hablan sin contexto, fragmentado, ...por la multiplicidad de puntos de vista, así se sienten ellos" pero el objetivo queda mucho más claro en la primera parte que en la segunda.
En resumen, si el libro acabase en la página 254 serían cinco estrellas como cinco soles...lástima que dure otras 250 y que ahí el autor falle en su propósito (muy loable, por otro lado) de dar la vuelta a la perspectiva de la primera parte.
Es un libro interesante, pero que va de (mucho) más a (bastante) menos.
Si bien las ideas centrales son muy sugerentes -la fragmentación de la verdad, incluso la propia existencia del concepto "verdad", la visión múltiple de la realidad, la identidad propia, etc. , es decir pura posmodernidad-, en su primera mitad están desarrolladas de manera magistral, mientras que en su segunda mitad el libro pierde fuelle y se entra en cierto manierismo, y experimentación vacua -aunque con algunos aciertos- hasta que, en mi caso, terminas arrastrándote las últimas 25 páginas.
El libro arranca despistándote y hasta la página 45 uno no sabe exactamente qué está leyendo, pero entonces te golpea y te das cuenta que no estas leyendo una novela SOBRE la cháchara inane a la que nos sometemos diariamente para entender la verdad y el mundo que nos rodea, sino que estas leyendo LA cháchara inane que nos rodea, y es tu responsabilidad como lector recomponer esa charla inane y hacerte una idea de lo que la novela -ergo, la realidad- te está contando.
Desde ahí se suceden 200 páginas magistrales y muy divertidas de leer, en las que un ritmo frenético, de frases cortas e interrupciones, todo contado con diálogos banales, se ve salpicado con reflexiones más largas e interesantes que incluyen digresiones sobre el concepto de realidad de Descartes, o como los humanos de este final de siglo hemos aprendido a esconder pequeñas piezas de lo que creemos que es "la verdad" en un flujo -un mar- incesante de "bullshitting".
En esa primera parte el lector es un "yo" central que recibe toda la información de manera pasiva y reactiva, siendo "objetivamente subjetivo", dijéramos.
A partir de ese punto, y tras cinco paginas en blanco, la novela cambia y todo pasa a ser "subjetivamente objetivo", es decir, el lector se "encarna" en varios "elementos", desde el protagonista de la primera parte, hasta lo que parece ser una mota de polvo, o el tiempo, e incluso en un narrador omnisciente.
Los conceptos de realidad, verdad y personalidad siguen ahí pero están bajo una capa técnica literaria mucho más densa, y en ocasiones es difícil entender si estamos leyendo algo remotamente relacionado con la primer parte de la novela o no (yo creo que unas veces sí y otras no, pero ésta segunda parte es tan "juego técnico literario" que a veces me ha despistado muchísimo).
Es como sí en la primera parte te dijera "así se siente un receptor actual, perdido, fragmentado necesitado de contexto, así te sientes tú", y en la segunda parte trate de decirte "y es por esto por lo que los emisores hablan sin contexto, fragmentado, ...por la multiplicidad de puntos de vista, así se sienten ellos" pero el objetivo queda mucho más claro en la primera parte que en la segunda.
En resumen, si el libro acabase en la página 254 serían cinco estrellas como cinco soles...lástima que dure otras 250 y que ahí el autor falle en su propósito (muy loable, por otro lado) de dar la vuelta a la perspectiva de la primera parte.
April 9, 2020
Cuando encuentre palabras voy a hacer una review. Por ahora estoy atónito.
October 15, 2013
Dara's project seems to be one of con/dis/trans-junctive (dis)integration.
Whereas Dara's first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, focuses upon a disparate civic unit and its corporate overlord within a pre-futureshock timeframe, The Easy Chain's concern is upon an insanely talented and charismatic (and troubled) Continental wunderkind and the midwest (well, mostly Chicago) during the cusp of the stock market bubble.
This prose flows more than The Lost Scrapbook but is also more abrupt at times.
Whereas Dara's first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, focuses upon a disparate civic unit and its corporate overlord within a pre-futureshock timeframe, The Easy Chain's concern is upon an insanely talented and charismatic (and troubled) Continental wunderkind and the midwest (well, mostly Chicago) during the cusp of the stock market bubble.
This prose flows more than The Lost Scrapbook but is also more abrupt at times.
October 25, 2008
A friend from the Bay Area told me he saw this at a Berkeley bookstore, and I was insanely excited to read it because The Lost Scrapbook is a favorite of mine. However, I couldn't find the book anywhere, and for months the only reference I saw to it online was a cover-imageless listing on Amazon.com. I was disappointed that I did not live in the same dimension in which this book existed. Eventually, I found it on the publisher's web site, so I ordered it.
The style in which it is written is striking. Much of it is written in free dialogue--no quotes, no removed narrative voice or exposition. Faceless, nameless people talk about the protagonist, Lincoln Selwyn; that's the bulk of the novel. As it progresses, we follow Lincoln around as he meets with various entrepreneurs, con men, investors, and straight-up nutbags. Those are my favorite scenes, because they give Dara a chance to do what he does best--float oddball theories and mess around with the worlds he creates.
Dara also breaks into repetitive, not-so-hot verse and incoherent ramblings and stuffs a bunch of blank pages in there. The novel seems to explode a few times. The good parts are so good that I'll follow him just about anywhere, but Dara definitely tried my patience in this book.
But: skronk!
No one seems to know who Evan Dara is, by the way. I've been speculating about it with a friend since we read The Lost Scrapbook together, and this novel didn't do much to dissuade me from our theory: that Evan Dara is a pen name for David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, William T Vollmann, or all of them--a collaborative project. If I had to pick one of these writers to be the man behind the Evan Dara mask, it would be DFW. I like to imagine Wallace writing under a pen name to escape the pressure of following Infinite Jest. Of course, the big problem with that theory is that The Lost Scrapbook came out in 95 and Infinite Jest came out in 96. Still, there are plenty of stylistic similarities and shared preoccupations between the two writers. In the final pages of Easy Chain, Dara even uses a pet phrase of DFW's ("and but so") and makes a Wittgenstein reference (DFW's Broom of the System is full of them). Also, the end of Easy Chain makes for a pretty moving Goodbye Cruel World. Now I'm just bumming myself out.
The style in which it is written is striking. Much of it is written in free dialogue--no quotes, no removed narrative voice or exposition. Faceless, nameless people talk about the protagonist, Lincoln Selwyn; that's the bulk of the novel. As it progresses, we follow Lincoln around as he meets with various entrepreneurs, con men, investors, and straight-up nutbags. Those are my favorite scenes, because they give Dara a chance to do what he does best--float oddball theories and mess around with the worlds he creates.
Dara also breaks into repetitive, not-so-hot verse and incoherent ramblings and stuffs a bunch of blank pages in there. The novel seems to explode a few times. The good parts are so good that I'll follow him just about anywhere, but Dara definitely tried my patience in this book.
But: skronk!
No one seems to know who Evan Dara is, by the way. I've been speculating about it with a friend since we read The Lost Scrapbook together, and this novel didn't do much to dissuade me from our theory: that Evan Dara is a pen name for David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, William T Vollmann, or all of them--a collaborative project. If I had to pick one of these writers to be the man behind the Evan Dara mask, it would be DFW. I like to imagine Wallace writing under a pen name to escape the pressure of following Infinite Jest. Of course, the big problem with that theory is that The Lost Scrapbook came out in 95 and Infinite Jest came out in 96. Still, there are plenty of stylistic similarities and shared preoccupations between the two writers. In the final pages of Easy Chain, Dara even uses a pet phrase of DFW's ("and but so") and makes a Wittgenstein reference (DFW's Broom of the System is full of them). Also, the end of Easy Chain makes for a pretty moving Goodbye Cruel World. Now I'm just bumming myself out.
December 5, 2024
I thought I had a grasp on this one until I didn’t, and from around page 250 until the end all bets were off. There’s such a clear and accessible narrative in the beginning that what follows is completely disorienting, and I’d reckon I fully understood about half of the action in the final 200 pages.
That being said, I was fully captivated even in the sections I struggled with, completely in Dara’s grasp with every new experiment he threw at me. There’s an extended section of verse, there’s an article on water privatization, there’s a bunch of emails, there’s a seemingly never ending monologue from a man held at gunpoint - there is no way to prepare yourself for the mess that this novel becomes, a devolution of structure and language that makes Dara’s first one, The Lost Scrapbook, look like a beach read.
What I adore about this author based on both of the books I’ve read so far is the intense political anger behind his work. Passion is not the correct word - he writes with a shaking rage at social institutions that I can’t quite compare to anyone else I’ve ever encountered. There are brilliant sentences in this novel that I would love to include in this review but have decided not to because I’d hate to spoil them for anyone considering reading - just know that this is some of the best and most unique prose you can hope to find, anywhere.
I feel like I should reread this immediately to make more sense of it, but I’ll settle for letting it work its way into my consciousness for a few years before I pick it up again. I hope others discover it in the meantime.
That being said, I was fully captivated even in the sections I struggled with, completely in Dara’s grasp with every new experiment he threw at me. There’s an extended section of verse, there’s an article on water privatization, there’s a bunch of emails, there’s a seemingly never ending monologue from a man held at gunpoint - there is no way to prepare yourself for the mess that this novel becomes, a devolution of structure and language that makes Dara’s first one, The Lost Scrapbook, look like a beach read.
What I adore about this author based on both of the books I’ve read so far is the intense political anger behind his work. Passion is not the correct word - he writes with a shaking rage at social institutions that I can’t quite compare to anyone else I’ve ever encountered. There are brilliant sentences in this novel that I would love to include in this review but have decided not to because I’d hate to spoil them for anyone considering reading - just know that this is some of the best and most unique prose you can hope to find, anywhere.
I feel like I should reread this immediately to make more sense of it, but I’ll settle for letting it work its way into my consciousness for a few years before I pick it up again. I hope others discover it in the meantime.
November 18, 2024
blew my mind
April 23, 2021
'the lifestuff is just furiously selving, instinctively manufacturing endless identity"
Took longer than I expected, largely due to the descent (or ascent? I'm still undecided) into full frontal avant-garde territory in the second half.
There are about 60 pages midway through the novel where Dara appears to let Gertrude Stein take the authorial wheel and we get a full-on verse poem. Needless to say, that took me unawares. It's brilliant. Maybe? If you're unproblematically enjoying the initial set up of Lincoln Selwyn's meteoric rise to Chicago's social heights - and it is genuinely riotously funny mind you - well, you've got another thing coming entirely buddy.
This is Dara's established M.O. though. Besides the whole setting of the American late modern (don't quote me on that), and all its absurdist comedic potential (here, the comparisons to DFW, Delillo, and Powers make sense), Dara has clearly read William Gaddis and thought: this is the bee's knees of literary experimentation.
As another review mentions, Easy Chain is the inverse of The Lost Scrapbook: instead of dissonant voices being resolved into harmony (ultimately "bad" harmonies?), this begins with a choir more or less united in extolling the many virtues of LS, before spinning out into disarray. So you have all of these voices, done J.R. style without a speaker to name - for the most part anyway - and a subject that is, as I understand it, language itself: 'language is the money of mind - a system of abstractions that become a medium of exchange that warps and falsifies everything it touches'. You've really got Dara's whole project in a sentence there. Language as individuation and language in common, but always under threat from the vague ratiocinating, abstracting, publicizing, capitalizing forces that colonize everything, that reshape speech in its own image. And this tension is acted out in form: characters fade in and out of the anonymous cacophony; frame stories materialize out of nothing, play for a time and are never mentioned again; sometimes blank space will run for a 30 pages or so; terms of art, obscure cultural and technical references, everydayisms, and purple prose linger together violently; sometimes - and this I like - Dara will go full essayistic mode and riff on Chomsky or Pythagoras for a bit. That's why you read, why people ought to read Dara (in the masses!) Here is him describing Jazz, but its as good a statement of his own style as any:
'Jumbled, jilty, up-and-stumble sounds, more erratic than he'd remembered. Sax whizzes playing like emphysematic elephants. Drummers rattling their cages. He milks the last notes from each evening's dark breast …
So layering and fragmentation, Disharmonious Harmony— I'll cease the pretensions. The problem is, then, how does one say, and I mean 'say' in the fullest possible sense, 'I' or 'we' authentically?
That's what the Scrapbook was all about, "bringing meaning into virtual being, through montage", variations, repetitions. Easy Chain is exactly the same, only now the aperture has homed in on a single man. Lincoln Selwyn. Or, maybe Link-on Sell Win. It's not a question of turning 'particles into waves' here, rather, Selwyn's bildungsroman, his adventure in America gone awry. He is very much a realized character, no abstraction at all, even if we do learn of his exploits and biography second hand. But, to use some hardcore theory-wienie lingo, he is deterritorialized in the course of the novel, becoming a becoming for corpospeak and high society's banalities. That's his tragedy, and that's what kicks off the Gertrude Stein shenanigans.
But how successfully Dara resolves (? - that sounds immature) this is something I'm still ambivalent on. Something to reread I think, whenever he comes back into print. Preferably and deservingly with a bigger publishing house.
Took longer than I expected, largely due to the descent (or ascent? I'm still undecided) into full frontal avant-garde territory in the second half.
There are about 60 pages midway through the novel where Dara appears to let Gertrude Stein take the authorial wheel and we get a full-on verse poem. Needless to say, that took me unawares. It's brilliant. Maybe? If you're unproblematically enjoying the initial set up of Lincoln Selwyn's meteoric rise to Chicago's social heights - and it is genuinely riotously funny mind you - well, you've got another thing coming entirely buddy.
This is Dara's established M.O. though. Besides the whole setting of the American late modern (don't quote me on that), and all its absurdist comedic potential (here, the comparisons to DFW, Delillo, and Powers make sense), Dara has clearly read William Gaddis and thought: this is the bee's knees of literary experimentation.
As another review mentions, Easy Chain is the inverse of The Lost Scrapbook: instead of dissonant voices being resolved into harmony (ultimately "bad" harmonies?), this begins with a choir more or less united in extolling the many virtues of LS, before spinning out into disarray. So you have all of these voices, done J.R. style without a speaker to name - for the most part anyway - and a subject that is, as I understand it, language itself: 'language is the money of mind - a system of abstractions that become a medium of exchange that warps and falsifies everything it touches'. You've really got Dara's whole project in a sentence there. Language as individuation and language in common, but always under threat from the vague ratiocinating, abstracting, publicizing, capitalizing forces that colonize everything, that reshape speech in its own image. And this tension is acted out in form: characters fade in and out of the anonymous cacophony; frame stories materialize out of nothing, play for a time and are never mentioned again; sometimes blank space will run for a 30 pages or so; terms of art, obscure cultural and technical references, everydayisms, and purple prose linger together violently; sometimes - and this I like - Dara will go full essayistic mode and riff on Chomsky or Pythagoras for a bit. That's why you read, why people ought to read Dara (in the masses!) Here is him describing Jazz, but its as good a statement of his own style as any:
'Jumbled, jilty, up-and-stumble sounds, more erratic than he'd remembered. Sax whizzes playing like emphysematic elephants. Drummers rattling their cages. He milks the last notes from each evening's dark breast …
So layering and fragmentation, Disharmonious Harmony— I'll cease the pretensions. The problem is, then, how does one say, and I mean 'say' in the fullest possible sense, 'I' or 'we' authentically?
That's what the Scrapbook was all about, "bringing meaning into virtual being, through montage", variations, repetitions. Easy Chain is exactly the same, only now the aperture has homed in on a single man. Lincoln Selwyn. Or, maybe Link-on Sell Win. It's not a question of turning 'particles into waves' here, rather, Selwyn's bildungsroman, his adventure in America gone awry. He is very much a realized character, no abstraction at all, even if we do learn of his exploits and biography second hand. But, to use some hardcore theory-wienie lingo, he is deterritorialized in the course of the novel, becoming a becoming for corpospeak and high society's banalities. That's his tragedy, and that's what kicks off the Gertrude Stein shenanigans.
But how successfully Dara resolves (? - that sounds immature) this is something I'm still ambivalent on. Something to reread I think, whenever he comes back into print. Preferably and deservingly with a bigger publishing house.
July 20, 2015
this novel, which is mostly concerned with secondhand accounts of Lincoln Selwyn (a charming british immigrant, who becomes a tycoon of many things) and his exploits leading up to his disappearance. Linked throughout are the vocalizations of various absurdist get-rich-quick schemes, lampooning capitalist ambitions of people who refer to themselves as promosexuals: that is, the fetishization of self promotion. it's almost all unattributed dialogue, with about a hundred pages toward the end that are a numbingly phonetically repetitive poem. the dna (poem aside) here is Gaddis, all the way. What feels like this whole novel is a direct descendant of the party scenes in The Recognitions. The ambition alone here is impressive, but it slows and sputters at parts and not all its narrative risks pay off emotionally.
September 19, 2015
Do I understand this book? Not very well! But goddamn is it ever stylistically heady stuff.
March 27, 2022
4.5 Stars Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkliJ...
November 27, 2022
Empezamos por la cúspide. La cadena fácil, de Evan Dara, guarda similitudes con la obra de un autor de la envergadura de Thomas Pynchon. Hay lugares comunes formales pero también respecto al comportamiento del autor. En un mundo en el que vivimos hoy, en el que no eres nadie si no apareces en TV, en las redes sociales o en streaming, existe raras avis que rompen la normalidad vigente. Ambos autores, como en su momento J.D. Salinger, pertenecen a esa estirpe de escritores que prefieren vivir lejos del ruido mediático, que no conceden entrevistas, ni presentan sus libros. Nos queda de ellos tan solo su obra. Y es por ello por lo que tenemos que juzgarlos.
La cadena fácil está compuesta por dos partes claramente diferenciadas, no solo desde el punto de vista estructural. Podría decirse que aun cuando formen parte de una misma línea argumental, cada parte es un solo libro en sí. Como nos adentramos en las cenagosas aguas de la literatura postmoderna, cada parte tiene sus propias alteraciones, cambios de punto de vista y narraciones. En la primera parte asistimos a la presentación de Lincoln Selwyn. Un joven holandés de padres norteamericanos. A través de las voces de terceros, como si estuviésemos en una fiesta o en una reunión multitudinaria y todos hablasen a la vez, de esa manera conocemos al personaje y sus primeros años de juventud, desde que abandona Países Bajos y triunfa en EE.UU. Como no podía ser de otro modo, la historia de Selwyn se ve salpicada por otras historias, por derivaciones de la línea narrativa principal. Es cierto que en algún momento puede llegar a ser confuso, pero esto es un mensaje para lectores avezados: se disfruta más que se sufre.
Para la segunda parte asistimos a un profundo terremoto dentro de la obra. Si bien, como cabía esperar la estructura no se mantiene indemne a lo largo de toda la parte, se presentan diversas líneas principales. Todas relacionadas en alguna medida con el personaje principal, aunque con una indudable autonomía.
Preferimos no ahondar en la trama, que sea el lector el que descubra las trampas, los juegos y los giros que Evan Dara, si es que existe, ha preparado para un disfrute de la obra. Un libro que quizá llega años después del auge de la visión postmodernista de la literatura, pero que no por ello desmerece en absoluto.
La cadena fácil está compuesta por dos partes claramente diferenciadas, no solo desde el punto de vista estructural. Podría decirse que aun cuando formen parte de una misma línea argumental, cada parte es un solo libro en sí. Como nos adentramos en las cenagosas aguas de la literatura postmoderna, cada parte tiene sus propias alteraciones, cambios de punto de vista y narraciones. En la primera parte asistimos a la presentación de Lincoln Selwyn. Un joven holandés de padres norteamericanos. A través de las voces de terceros, como si estuviésemos en una fiesta o en una reunión multitudinaria y todos hablasen a la vez, de esa manera conocemos al personaje y sus primeros años de juventud, desde que abandona Países Bajos y triunfa en EE.UU. Como no podía ser de otro modo, la historia de Selwyn se ve salpicada por otras historias, por derivaciones de la línea narrativa principal. Es cierto que en algún momento puede llegar a ser confuso, pero esto es un mensaje para lectores avezados: se disfruta más que se sufre.
Para la segunda parte asistimos a un profundo terremoto dentro de la obra. Si bien, como cabía esperar la estructura no se mantiene indemne a lo largo de toda la parte, se presentan diversas líneas principales. Todas relacionadas en alguna medida con el personaje principal, aunque con una indudable autonomía.
Preferimos no ahondar en la trama, que sea el lector el que descubra las trampas, los juegos y los giros que Evan Dara, si es que existe, ha preparado para un disfrute de la obra. Un libro que quizá llega años después del auge de la visión postmodernista de la literatura, pero que no por ello desmerece en absoluto.
May 16, 2023
Adoro a Pynchon pero esta novela va mucho más allá. Momentos de brillantez (la escena del restaurante) pero desatado.. una locura sin control.. en la que me perdí.. una y otra vez.. lo peor es que la releería, o algunos pasajes… Pero no la recomendaría a nadie. No sé ni cómo calificarla.
May 17, 2018
This is a very weird book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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May 23, 2021The real story is the one not being told
September 23, 2025
It's miraculous that any of us can stand up after the way the World runs over us. We are proof that the Resurrection exists.
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