La Medusa

by Vanessa Place

La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.

Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.


"Is the brain all these little movies, one synapsing into the next? Or I mean is culture that? Who are all those people on the freeway next to me, or dying in the blink of an eye when I forget about them. Vanessa Place's La Medusa is a novel of a million (I am sure there is a more precise count) brilliant suggestions about the mind and time and us. What seems impossible is that she is pulling "it" off in this impressive tome that moves like traffic when you have gotten it impossibly incredibly light. No wrong moves here. We get home fast." —Eileen Myles


"Dazzling and daze-inducing, Vanessa Place dares to ask the dangerous question: What happened to Modernism? Why did what was ambitious, difficult, serious and experimental in Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Beckett give way to a glittering string of infinite jests - high-wire acts, virtuosity, transcendental Camp? La Medusa returns to James Joyce's Ulysees to find the inspiration for an investigation into the nature of experience. Los Angeles takes the role of Dublin. The brain and its double cortex generate the stylistic intricacies that the organs and senses do in Joyce. And this is above all a Female Epic in which the swirling city-universe is explored and shaped by the petrifying eye and intellect of the wily Medusa, her coiling locks extending everywhere. "
—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW Public Radio


"La Medusa, Vanessa Place's monumental polyvalent, polyglot epic novel of Los Angeles in which the postmodern morphs into random-access postcontemporary, in which the device of the narrative text in film script form has replaced that of the epistolary novel, is like a shocking rock slide of polished stones of the first water, cut by master jeweler, faceted into ten thousand-and-one sides — and the whole spill run in relative slow motion with no drag, no yawns, all be-bop, hip-hop Now. And sardonic: it zaps, out Fante-ing Fante and out-Rechy-ing Rechy. Looked at metaphorically in terms of motion pictures, Medusa is an epic silent, as long as Von Stroheim's Greed and every bit as cumulatively powerful. But one thing is certain: no matter how good the picture may turn out to be, the book will definitely have been better." —James McCourt

Genres: Fiction, 21st Century, Novels, Contemporary, American, Literature, Classics

488 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2008

About the author

Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press/Random House. Information As Material will be publishing her trilogy: Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument. Statement of Facts will also be published in France by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits. Place is described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”

Author Interviews:

--http://avantwomenwriters.blogspot.com...

--http://www.joshmaday.com/2009/04/blak...

Reviews

[Gregsamsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Damn, Girl, What's Up with Those Snakes?"

One sure way to get me to read a novel is to divide it into chunks named after parts of the brain. This wild assortment of multivocal narratives is sectioned into brainy bits and cranial curves, each named after a portion of the nervous system's HQ and attendant psycho-biological offices, with the exception of the final chapter, dubbed Noumenon, which, unlike the others, does not show itself in an MRI, resists mapping, is more of a thing in itself, and was put at the end likely just to be hard to get to using mere human senses, subject as they are to being overwhelmed by stimuli like holographic advertisements, History Channel profiles in Voodoo, TV theme song earworms, roadside diner come-ons, Dazz Band lyrics sifted through Descartes, nail salon extravagances, peaches, Dr. Dre-style sidewalk scenery surveys, cop-show scripts, unhelpful Spanish lessons, gratuitous Latin ("here lies Narcissus"), the 40+ species of Barbie doll, a Hollywood Hills Voodoo ceremony echoing with etymology, a pop quiz on superstition-ethics-television, trucker culture, convenience store flotsam, ontology of selfhood sit-com asides, quasi-Greco mythology, city sewage specifics, and at least five different flavors of stream-of-consciousness prose.

If this chafes, rub on some Bakhtin to soothe the itch and explain the voices.

It's a smoother experience, over all, if you focus on the easy stuff, like complaints and flaws, when absorbing the secondary impact of an impressive brick of a book that just smacked you with MAXIMUM KABAM. Drek is all flaw but, I mean, even the smallest lint stands out on wow.

In a mega-modernist mishmash of this size, there will be patches of the pastiche which don't charm, and one for me was how Place used screenplay conventions, specifically abbreviated establishing shots, which is more handy than clever, to me, but it is handy, though it does uneasily bracket very different prose and/or poetry, as in this amorous bit of down-low lesbian action: "Rocki can smell the apricots Stella seems to jam her body with and the vanilla she bakes in her breath."

That passage was prefaced with "INT. MYLES P.'S SEMI-NEEDLES, CA--SIMULTANEOUS." Yuk.

The book abounds with inconsistencies easily explained by the difference in perspectives, but there are a few which clash even within the same one [Was Dr. Bowles' father buried in a veteran's cemetary or were his ashes scattered under his rose bushes? Bowles remembers both but doesn't notice the discrepancy].

"We're a mob of improved maybes."

Enough complaints, now complaints about complaints: This reader is barfably tired of hearing about how "today" "we" don't know what's "real" "anymore" because of the shallowness of mass culture, a whine that might have cut some grass in the 50s but to me is now an insight-free example of staleness incarnate. My Atari generation was not more reflective than the Facebook generation, and don't get me started on this business about naming generations like that, a stunningly shallow trope often deployed by shallowness's very plaintiffs.

Given several of its features, including that this book's setting (and theme, and tone, and style) is Los Angeles, I was worried this would be one of those books.

I am happy to report it is not.

It is almost the opposite: the infinite potential points of refraction and reflection in our global cultural aquarium overflowing with pop ephemera is exploited for its dizzying complexity and depth; Place illuminates the idea that it is not things themselves which emanate meaning and pathos, but the neuro paths by which we've burned associations between their images and the pangs and pleasures of lived experience.

"I used to shoplift. I wore loose pants and snug sweaters and put my hair up. I shoplifted cheap, boosting a ballpoint pen or a single orange or a snakpak of sliced salami, sticky with fat."

I think it interesting that so many books--whose audience is clearly a rarefied slice within the larger wedge of well-educated (formally or not) readers of literary literature--want to be bad books. I don't mean qualitatively, I mean bad as in having to do with drugs, prostitution, crime (petty or not); you know: the street, and then handle it in ways quite unstreetlike:

"I shoplifted cheap, boosting a ballpoint pen or a single orange or a snakpak of sliced salami, sticky with fat. Like an alchemist, I took trash and turned it to gold, trinkets translate into time. The petit theft of a Baby Ruth ambers minutes as you wonder when to snitch and whether anyone's watching, and if the mirror-eyed gods are with you, someone in an ironed shirt will handle your shoulder and say wait,"

The ambering of minutes itself is quite a long ride away from the book's Ulysses-meets-Nuthin'-But-a-G-Thang elsewhere, but that's nothing:

"...and there will be no debate, and the hours spent subsequent with thick-lipped security personnel will stack like hotcakes and melt into the open mouths of months befacing years idly unspun in the slammer and you will have astronomically elevated the ontology of the thing stolen, turning a trifle into a lead-glass prism of prayer."

I have never read a fictioneer who scalpels this out so earnestly, without sacrificing humor which is after all about surprising associations. That was the least street, btw, of her street-level scenes. Other shards of scene don't operate within the main narratives but provide a sort of Joan Didionesque ambience:

"In Las Vegas in the '50s, there were parties on hotel-tops, parties that went on all night long, everyone swinging to the sounds of some sassy swinging-hair'd sister backed by a brassy cool combo, and the show-stopper was the morning's nuclear test, sponsored by the US Army, the white light skirled across the shar Nevada desert, blotting the sun, they called them dawn parties because they done broke the day."



Let me attempt an overall gist through profiles of the grammatis personae:

*Jorge, a dazzlingly gifted mental rapper who pushes an ice cream cart. *Myles and Stella P. a trucker couple whose ride is their pride *Dr. Caspar Bowles, the neurosurgeon center of a legal swirl of nonsense. *An Unnamed Corpse with impressive insights re the city and these people *Feena, a snotty puddle of pre-teen precocity where family tensions drip and collect. *Medusa, everywhere and nowhere and woefully misunderstood.

These characters' lives connect through that most concrete but tenuous connector, the highway (of course).

Heads up for non-Americans for whom English isn't tongue #1: I had a hard time with many of Jorge's passages, steeped as they are in hip-hop argot, TV reruns, and West-Coast street patois. While the most difficult (for me, anyway), his are the most impressively impressionistic and psychotically semiotic:

"Doc's knelt next to palmless kid, ear at kid's pointless mouth, mad Doc unpockets penlight, janks kid's lids, snap-light inside. 'Shit,' goes Herr Docktor, suddenly coatless. Doc musta disrobed exitin the sled ho-ho man wearing a suit coat all the livelong tho fuck brotha it's been hot ergo that's objectively schizzy shit, still signals, don't it though, all Mark-us Well-be, MD, sportin his huxtable 24-7, you know that ain't loco."

That's a voice quite distinct from, say, Stella's:

"First off, she's fat, a word she's becoming increasingly comfortable with, just as she has with increasing herself. She used to fight fat, that squat-legged, tub-gutted, cud-chewing, nose-licking word, using such compound yet slimming terms as big-boned or heavy-set or plus-size, voluptuous is a good ane and zaftig described one who widowed quick and rich, but not pleasingly plump, because she was never that now, to be honest...."

Few women write extremely convincing male perspectives, and even fewer men write well from inside female minds, but fewest of all are those writers who write a good pansexual overmind.

The POV is L.A. itself, so the screenplay streetsigns make sense, but if you've ever used the word "overambitious" to criticize a book then let me arrange some highway flares around this one for you right now.

Through the pathetic fallacy and others, lots of writers exteriorize the interior (a storm accentuates psychological strife, a sunny day illuminates cheery thoughts, etc), fewer interiorize the exterior (a specific sense of place imprints mental topography), and fewer still do both simultaneously as in Place's experimental asides I came to think of as "brain chunks." In these, the mystery of MIND grapples with the fact of its ultimate materiality, and that friction heats up her prose style quite a bit in these framed shards of narrative. They do not explicitly do what I just described, mind you, that's just my take on them.

"You know how needy people can be, thy head-butt into you, but themselves is what they're getting to, they understand mirrors reflect and project, forgetting it's the curtain that promised entertainment, the sill tea plait on the shade is what betrayed lovestarved sister, and uncurtained brother's noosed neck, but such latencies are not for them, the Hallmark set, they live drapeless as white folks and shop keepers, they prance naked and hang mirrors off your chest, put yourself in my shoes, they insist, from where I'm standing, they applique, why can't you see it my way, the way I see it, do you see, they hiss, do you see, do you see what I mean? "

She's cooking with fusion heat here, the self/other kind that emanates from dense irreconcilable irreducibles, often the conflict between seemingly incompatible ideas: the brain and its workings are obviously physical matter and phenomena, but consciousness itself does not seem (to consciousness itself) so reducible, like it differs from your phone's workings only on the level of complexity. Perhaps corralling the diffuse phenomena of thought and feeling under the idea MIND or SELF is an illusion, like Los Angeles being "a" city. Perhaps consciousness is no more fused into a single thing by feeling like it is, than a sprawling place is unified by lines on a map. Maybe your mind is a lot like Los Angeles (oooo, burn!).

Few cities are Amsterdam-tidy, roads radiating from a centraal spot, but L.A. is surely one of its most opposite arrangements, a wild sprawl of blurry patchworked class and culture categories.

"Andrei Bely said there are intentional and unintentional cities....

This city started intentionally and then became un-. So many of our visitors feel betrayed."

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find it very difficult to think of anything coherent and pithy to say about La Medusa. I am also cognisant of the fact that I am duty-bound to encourage you, the Reader of this, to become a Reader of It.

So what, if you shell out hard-earned cash to get your grubby paws on a copy of this, will you discover?

Well, we are in L.A, though it is L.A filtered through multiple minds and multiple voices. And this is very much a city-text and, like any city, is an assemblage of disparate elements hinting at buried connections and resonances; we are not in a linear-land. One could reference modern compositional techniques, sonic-juxtaposition and dissonance, polyphony, sampling and improvisational flurries as ways and means to form a whole from a Big Broken Book. One could.

But there are people here too – doctors, truckers, nine-year old saxophone players, a john-doe, sex workers and gang members, and voodoo-practicing grandmothers – people whose lives propel the pages onward. The Author uses voice magnificently – the prose shifts for each mind we encounter and displays hugely impressive technical skill.

One character's internal voice can only be described as a kind of multi-lingual, Joycean rap.

The novel also contains a two page list of synonyms for vagina. About 60% of them were new to me.

There are constraints here too (linking her to CBR and others) – for example, each section begins with a description of the functions of a certain part of the brain. The narrative, and the prose, are then shaped/limited by this particular function.

There are connections to books like The Tunnel, though this is funnier and more modern(?) (youthful?) somehow.

She belongs very much in the Federman, CBR, Gass, Sterne, Stein , Perec tradition and I would unhesitatingly recommend her to any fans of this (widening?narrowing?) literary stream.

Here are some pictures of some of some of the pages. Note, however, that there are also many pages that are more typographically conservative.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Of course, Finnegans Wake, though that’s like citing a sunrise. And The Unnameable, which would be the sunset. --Vanessa Place


Set One :: Danna Tartt, Alice Munro, Rachel Kushner, Eleanor Catton, Jhumpa Lahiri, Patti Smith, Jess Walter, Dave Eggers. [The Millions top 10, March 2014] Throw in sum=more names (same page, Hall of Fame, since 2009!, selected with caprice) :: Elaine Dundy, Elizabeth Strout, Junot Díaz, Stieg Larsson, David Mitchell, Jonathan Franzen, Hilary Mantel, David Shields, Tana French, Justin Cronin, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, Emma Donoghue, Paul Murray, Suzanne Collins, Tom Rachman, Ann Patchett, Haruki Murakami, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chad Harbach, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Denis Johnson, Gillian Flynn, Michael Chabon, Nicole Krauss, Lauren Groff, Adam Johnson, Tao Lin, Meg Wolitzer.

Set Two :: Coover’s Brunist sequel ; Katz’s Memoirrhoids ; Evan Dara’s three novels ; McElroy’s Cannonball ; Theroux’s thing on Pop=Music and it’s lyrics and other assortments ; Dixon’s latest and probably others ; Joshua Cohen��s books ; Theroux’s Estonia book ; Tom Carson’s latest two greatests ; Sergio de la Pava’s two books too ; McElroy’s Night Soul ; whatever Federman pub’d post-2000 ; Sorrentino’s last(?) by Coffee House Press ; Vanessa Place’s La Medusa ; the translated Where Tigers Are at Home (how big can Other Press be?) ; Laura Warholic ; McCourt’s Now Voyagers ; anything CBR post-2000 ; Verhaeghen’s either too-sexy or too-violent depending upon your continent Omega Minor ; McElroy’s Actress ; Apikoros Sleuth ; Ducornet’s books come from pretty small presses, yes? ; Julián Ríos’s The House of Ulysses ; McElroy’s Exponential legal only in Italy and in Italian ; Nicole Brossard’s Yesterday ; [capricious selection criteria :: (mostly) on-my-shelf, small press, pub’d 2000 & post-.]

Notes. Re: Set One, the only thing these names have in common is that I’ve not read their work and likely won’t (I’m too busy, honestly). Except that one book I read from Eggers. Re: the two -- let’s just leave them in quiet juxtaposition.


On to La Medusa.

I liked everything about this book. Everything. All of that experimental jazz (experimental is how to write a novel). Only it didn’t seem to work. Here I have a few phrases which I want to think might get at the experience of this novel not working (for me, yesyes ; conversely, me not working for it ;; I did say ‘experience’) :: the words just sort of slide off the page ; in the Barthian equation “passionate virtuosity” the passion didn’t seem to permeate each and every level from letter to architectonic (but where exactly?), notwithstanding the fact that passion there be ; somewhere next to the question of passion lies the question of necessity, of urgency, of There is no other way through this xyz except to write/read this novel, i.e., Here I write/read and can do no other ; somewhere after the level of phrase and before sentence unity something got stuck too frequently, but not stuck at all but rather the sentence ends somewhere where it did not begin which could be entirely intentional given that the ending/beginning sentence of The Wake does not end in the same voice in the same locale in the same anything as it begins ; and too frequently there are episodes which want to emerge and but they don’t ; Jorge said what? ; and did I say Maybe there are just too many words here (but saying that makes absolutely no sense).

Something doesn’t add up. Which could be intentional. There is structure and there is form and there is a fully functional principle of unity to the work. And I may have read too closely to the surface, which is shiny (is it a mirror too?), to have adequately articulated the book. La Medusa is clearly in the Hawkes’ enemies of fiction school of fiction. Those things are all there -- the characters, the plot, the themes, the setting -- but that’s not where the action is. Where is the action? It’s in the voice(s) which is more multivalent in terms of identifiability of the speaker than is The Wake.

And now maybe I understand what it’s like to read Blue Pastoral and be disappointed because what does it all amount to? Which I would suggest is a distinct question from that novelistic experience of, What the hell is going on? more please!

I am harsh here only because it is a matter of the question. And I can’t really apologize whether I failed or not but what I can do is substitute myself with that of the others reading, Jonathan and Ronald, but their reading too is insufficient. A small smattering of other readers on goodreads here too, but this book needs more.

I don’t really care what I said above about this novel not really coming together (for me, in my experience, etc, etc, etc) because, and this is the only damn thing that matters (in two parts) :: It is an expertly assembled novel --- which is unlike any other novel which I have encountered. Comparisons with The Tunnel and The Wake are apt, and indicate only what I said when I say :: is unlike any other novel which I have encountered.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Radical, beautiful interconnectivity and obscure correlation.

This mega-novel of de-centralized consciousness, the collective consciousness and polyphony of voices of a city without borders, is a monolithic construction, but not a seamless or impenetrable one. Instead, it's a kind of open structure bleeding out in every simultaneous direction, each bit an access point, if possibly a mysterious one. The bindings barely contain it, as I said with Infinite Jest, it seems to be continue infinitely beyond the physical book. But whereas DFW's narrative and characters flow in all directions in a vast human web, with Place, it's more the idea stream, the raw activity of 3.9 million minds flitting past eachother, in recognition or sightless, a wave of information that threatens to submerge character and plot entirely. As such, the medusa is not only the mythological hazard of seeing another or perhaps your reflected self (by reference), the L.A. freeway (by inference), or the tangled structure of the brain (by structure), but the endless interconnected informational tsunami of the never-directly-referenced information age. How could a book about interconnectivity published in 2008 fail to mention telecommunicatons, cyberspace, search engines, practically even cell phones? Presumably this is significance through omission, a mirror of the increasingly digital universe in the analogue information systems it has rapidly and dramatically arisen from.

(And beneath it all another final medusa, of sewer lines, submerged infrastructure sluicing muck into the great drain of collective and inextricable humanity, Styx or Lethe to what grand and secret cathedral?)

This is a dense book, an extremely ambitious one, a singularly-arranged one full of typographical and structural special effects, an insightful one, a self-denying one. For every fascinating character who we strive to approach and understand, there are dissociated pages of associative (brillant yet only semi-permeable) rambling, for every flash of clarity there are so many shadowed mental recesses. I loved it and I fought it and I was exhausted and frustrated by it, and I may barely have escaped being turned to stone. But, vanquished(?), will any shocking Pegasus will now leap from its body? Will 3.9 million hearts continue to beat from my bookshelf, drawing me back, again and again and again?

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each metropolis preselects its suicide like an officer packs a capsule, for if a city lives by remembering, mein Leibnitz Herr, the opposite must also be true, ergo a city dies from forgetting, and such death is by the city’s own hand, it turns it neglected bungalows to gallows and potholes its veins.

Wasn't Leibnitz snowed in somewhere and instead of completing a mathematical treatise, instead developed a system for irrigation? I recall reading that somewhere in the shadowed corridors of my memory. Likewise the dump of snow we experienced in fits and starts last week and into this weekend put all other endeavors on hold. I was left with this hefty tome and an otherworldly silence. Some other reviewer led me to explore Blake Butler's conversation with Vanessa Place in html.giant. A resounding thunderclap of affectation was discovered. I did not allow that to dissuade me. There are threads and patches of this novel which remain inscrutable. There are also lush expanses of a poetic argot which only a well-read polyglot could embrace. I may be just pulling out of the station towards Well Read. I struggle enough with English.

La Medusa concerns Los Angeles, the City of Angels, Hollywood(land) and the crack and Glock infested corner of the American imagination. The associations between threads and characters revealed whispers of our cinematic memory, one from Sunset Boulevard to Magnolia, though Crash (2004) appears a lodestar as it is for Danielewski and Ericson.

The snow afforded ponderous solitude and muscle memory conjured the feral. Hibernation is presupposed by mastication and gnawing remains a poetic ritual. Salvaging through the depths of La Medusa, one can certainly be sated if not unhinged by its rich eloquence.

[Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phonics as harmonics, myth as glossolalia. A fractal inquiry into the melting pot that is LA. The sort of multi-layered narrative curation of sheer experience that is at once avant-garde and a shoring up of the conventions of plot and novel and poem. Oftentimes within the same sentence, even.

This is a book for those who prefer their hyper-attentive realism to be made revealingly surreal by technique and distinct stylistic variations.

This is a book for people who: like books but love movies, like movies but love books, or learned the story of Medusa by way of an elder cracking a hard drive from the year 2000 in order to read Greek myths to an eager crowd along a trash-can fire in a bombed-out version of LA 500 years in the future.

[Geoff]

This book should have worked out really well for me - it has all the indicators of something I'd adore - It's polyphonic! It's multi-vocal! It's a city novel! One of the kinds of novel things I most adore! It's got a mindfuckery of a structure, innovative typesetting, Wakean post-language, fractal perspectiving, a pansexual Medusa and Narcissus at the core of the novel, a corpse that recites secrets, miles and miles of snaking highways and snakes themselves coming to mean millions of metaphoric things, it leaps from Myth to the mundanities of sitcom culture in a single bound, it's got loads of medical terminology and schematics of the brain, it is in love with the rhythm and song of language listening to itself being language - all these things I should have adored... And yet I didn't. It started to feel like a schlep to get through this thing, and eventually I just stopped being very interested in it. But you, dear Goodreader? You should read this! It might be just what you need to get yourself up and go out into this brave new world with a little more elbow grease, gusto, and verve. Don't listen to me, I can barely bring myself to vote!

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Images and ideas remain: c-store pies, soft bodily expression. A sound feast. Read this before scholars on hovercraft discover it in the year 2056.

[Chris Via]

Video review: https://youtu.be/RTrNDsijTpQ

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 stars for fun, 5 stars for importance, so 4 stars total (you can see how arbitrary a star-system [no, not the one that destined our existence {but maybe that, too?}] really gets).

I struggled more with this book than I have with any book in a long ass time, to be frank. I think due in large part to Place's context as a poet--much of this prose is really kinetic poetry, wrapped around loose concepts of narrative and character. The scenes and interactions are incredible--and I'm sure one could have a total blast mapping how interconnected all the disparate lives are on literal and thematic levels (INT. Skull -- Cont.) A cork-board covered in several layers of index cards roped together with fraying, multi-colored yarns twirled around push pins pinioning the layered and tangle mess together.

Personally, I was most invested in the lives of Myles P. and Casper Bowles (and his time with Jorge). Which might be saying something since these are the male characters of the novel... which gives me the creeps about my own tastes and preferences and inclinations because I'm always in a mood of resistance to such simplistic ideals in writing/reading as "relating" to characters.

Truly, I don't know what more to say about this book; it's an experiential matter that kind of defies being summarized into a salesworthy pitch to implore you to read it. To exist in this book is to exist in pure consciousness much like the work of McElroy--you may not always know where you're situated, you may not always know what's going on or where you're going, but you know you're in hands to be trusted, that you're going to be altered on the course. Bettered in some way for the experience. Along the way, you will see other lives and live other thoughts; you will imagine sisterworlds to your own.

I would recommend this book to anyone open to experience, but not to someone who wants life wrapped up in a box of pleasure. The book is beyond the bounds of entertainment and pleasure and elucidation, which is a-OK for the right kind of reader.

[AJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

La Medusa is Ulysses in Los Angeles. Much of it is in the style of improvisational beat poetry which mostly dazzles, except when it comes to the character of Jorge and the use of Hispanic-American vernacular that, while clever at times, just felt over-written and quite frankly cringe-worthy. Having said that, there is a lot to love about this novel as well. Tailoring the prose in specific chapters to sections of the brain was brilliant and probably my favorite element. It did start to lose me toward the end as it did to numerous other reviewers, many of whom ended up abandoning it. I trudged through, and I liked it more than I disliked it. I’d say it was worth reading, and I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy Joyce, DFW or Pynchon.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I used to shoplift. I wore loose pants and snug sweaters and put my hair up. I shoplifted cheap, boosting a ballpoint pen or a single orange or a snakpak of sliced salami, sticky with fat. Like an alchemist, I took trash and turned it into gold, trinkets translate into time. The petit theft of a Baby Ruth ambers minutes as you wonder when to snitch and whether anyone’s watching, and if the mirror-eyed gods are with you, someone in an ironed shirt will handle your shoulder and say “wait,” and there will be no debate, and the hours spent subsequent with thick-lipped security personnel will stack like hotcakes and melt into the open mouths of months befacing years idly unspun in the slammer and you will have astronomically elevated the ontology of the thing stolen, turning a trifle to a lead-glass prism of prayer.


This book spoke truths in a rhythmic garbled “nonsense” which ignored traditional margin spacing and asked not so much to be understood as observed. FYI: you may want to have Google Translate on standby for the German, Spanish, French and Latin.

This book was a 500-pager whose stories took place over the span of twelve hours, so there was a lot of liberty taken with the narrative’s pacing. In between the character’s storylines we got interruptions ranging from world history lessons to script ideas for ridiculous plays (ex: Medusa lying in bed with St. Patrick, filling out a crossword puzzle while arguing like married people over the rules of sainthood.)

While I understood the reason behind the different voices, I had to skip over some of them such as Jorge’s inner dialogue which was nothing short of gratuitous violence to the reader’s patience.

On some days this book was too abstract and left me bored, but on most days it was a classic masterpiece with a style I could barely describe. The smallest background details would fight their way to the forefront and take over the entire scene. It was done with poetry that left me enjoying the tangent of metaphors more than the plot. This book will please more than it frustrates: if you want to invest the time, I recommend checking this one out.

[Melanie Page]

I gave up on this book, and I'm really sad about it. It's 488 pages long (I know Goodreads says it has over 600, but I double-checked), I'm halfway through, and I still have no sense of plot or direction, so all I keep thinking about are all the other books that I want to read. The writing is BEAUTIFUL, but the alternating characters tend to be static in their actions. Dr. Bowles will come back repeatedly, always in his car, thinking. Myles P and Stella have stopped in Needles, CA, and for chapter after chapter Myles is talking religion with other truckers while Stella is getting it on with another woman in the rig. The thing that bums me out the most is that I would have never know that Medusa was supposed to be like the city or that the brain was the city unless I read the back of the book. While I have a lot of faith in a book, I don't want to have conclusions only because someone cued me in. Help a sister out, you know? Also, Place uses French, German, and Latin in the middle of sentences, so either I have to read the book next to my computer so I can translate (which I'm sure is what the author wants me to do; I just know she's pushing to see if I'm a lazy reader, and that I have to work for it if I want it) or I have to go on clueless. There is another language, one developed by Place and used with the voice of Jorge--a type of slang mixed with phonetic spelling (sometimes not always intuitive), so I'm not really sure what this character is doing. I think he kills people. I think he has followers. I think he has a baby mamma. I think he hates dogs. There are mentions of ice-pops, and I learned that he sells ice cream from a cart (because I read it on the back of the book). As soon as I find some short stories or a less lengthy novel by Vanessa Place, I shall eat that stuff up.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I’m not an LA lover, sorry. NY’er my whole life this was one time I was happy to be thrown into the city of angels. This is beautifully crafted literature and not afraid to try and say anything. Really unique voice. And we need to keep creating and reading literature like this. Damn, this was good.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh my oh dear, Vanessa Place. James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy birthed a child and raised her in LA (split custody, half in the sewers and half in Beverly Hills, though she could never tell which was which), where she was nursed on Dresden Dolls and T.S. Eliot.

LA has no center or maybe it does and the book is the same. But if forced to say an uncenter I'd say: All is War and still there's beauty, and no one's saying whether that makes it better or worse.

I'd get lost in the stories -- are they killing each other or making love? -- and the pages and pages of wurds spehled lahk thes which makes reading into a slow and grating sudoku quiz. The bombastic creativity becomes unreadable, resolves itself into a headache. But I get the sense Place doesn't mind much over the physiological complaints of her readers.

Moments of relief: when she turns the story of Medusa and Perseus into an absurdist sit-com, or lists metaphysical anti-jokes, the dark and awful ones born out of her experiences as a lawyer in violent cases (note: Place is also a writer for Law and Order Special Victims Unit), the bubbling ones about Jesus Christ being voted Most Likely to Be. She dives into a strident, snarky, brilliant maltheism: "'In the image of God created he him.' We are the cheap sons and daughters the Father desires, for filthy Job triumphed over the King of Kings like a fart trumpeted through Notre Dame. Amen. Amen."

Or, while we're on the subject of Job:

"and do you think the new brood made it okay for Job to have seen those other sons and daughters dead, their lips shrinking to an icebox smile, or was that so much conciliatory salt on the sore, for all we know God takes us seriously, He does, you know, he blesses all our little pink toes, which he thoughtfully numbered ten, but even still we suspect that in the Big Picture we’re as fungible as cakes of soap or baskets of berries, our sense of purpose pointless as a beachball, it all pisses us off proper"

Other grounding-points in the swirl of the stories are her History Channel interjections:

In Las Vegas in the ‘50s, there were parties on hotel-tops, parties that went on all night long, everyone swinging to the sounds of some sassy swinging-hair’d sister backed by the brassy cool combo, and the show-stopper was the morning’s nuclear test, sponsored by the US Army, the white light skirled across the shar Nevada desert, blotting the sun, they called them dawn parties because they done broke the day.

In sum: I think she's one of the most creative brains that exist. That creativity can blow out full-force only because she has no regard for the comfort or comprehension of her reader. But I say let it blow.

[Ryan]

Hope you can read Latin or know how to use google lens.

In any case it’s hard and difficult and if you are expecting an ending you really shouldn’t. Multiple perspective narratives are always interesting but it’s only if each character feels fully fleshed out, this one has the benefit of just brain spilling character juice 90% of the time so you get a sense of what or how the character is going through early on and perceptive readers get more out of these sections. There’s a great lyrical and rhythmic element going on the in the prose that is similar to The Tunnel that is fascinating and it’s just as cool in this one as it was in that book. Finishing that book made this one more possible, or at least more consumable.

An anthesis to The Tunnel for this one is the first 100 pages skirted by like no business and then really slows down, especially by the 300 page mark, where to mind required more detail oriented reading. But i don’t know. I didn’t read Ulysses before this and the stream of consciousness that’s going on in this one I guess is very similar to that book. Interestingly this book had the potentially adverse effect where I do not really feel like picking up Joyce’s tomb in quite awhile. Oh well. Maybe another year.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 2 out of 5]

At a cottage recently, a friend of mine picked up this book and read the back: 'A polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness.' He looked at me dubiously and said, 'You knew this and still wanted to read it?' I agreed that I had. Chunks of free verse and be-bop and concrete poetry, divided into lobes, like a brain. Several characters chiming in. Something about a dead guy, an abused kid, a truck driver and his wife, a doctor, and the Beverly Hillbillies. Pictures of the lobes, to assist in the structure. It's a big book, ostensibly about LA, and not much really goes on. There is stasis in La Medusa, despite the buzz of words. I tried to let the torrent wash over me, to see if that helped, like maybe setting the tone would be the point, rather than the content. Didn't help. I lost the book somehow, 50 pages from the end, and that was ok.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit that this 5 star review definitely has aspects of "I got through this difficult book so I have to reward myself and the book." But I stand by it - it was fun to read even though I've hardly spent any time in LA.

And I applaud anyone who has the skill to take on James Joyce at his best.

[Namira Galando · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit sad to let this one go, but there are so many other books I'd rather be reading. Still not quite sure what exactly failed to click. Might write some thoughts down later.

[dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a secular & sober creature, partaking of stellar writing is about the closest thing I can have to a transcendent experience. I have regularly lit my black candles at the altar of DeLillo, his prose being the most consistently reliable way for me to reach states of exaltation. Others include DFW and William Gass, Rikki Ducornet and Joy Williams. I mention these names because Vanessa Place recalled each of them to me in her astoundingly unique & darkly exuberant novel La Medusa, w/r/t either mood, prose style, typographical experimentation, theme, characterization, or some heady admixture thereof.

I adore polyphony, but most writers—even very good ones—have a tendency to make their characters sound alike. Not so here. A sampling: meet Jorge, an ice cream vendor who narrates in freestyle rap; “John Doe,” a morgue’d corpse who explains, quite matter-of-factly, the events leading up to his demise; a trucker named Myles who’s driving his prize-winning big rig westward with his bisexual wife, Stella; nine-year-old Feena, with too many Barbies, not enough freedom, and a penchant for rhyming; a neurosurgeon named Dr. Casper Bowles who gets increasingly fucked up, his fraying internal monologue mirroring this progressive unhinging… yet another thread seems to be taking place directly inside an unnamed character’s cranium (possibly a stand-in for Place herself?).

Whenever a jump cut happens from one character to another, we get a screenplay-like indication of character and setting. For the abovementioned innominate encephalon, the marking is “INT. SKULL—CONTINUOUS”. Considering the novel is mapping out a sort of consciousness of Los Angeles, I found this both cheeky and perfectly apt. After all, the city is home to Hollywood and its stars—perhaps everyone, both thespian and non-, is playing a character, performing a role. Furthering this overarching theme of heads & skulls, the novel’s chapters are named after parts of the brain, complete with diagrams/photos and a description of what that portion is responsible for. We end in the noumenon, the eye directed inwards.

What ultimately makes this book rank as one of the most thrilling of my reading life is the consistently lustrous quality of the writing. I would describe most of its 488 pages as embodying various forms of jubilant prose poetry, replete with both luminous beauty and imaginative wordplay: homophonic phrases that read one way but mean another spoken aloud, jokes, palindromes… Place is a highly gifted, polyglot mimic, and her use of metaphor and simile is Gassian:

“as pointless as a beachball”
“words’re but breath spent in cooler air”
“as bold and blunt as a prom date’s thumb”

Top all of this off with astonishing formal inventiveness: the range of styles on display is enough to quench the thirstiest maximalist. Parts of the book (including dialogues between Medusa and Perseus) are arranged like a teleplay; many pages contain columns or boxes with different narratives happening in them; a bird shits on Dr. Bowles’ windshield and several lines of text become literally obfuscated by the poop; a lit cigarette of words emits a languid textual stream skyward.

I’m omitting so much about the book I loved. It needs to be savoured and experienced, rather than explained. I was giddy from first to last, enraptured by every single page. I swear I’m not hyperbolizing. I’ll be revisiting this book multiple times in my life—this is exactly the kind of stuff I want to read as much as possible before I peace out.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to friend Jonathan for the recommendation of this fantastic book. He’s got some image examples in his review of some of the structural experimentation at work in the text. But, as he notes, there is a great deal of the book that is “more typographically conservative”. Thankfully the book itself is not content to only be an exercise in textual weirdness, and is, instead, amazing for a whole host of different reasons.

Mythology and Mythification

If you’re going to write about myth – both ancient, established myth and the burgeoning mythology of modernity as filtered through television, movies and literature – and you’re going to do it well, odds are good I’m going to dig your book. The titular gorgon plays a prominent role in this book (as does Perseus) – but Narcissus does as well. The connection isn’t immediately obvious (well, it is in the book, but I don’t think one would immediately jump to it on their own) but Place has recognized the connection between the two figures (reflection/mirrors) and made it a recurring dominating theme throughout the book.

Every epic begins with a look in the mirror

Narcissus and his reflection are of course famous, but I had forgotten that Perseus had slayed Medusa by use of a mirrored shield. The idea of Medusa in the mirror is explored throughout the text – the voice of LA (as Medusa) is captured within a literal frame (Place herself has described it as a mirrored frame) for a large portion of the book, and her narrative escape from the frame coincides with her emergence into the narrative itself. But Place has also discovered a harrowing isolation surrounding the mythical figure of Medusa – she is a character who will always be devoid of any connection with an Other – there can never be a moment of locked eyes, of recognition, of seeing someone seeing her for the first time – as the moment that precedes that moment is death for the Other.

Of course, that’s just one telling of the Medusa myth – Place has identified three and all are given fairly equal weight in the text itself. And that’s the thing about myth, it layers on top of itself, sometimes piling contradictions one on top of the other, threatens to collapse under its own weight, and yet, endures. Added to this weight of mythology Place begins to interject modern LA mythology – The Beverley Hillbillies, I Love Lucy, various shows that, by virtue of being created and filmed in LA, tumble through – and layers in the biblical tale of Job. All of this is used to slowly build a mythological portrait of LA as a whole. But Place isn’t content to only burden LA with mythology – to this she adds the weight of history itself - in great part represented by the history of voudou and the French slave trade in Haiti (due to LA’s sizable Haitian population) - present in framed sections titled “The History Channel” until, much like the framed Medusa monologues, the text begins to escape the frame. So, eventually, both myth and history escape their prisons and run rampant through the second half of the book.

Los Angeles as Presence

So, you have Los Angeles present as weight of myth and history. In addition, you have Los Angeles present as the gorgon, who also happens to be the books narrator. And it’s easy to lose sight of that, the overall first person narrator behind all the narrative threads, not just the “INT. SKULL” narratives; but the “I” pops up every now again, the narrator steps out from the narration, almost always to great effect.

You know, I feel sorry for Dr. Bowles, even as I plan on killing him

Los Angeles as narrator describes herself throughout the book, and she takes on the characteristics of the city – her always cracking skin as representation of the fault lines running under LA is particularly well done – into her physical appearance, and, unsurprisingly, LA is ugly. And then, throughout it all, you have Los Angeles as the book itself, as represented through the characters who crisscross its pages. The book starts with a number of disparate voices and story lines and happenings, but as the book progresses the interconnectedness of the stories (and the city) begin to emerge and a larger structure, all dotted lines and interactions and strings tying everything together, always present but hidden, begins to show itself.

And really, it’s one of the three ways in which the book really shines, the intricate entangling of all these different lives – a neurosurgeon, a family of Haitian immigrants, a gangbanger, a drug addict, and various smaller characters – whose paths should never cross, but do, much as in the city itself. It would be appropriate to describe it a microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic city, but it is all the more relevant to describe it as a cross section of LA.

Cross-Sectional Language

There is an almost Ouilipoian limitation at work throughout the text. The book itself is divided by section, each section being introduced by a cross-section of the human brain, along with a description of that section, and what (thoughts, languages, emotions, actions) specific thing that section is responsible for. And that cross-section then drives the following section of text, and limits the majority of the actions and language of that section of the text to the dominance of that section of the brain. And, fuck, it’s well done. The section dominated by “Wernicke’s and Broca’s Areas”

Broca’s Area: Involved in production of speech, including writing, gestures, sounds; grammatical processing; and expressive speech, located near primary motor region relating to face, tongue and jaw. Wernicke’s Area: Involved in spoken / written language, gestures, musical sounds; located between primary auditory and visual areas. Aphasia may include repetition of sound, syllables, persistent or intentional misattribution of word to sense, or structure to grammar

Takes full liberty to play around with Joycean dreamspeak and wordplay, and is both terrifically well done and clever.

The Third Thing

So, I mentioned that there are three things that make this book shine. The third, and really the main reason to hurry yourself along and buy this book, is the writing itself. It’s all well and good to play around with language, and textual structure, and narrative confines – and I’ll read your book if you do any of these things, I’m really a sucker for it – but if your writing doesn’t stand on its own then all you’ve really produced is a pleasant diversion. Thankfully, the writing here is excellent, brimful of pathos and humor and terrifying intelligence, and I found myself stealing time throughout the weekend to sneak in just a few more pages, and when I found large chunks of time I magically found them gone and myself hundreds of pages further into the book. There is an amazing scene where Casper Bowles gets drunk in a Mexican restaurant that is one of the better individual sections that I’ve read in a while.

And, I’m going to be honest, there’s so much else to rave about here that I’ve not even touched on, and am not going to. Just buy the book, just do it, just do it, just do it.

[Jarvis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Swing -- and a miss. I was onboard with the book, barely, for 85% of it. It really seemed Place was really getting somewhere, but it seems I was just seeing clues that never existed in the actual text. The book is a mess, and it prides itself on being that way.

[Zack · Rating 1 out of 5]

wut

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ9Vi...

[Steven]

I read parts of this in an MFA workshop several years ago and am excited to see this novel in print. Brilliant and difficult and rewarding, it aims (according to the author's own aspirations) to engage Joyce's Ulysses and Gass' The Tunnel in a literary conversation. Successfully I'd say. Not a beach read, but with winter coming on . . .