Nate D’s Comments (group member since Sep 15, 2015)

Nate D’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Actually, the Whitby scene was sort of jarring to me, as it was the most obviously horror "genre" scene in the book, which makes it the riskiest. We're dying to hear more of the insane things that are being hinted at, but each reveal risks pushing things too far and robbing the story of its mysterious weight. Oddly, the tantalizing details of first expedition held back enough to maintain the spell, while Whitby's derangement almost broke it, for me. Not quite though, the series continues to balance on a knife blade between becoming overly removed and conceptual, and tipping over into mawkish genre tropes. It's very difficult to do this successfully, for me as a reader at least.

As part of that balancing act, how did people feel about getting jerked out of Area X and into semi-mundane bureaucracy for a while? It seems reasonable to have a bit of a lull for the middle volume of three, before ...something... whatever that is, explodes into focus for the third volume, which I suspect will again take place in Area X.

I haven't begun reading that one yet, but I already have it out of the library, so will doubtless will soon. Is Acceptance scheduled for group-reading at some point?

Stephen wrote: "Whitney wrote: "Vadermeer denies that Roadside Picnic was an influence, but that is the one that I (and quite a few others) were immediately reminded of in Annihilation. The idea of a..."

Yeah, to me it instantly felt like a more self-aware and non-xenophobic Lovecraft specifically attempting to re-write Roadside Picnic. I loved Roadside Picnic, but this is good in a different way. I like how we just dive straight into the Zone (Area X that is) rather than being briefly tantalized and then dying for the next visit.

I've been reading these in parallel, by the way, then suddenly recalled I could come back in here to the discussion. Actually done through the end of book two, so jumping over to that thread now...

You have to wonder how many more books the list-maker can possibly have read that didn't make the cut! How many books can one actually read in a lifetime? It is, unfortunately, certainly a finite number.

Only novels written in English are worth reading I see.

Oh, sorry to hear about your mother, Traveler! I hope she's doing better shortly!

As to your last question, I would actually argue that If On a Winter's Night a Traveler is only one of the most fun and delightful books ever written, but then I'm perhaps overly charmed by formal experimentation. However, where some of it comes off as a dusty exercise in the hands of other writers, Calvino manages to inject so much life into his structures. Borges is a good comparison, but I'd actually say that Calvino is the more playful of the two. His works are a dance with the reader.

(I've read this one twice, I'd even hazard that it's my favorite of his, though it's neck and neck with Invisible Cities.)

The dollar bin at the Strand. Cheaply made recent edition, of which I think there are many since it's out of copyright.

Prophet's Paradise is worth a look. By far the most cryptic entry in the volume, a set of short, almost palindromatic sketches that repeat or invert themselves, arguably (though maybe only aspirationally) relevant to the King in Yellow's text. Check it out in an online version, it's only a couple pages.

Last three stories? Mine has 10 in full, everything listed on the wikipedia page--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kin...

Are there differences in edition?

Hmmm, yeah. Somewhat underwhelming. I do like the (view spoiler)[vision of Caracosa at the end though. Spires that loom up behind the moon? Wonderful. And very Lovecraftian. (hide spoiler)]

Re: Boris reaching in -- I think he says that it's a matter of timing. He can only reach in safely just after the ray of light. But how would he have chance to discover this safely?!

And Traveler, I think you mentioned the bits of the play itself being so intriguing, and this is especially true here. Though as you say, masks become a metaphorical motif here, the actual scene in the epigraph seems much more interesting to me than most of the actual story.

I was wondering about all the other same points in regards to the actual plot that you both raise, Traveler and Amy. I better just spoiler all of this, actually:

(view spoiler)[So to try to summarize what actually happens. Alec loves Genevieve, Genevieve loves Boris. Boris seems to love Genevieve, but I don't recall much elaboration of their relationship. Alec hides his torment. And so things continue for a while. After Boris reveals his newly discovered process, the dynamic breaks down. Genevieve is unusually distant with Alec (then apologizes later), and then when Alec falls asleep in their house while working, he awakes to the sound of Genevieve in some kind of torment, playing sorrowful music, and startles her. She tries to play down whatever is going on with her.

The next day, Genevieve is ill, and while Boris and Jack experiment with petrifying, Alec reads the King in Yellow. Immediately afterwards Genevieve awakes in a delirium and "reveals her secret" and "turns their relationship upside down". And what is her secret? Apparently that she loved Alec, but I'm not sure how this would be quite so terrible as to throw everyone into such disarray -- Alec delirius with the mask that had become his face torn away (really, shouldn't that be a relief?) and Genevieve attempting to kill herself in the pool. The end is all pretty clear, unless, as you say it's all King-in-Yellow-related madness. So we end with a kind of happy ending, or maybe delusional happy ending. But I still feel like I'm really missing something in the middle.
(hide spoiler)]

I wonder, also, when Chambers was in Paris. His writing seems to bear the influence of the symbolist/decadent Parisian scene of the 1890s, which spawned a few other such horror/weird writers, in both France and England.

I'm just going to pop in and say that Malpertuis was very enjoyable modern-gothic (as written in 1943 occupied Belgium) weirdness for October. Nice sense of dread, unique and twisty plot, and actually borderline surrealist in the sheer oddity of a few scenes and backstory.

I liked the bit here about how photography was ruining painting. I wonder if, in fact, the development if photography as a means of exactly capturing reality (subjectivity of all images aside) actually freed more painters from strict realism, since they were no longer nearly the only means of remembering physical details, and hastened along modernist developments.

Actually though, this story just didn't actually make sense to me. I'll wait until more of you have read it, but some of the motivations seem really hazy or contradictory to me. Unless we can put some of this down to the distorting effects of the King.

I sort of took it for granted that the rough events in outline were real on initially reading, while all of Hildreds connections, assumptions, and aspirations were highly delusional.

(view spoiler)[But while it seems to me that most everything that transpires between Hildred and Louis and the Hawberks has some kind of reality, Wilde's apartment seems another realm entirely. What are the chances that Wilde and Hildred would corroborate eachother's delusional realities so specifically? (Unless The King in Yellow really does cause these things by forcibly overlaying its own version of the world, which then becomes shard by all who read it.) Or the part where Hildred entirely misses a third person in the apartment while searching for the cat -- even he finds this odd. And finally the sort of hazy events of the last visit.

But even just the underexplained particulars of Wilde are extremely strange. How did he get his weird injuries, and what exactly does he do as a Repairer of Reputations? Does the army in his employ just spread positive rumor, like those agencies nowadays that can be hired to to flood the internet with positive press and tweets about you? I found all of this very intriguing, and I'm not sure if I wanted to to be told much more or if being left in the dark is ultimately more interesting here. (hide spoiler)]

Traveller wrote: "Interesting how he sees these as solutions:
the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigr..."

I noticed this as well. It really seems to be intentionally ominous and dystopian, a sign of troubled times, along with the newly institutionalized suicide. But it's obviously harder to say exactly at such a double-remove (1895, and then projected into the "future"), and knowing really nothing of Chambers, though.

I had an unread copy of this which I just pulled down. It's pretty fascinating so far, and Chambers gets a lot of his guesses fairly correct, particularly in forseeing that Europe would eventually become divided between the west and Russia. All this about the U.S. becoming a dystopian military state is interesting as well. This seems promising!

Did everyone else eventually finish the first story? I'll be done with it later today, doubtless.

Interesting topic, Traveler!

In America, the one that always astonishes me is Ulysses, which was banned as obscene from 1920, during serialization, until 1933, when Random House took it to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, it was standard practice for the postal service to burn all copies they found attempting to be imported.

Later examples: Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer. What, I wonder, is the most recent book to be banned here?

That's actually amazing that yo have a copy on hand. Nice find.

Traveller wrote: "Nate D wrote: "Thanks for the invitation, Traveler! As far as Delaney goes, Dhalgren makes the best case as essential 20th century lit (see Aubrey's recent 5-star review!), or Babel-17 for fast sci..."

Oh absolutely. That is, I think, just about her earliest work, but it serves as a rapid microcosm of what she does so well. Though I don't think it's even remotely in print, besides being contained within the copy of he collection House of Fear that I managed to find at the library.

Thanks for the invitation, Traveler! As far as Delaney goes, Dhalgren makes the best case as essential 20th century lit (see Aubrey's recent 5-star review!), or Babel-17 for fast sci-fi entertainment (that's also very smart and about linguistics!). Hogg was really only something I was able to approach once I had a wider view of where he was coming from, in ficton and nonfiction, and even then, it seems designed as an act of total frustration and nihilism, and reader horror and revulsion seems to be the intended effect.

I'd like to counterbalance these a bit with something less intense: I think everyone should read Leonora Carrington's stories. Her geriatric adventure novel The Hearing Trumpet turned up in another group recently, and it's splendid, but the stories in The Seventh Horse And Other Tales are even better. Especially The Stone Door, which occurs both there, and as a longer novel soon to be re-printed by Exact Change.

She was a capital-S Surrealist who eloped with Max Ernst as a teen and painted into her 90s in Mexico, so she's probably not for everyone, but her storytelling has a fairytale clarity, sense of purpose, and humor that many of her contemporaries had less of a handle on.

Traveller, I very much hope that Hogg isn't your only foray into Delaney. It's a very determined outlier.

I really must read High-Rise, though -- Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, is probably his most world-remaking and astonishing, but High-Rise really needs to be the next I read I think. So thanks for the reminder!

(Hello all, I seem to have just been pulled into this conversation long after it began, but I will jump in and out as I can!)