Status Updates From Sisyphean

I wasn't a huge fan of novella 3, it was okay, but the shift in tone from heavy metaphysics to a pulpy weird noir was jarring - and, frankly, not as interesting.

50 more pages to go in this novella, this one is moving more slowly for me than the previous two. It's kind of reminiscent of an old gumshoe detective novel but with insectoid creatures that share a common ancestor with humanity.

The second novella, Cavumville, is dense but much more comprehensible than Sisyphean. Sisyphean takes place after Cavumville, and Cavumville is about revivication on the moon, when identies were fracturing literally and metaphorically, but people still had names and identities and histories that are treated almost religiously. This is a really fascinating read.

This book is 4 novellas in the same world, I'm reading one per day. Important to note that the author is an artist and created the illustrations first, then wrote the story to expand. First novella summed up: It is about how human dreams of transcendence become systems of exploitation, and how individuals become instruments for futures they cannot comprehend and will not inhabit. Dense and alien, loving it.

Already goggling at the work that must have gone into translation. Dense with ideas.

I’ll come to this one day.

One of the most convoluted books I’ve ever read.