Status Updates From Mangled Hands

Certainly one of the oddest books I've ever read. Still not too sure what to make of it. Ah well, ever onward!

Hmmmm, a bit one note. I think the style is cool and distinctive which I really dig, however the aesthetic is running out of gas--nothing progresses, it just is.

WTF??

"If it's a word, it's not an animal. And if it's an animal, its voice won't reflect light, so you can escape from its language."

It seems I have to read this one slowly because it's so rich in brutal and beautiful images, dominated by dream logic.

Some parts remind me of the poetry of my friend Barton Smock, like the quote above, which makes me wonder what kind of magic would happen if he wrote a novel.

"Ancient stories of black darkness and terrible falls plugged the holes in my body..."

Soft-spoken and compressed with wonderful mythological and philosophical implications, this novel of dream logic puts me in mind of Ben Okri's The Famished Road, except it's about a Huron boy in the 16th century rather than a Nigerian in the 20th.

I was on my hands and knees like a village dog, yet I was dreaming about the beautiful world at the bottom of a ladder. Everything was upside-down and gone crazy . . . my other father was returning to the people who had mangled his hands and tortured him so cruelly.
I could not dream anymore . . . my tongue was split down the middle of the Great River. What I might say scarcely mattered, so I watched and listened...

There were nine days of bad dreams before it was the middle of the night again. All the other Snake villages had been destroyed. I had dropped my voice to the point of a stick . . . my head rolled out of a tobacco pouch while my heart was stuck inside a snakeskin. I felt as if I had died and my body had gone where the dead crabs go. I rubbed the dreams out of my eyes and looked over the rim of the kettle.

I had been crawling in the mushroom fields all day, collecting bruises and keeping a sharp lookout for invisible animals. I didn't see any, but they could be anywhere, I thought. They might be lurking in the rock walls, or by the dying signal fires, or in the hairy mounds of tobacco . . .