Eden Prosper > Recent Status Updates

So … Céline traded one blind tribalism for another, swapped the national flag for racial supremacy and virulent antisemitism … he literally surrendered to the exact brand of demagoguery and collective hysteria that his character, Bardamu, spent an entire novel running from! M’kay.

“Sudden outburst of digestive vulgarity. Discovery of a joyous shitting communism.” I’m in stitches 😂

I'm loving the dark, brutal prose, but the irony of Céline's life is wild. He nails WWI as a meaningless meat grinder run by crazy elites who treat the poor like cattle, and yet by the late 30s, his dread of another war morphed him into a fascist fanboy. Dude actually pushed for an alliance with Hitler to "avoid war" literally backing the exact monster that started the biggest war ever!

Just a lot of finger wagging at China so far!

I am thoroughly captivated by this dense, sweeping epic. While the page-long religious diatribes feel a bit sloggish, the writing style and philosophical digressions are incredible and I’m genuinely invested in the characters. Also, I’m really digging Ivan!

Paradiso 😮‍💨

This feels like an A24 movie; it’s so delightfully strange, absurd and dream-like.

Sooo … I knew China and COVID had that whole “nothing to see here, citizen” vibe, but I didn’t know just how many trapdoors the rabbit hole had. The history of the lab leaks, casually constructing a BSL-4 lab and apparently staffing it with people whose qualifications felt adjacent to “watched a YouTube tutorial once” it’s all getting increasingly sus. What horrors await in the Gain of Function chapter?!

When I first read this book in 2009, its only enduring impression was the deeply uncomfortable (pedo) scene early on. Rereading it now has been an interesting journey; I am especially enjoying the threads of the narrative that feel intimately autobiographical.

A bit sluggish at the start but about a third of the way through it started getting curious; about half way, I’m completely intrigued!

Other reviewers were not exaggerating when they stated this book is hardly a pleasurable read. While I didn’t exactly expect it to be conventionally engaging, it resists immersion more than I had thought; after only a few cantos, my attention begins to falter. That said, I have no intention of abandoning it; rather, I’ll approach it more deliberately, interweaving it with other books.

My knowledge of Jewish history is admittedly lacking; however, this has only served to sharpen my fascination with this story. I find the historical milieu entirely absorbing, and the prose is exquisite!

Bruh… I am both fascinated and perturbed by the mimivirus and pandoravirus, nature is creepy as hell. 😭

I really don’t want this book to end. The only rational course of action, as any responsible adult would agree, is to immediately acquire the entire collected works of Salman Rushdie and construct a literary life-support system to keep this feeling alive indefinitely.

Have you ever read a book so compelling that it gets you out of bed in the morning? The kind that, when life settles into a dull and weary rhythm, becomes a sudden source of light; something vivid and sustaining amid the gray? That is what this book is for me, and I fucking love it.

Rushdie’s wit is killing me! Scarcely a paragraph goes by without a giggle, so I’m perpetually smiling while I’m reading this. I am, without a doubt, thoroughly enamored with this book!

Loving this!

I am in love with the prose. It fuses the ordinary with the enchanted and has a lazy elegance and mythic detachment that feels like you're drifting through a fever dream. This is not your typical fantasy novel, but a work that prioritizes atmosphere, language and reflection over fast paced plot-driven storytelling.