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The Artifact by Germán Sierra

daneekasghost's review

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4.0

I really liked the experience of reading this, even if I'm not sure how great of a book it is. (Side note - that sentence applies exactly to every book I've read from Inside the Castle - I need to read more of their books).

The sentences made me want to work at them and detangle them and reattach them some way. Sometimes things got very dense, but I rarely got overwhelmed.

I'm doing a terrible job of describing the book here, but here's a bit that comes after a page or two of discussion of Alvin Lucier's "I'm Sitting In a Room" (a favorite modern music piece of mine as well):

"Lucier was perhaps trying also to show that every
skull is a room—a hydroxyapatite grotesque chamber with arcs and vaults and windows— susceptible to be haunted. (This is of some
importance here, because I might be counted
among the few people who has ever witnessed a
haunted skull.)"

So, like "hydroxyapatite grotesque chamber"? That's a phrase that I could dig around with, or just gloss over and focus on the image of the haunted reverberating skull being shattered into nothing (or no-thing, as Sierra would write) like Lucier's voice.

But now there's about two or three of these sentences like this every few pages and ... I don't know, I liked it.
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