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mamimitanaka's review
4.0
A lot to say about this Gargantuan Art Cinderblock that I'm sure someone more passionate toward it could illuminate the deeper nuances of, but I really enjoyed my time with this nonetheless and certainly will be flipping through it recurrently. This may be one of the single most gorgeously composed books I've ever seen; a titan of graphic design if there ever was one, you could compare this to House of Leaves in just how much tender loving care clearly went into composing this piece specifically as an object, though this one stretches the limits much further of what could be considered a novel. In fact it's not a novel at all, but a collection of narrative breadcrumbs that seem to detail a morbid journey through a liminal dreamworld, where the end game of the journey seems to be the unnamed protagonist(s?) spiritual odyssey to exit the dream, either through waking, death, or, excuse my crassness, orgasm. (All three? Seems like they're one and the same.) Kind of feels like Yume Nikki in its approach as this Endless Dream Expanse created from a perspective point who we never get a look into the direct thoughts of; like the protagonists of both works, the reader is left to wander the maze of their traumatic nightmares and piece this oneiric puzzle together on their own terms, soaking in the surreal sights and sounds along the way which provide the closest thing possible to a roadmap in this abstracted headspace.
I read this from page one to the end, as I do with my first read of all books, but the primary fascination with this book is in its structure, of which there are surely patterns occurring that hint at the deeper mechanics of the work, beyond what one could get out of a quick first read. The numbering of the pages seems to be a key here that I'll be interested in unlocking with further ventures. The pages themselves are numbered out of order, making the reader's place in the labyrinth unclear; basically, you're dropped into the middle of a maze, possibly one that goes on forever; could the only way "out", as in, unraveling some kind of narrative going on here, be through corresponding the scrambled page numbers in the margins to the actual pages they link up with in the book? In that case, the book may take forever to read, but that may be the point as the spiritual journey detailed is infinite as far as we know, as sprawling as the world of dreams. I do think the book could have used just a little more oomph in grounding me to a more emotionally resonant context, but the questions its vignettes poke and probe at are enough to get my brain moving and thematically and formally compelling enough to return to multiple times. Really happy to have received this as a Christmas gift from my lovely family and to have something this striking and beautifully composed on my shelves.
I read this from page one to the end, as I do with my first read of all books, but the primary fascination with this book is in its structure, of which there are surely patterns occurring that hint at the deeper mechanics of the work, beyond what one could get out of a quick first read. The numbering of the pages seems to be a key here that I'll be interested in unlocking with further ventures. The pages themselves are numbered out of order, making the reader's place in the labyrinth unclear; basically, you're dropped into the middle of a maze, possibly one that goes on forever; could the only way "out", as in, unraveling some kind of narrative going on here, be through corresponding the scrambled page numbers in the margins to the actual pages they link up with in the book? In that case, the book may take forever to read, but that may be the point as the spiritual journey detailed is infinite as far as we know, as sprawling as the world of dreams. I do think the book could have used just a little more oomph in grounding me to a more emotionally resonant context, but the questions its vignettes poke and probe at are enough to get my brain moving and thematically and formally compelling enough to return to multiple times. Really happy to have received this as a Christmas gift from my lovely family and to have something this striking and beautifully composed on my shelves.
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