Beemouse Laboratories

So. I just read The Book from the Sky by Robert Kelly.

The copy of the book I have is an uncorrected galley proof, which poses an interesting problem in my experience of the book, because the book is considered experimental fiction. I found myself wondering as I was reading it, “just how experimental is this? Was that an error? Or an experiment?” I am almost tempted to read the official copy just to compare.

I think my views on this novel might be a bit strange. I got several different things out of it:

1. scary-as-hell alien abduction (really, why did I start reading it alone, at night?)
2. metaphorical description of what it’s like to experience extreme dissociation due to trauma as a child (bad enough to cause Dissociative Identity Disorder)
3. spoof of Rumi’s poetry
4. the strange experiences of writing, reading, and having language in general
5. how to live epistemology and confuse the shit out of yourself permanently

Regarding #1:

  And in their busy cave they went on working, lifting out his young pure smokeless lungs. In their place they carefully tucked two grey squirrels, apparently alive and breathing, and nested together like a pair of shoes in a shoe box, tail of one to the head of the other. And when they pulled the liver out slimy with blood, they shoved a live hawk in its place, that fluttered its wings once or twice then kept quiet, its wild eye looking here and there.

Regarding #2:

  They took me from the east, from Campfield’s porch, from the not yet visible rising sun, from Pennysylvania. From the mountains of my childhood.
  can a phrase like that mean something? It seems to mean so much, with these tender words. But it doesn’t, not to me. They took my childhood and gave it to somebody else. So for me it’s simple and sad, but doesn’t mean too much.
  They took me away and now I’m back. I’m one of those you never heard about before. But now you’ll hear plenty. It’s not I that’s coming back, they’re letting me come back. They want me to become you.

Regarding #3:

  Darling, prayer is a kind of drifting magnetic field searching for particles throughout all space and time. When it finds them, it assembles them into the form you mean. The form you want. Prayer is form searching for matter. The matter you mean.

and

  A shiver. I don’t want to be this guy’s darling. How does he know who’s reading the book, how does he know who’s holding what in his hands? Maybe he does know, what a terrible idea, that someone out there knows what I’m doing, where my hands are. Get your claws off me, he said, meaning, get your thoughts off me, but the word was wrong.
  Does he really mean me? But wouldn’t it be wonderful too, he thought, if that could really be true. Was there any evidence? Wouldn’t it be great if some book could really mean me, the real me!
  Darling, a good book finds the reader. I found you. Darling, you are almost mine now–it’s up to you to take that last, terrifying, glorious, last step over the slippery marble, half-dazzled by the gleam you see before you.

Regarding #4:

  Why do we so want to tell? Do words make the event realer? Do words bring back the lost moment, and hold it again, and by avowing its loss, right here, with her, the one from whom the event was lost, he, they, words, could unlose it, enter the moment as if it were still to be, and now actually is?

Regarding #5:

  His friend was dead. And all of a sudden Jack didn’t know what death means. What does it mean, my friend is dead. What is dead? What is this ‘dead’ that someone can ‘be’ it? Isn’t ‘be’ about existing? If a man is dead, aren’t we saying that he exists. Still exists. Nothing goes away…
  If the friend is not still there, somewhere, then anything Jack could say about him is meaningless, a scared primitive jabbering about basilisks and unicorns. “My friend is dead” creates so many epistemological problems– even before that terrifying ontological question it begs. My friend is dead is as senseless as My friend was never alive or I have a friend I don’t have. Or I have no friend

By the end of the novel I was completely ungrounded and overwhelmed by #5 from the above list, and my feelings could best be described as “O_o” with a little bit of eye-twitching. This isn’t exactly a bad thing.

The book started out with a concrete, if divided, backwards/forwards/sideways running plot, and slowly progressed towards something like limp dissolution. It was like a series of rushing rivers all crossing themselves and then joining at one point (maybe it was supposed to be the denouement) and then splooging out into a squishy delta. A silty, squishy plot delta.

It was ultimately unsatisfying, and I couldn’t tell if it was unsatisfying in the Good Literary Wow Aren’t Things Ambiguous way or the This Book Wasn’t That Good way. I think it might fit in-between. In any case, I’ll probably read the book again, because I like weird stuff.