exboyfriend recommended this to me and apparently I'm still taking his book recommendations, I love literary novels that take place in offkilter worldshere, strange climatic events such as sandstorms and shrinking seas provide the backgroundbut I don't love when the characters themselves stop acting/reacting like real people.
On almost every page a thought or image made me go, "Umm, sorry, but I don't buy that he/she's thinking that at all right now.
" Yes, these thoughts and images were poetic, maybe even poetically true, and maybe I've been brainwashed the past two years, but, yo, from a pointofview perspective, this book did not work for me.
It did have its moments, though, and obviously, my criticisms unfairly attack it for not being something it never purports to be, a realistic novel.
This book came out inand I remember really wanting to like it I was in my mids, in the midst of an inevitable Thomas Pynchon fanboy stage Pynchon had come out of hiding to blurb this book, but not quite getting there.
It was unabashedly romantic and grandiose, written in this florid language, in stark contrast to the minimalist social realism practiced by other writers Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Mona Simpson on the Vintage Contemporaries imprint.
Well. flash forwardyears and this book has found its time and place, The world it describes is a world that forgets its past every day events have become uncoupled from meaning, everything except love has lost its context.
Los Angeles fills with sand Paris fills with ice the canals of Venice empty and the oceans retreat a single train trip might take a lifetime identities become interchangeable everything eventually goes dark.
Hardly anyone notices everyone turns inward, consumed by obscure obsessions, Days Between Stations predicts, with eerie accuracy, the world we're living in now, The Believer says that Erickson's a master of defamiliarizing us from our worlds how this differs from say, science fiction or fantasy is that Erickson purposefully creates a fully realistic world like our own, just slightly askew.
This is a risk inasmuch as it was for the Latin American Magic Realists who I could never get into: what is your dividing line between reality and fantasy If your characters exist in a world recognizable to any reader, then any diversion from this will reassert the novel's existence as artifice.
This is all well and good and can be very good, as in David Mitchell's sitelink Cloud Atlas, but what it sacrificed is pathos for the characters.
And so while I admired Days Between Stations for its novel take on film history and the limits/commonalities between film and memory, I found several of the Days Between Stations's elements highly problematic.
His characters were all selfpossessed in an almost narcissistic way, which would've been less noticeable if Erickson hadn't exercised capitalP amp F Pathetic Fallacy in every scene.
There is a high level of purposeful vagueness throughout, as if this world contained only descriptions, never answers,
It's fitting that sitelink Thomas Pynchon has a blurb on the cover Stations is a direct descendent of sitelink V, Both books hop the globe and dwell on people searching for something they cannot quite name or discern, and both make room for the influence of art on our lives and our ability to live them.
However, Pynchon's stylistic fireworks are exchanged for an intense look at the protagonists' emotional terrain, This is unfortunate, as long passages of the book come off as almost purple prose, and the many sex scenes as romancenovel fodder coupling on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, anyone Did I mention the fog.
This, much like Tom McCarthy's sitelink Remainder, gets to the very heart of my literary taste, I can recognize the immense talents of the author and even feel that his conceit is neargenius, But the execution is deeply, deeply irritatingI think with every page, "Fuck, if only I had thought of this first, I would have done it this way and it would've been great!".
. . Then again, Adorno says we should have just such an unpleasant reaction to the art which truly challenges us, which might be a very large backhanded compliment.
I dunno. I should probably reread this in ten years,
In a world of cataclysm and unraveled time, a young woman's face, a misbegotten childhood in a Parisian brothel, and the fragment of a lost movie masterpiece are the only clues in a man's search for his past.
Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is the stunning, now classic dreamspec of our precarious age by turns beautiful and obsessed, haunted and hallucinated, in which lives erotically collide, the past ambushes the future, and forbidden secrets intercut with each other like the frames of a film.
Ok, that was just weird, I was going through my backlog of friend requests when I stumbled upon my new booknerd friend Michael's very awesome review of this book, So yes he is now my friend, and then I went to read more about the book itself, And the weird thing is how when you look at people's books sorted by review, it doesn't show the author of the book, right So I didn't realize until a few more clicks that this is written by the same guy who wrote Zeroville, which I am reading right now and absolutely adoring.
So fuck, that's some cool synchronicity and I guess I'm supposed to read this right away, En esta primera novela se entrecruzan varias búsquedas: los orígenes de unos personajes desarraigados/desmemoriados entrelazados con otros de dos generaciones antes en la Francia de principios del siglo XX su devenir en un contexto que amenaza con descarrilar en una catástrofe natural y, para mi el más atractivo, el rodaje y el destino de una película llamada a cambiar el lenguaje cinematográfico.
Como historias dentro de algo más grande Erickson es tremendamente sugerente, en espacial en la construcción de imágenes, En Días entre estaciones hay fragmentos de una poética vigorosa, caso de los capítulos que desarrollan una violenta tormenta de arena en Los Ángeles
un París asolado por una ola de frío glacial, con cortes de electricidad y la gente tirando de todo tipo de combustibles para conseguir calentarse mínimamente o un viaje en barco por un Mediterráneo menguante.
La carencia de una estructura nítida que enhebre los diversos relatos, sin embargo, desencadena un curso errático, salvado durante dos tercios de novela por lo poderoso de las imágenes, sentimientos, hechos.
Erickson se zambulle de lleno en una narración claramente surrealista que prescinde de certezas e insinúa, elude y sugiere mientras se pasa por el forro cualquier limitación genérica.
Lo que no le evita entrar en pérdida en las últimaspáginas, de las cuales apenas rescataría alguna respuesta más o menos clara.
Having only ever read The Sea Came In At Midnight and detect a fluid, yet discursive narrative style that Im eager to see whether it casts across his writing in general.
The books were written fourteen years apart published, rather,vs,and the narrative digressions are breezier with the earlier book, Theres an amazing concatenation of character strands that fascinated me in The Sea Came In At Midnight as much as it didnt quite satisfy as a whole that suggests a more mature writer.
Days Between Stations was his first novel, and I dont mean to say the digressions are leaden, Not at all, but it is certainly moored, another way to say made heavier, by a silentfilm centered around the death of Marat, The book centers around this, in multiple eras, and joins Paul Austers The Book of Illusions in a kind of subindustry of novels dealing with faded, near, alternative, shadow from the early days of cinema.
And both are pleasing in the same way,
So, I came in expecting one thing, something along the lines of to the welltravelled, skimming brevity of lonely yet vibrant lives and ideas of the later novel, and got something more dreamlike and strange.
This isnt Ericksons fault, although the title suggests road trips, discovering America, buttes and deserts,
The oneiric portions roll off me, however, and it feels hes straining for affect, The portions in the Paris brothel early on feel too cookedup to be impactful, the digression with the Montreal youth and his father and the flintlock! too narratively frothy to sink in, and the Adrien/Michel, eyepatching, love triangle stuff too ungrounded to really sing to me.
I remain a guy who hates to hear about other people's dreams,
This feels like apprenticework, but unlike most novels of the kind, it's far too assured and unique to be dismissed out of hand.
He remains a writer I find very intriguing and I look forward to reading more, This could have been a really good book but it wasn't, Instead it was just a confusing read, People seem to describe it "sensual" and "erotic", . . nah. More like devoid of any real emotion or substance, coupled with odd male fantasies of playing with insentient dolls, The badly written sex scenes ruined it for me, they were so ridiculous and stupid to the point of not being even funny or entertaining.
"He pulled her to him and it was only about ten minutes later, so fixed was she on the blue and the shutters and the sea, that she realized he was inside of her".
. . yeah right. The characters were unconvincing and onedimensional, I didn't like the style and frankly it was just stupid, There's also a ludicrous, somewhat disturbing rapey scene that takes place outdoors during a sandstorm, which I think is supposed to come off as erotic and exciting, but it just sounds like an awful second rate rape fantasy.
Stuff like this makes me too conscious of the writer and his motives and distracts from the plot, As a disclaimer, I like weird things but this was just rapey and felt unnecessarily stupid, I really would've liked to enjoy this book because all the other elements were there, so this was disappointing, My first exposure to Erickson I promptly sought out his other books after reading it, Still my favorite, although I haven't yet read Arc d'X or Our Ecstatic Days, I came to Erickson based on the presumption that he was going to be "Pynchonesque", Really, he isn't at all, except if you count the way Pynchon can just drop your notions of reality right out from under you, and I guess that was what hooked me here.
That, and the fact that this book contains some of THE most haunting images I've ever encountered in fiction, Uneven. That's my ultimate word on this book,
The comparisons to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nabokov are almost laughable, and I can see why those guys come to mind in terms of tone and themes, but the prose doesn't even approach them.
This novel had a grand idea and Erickson developed an intricate riddle for the reader to solve as she reads it, which I always appreciate, but the language is so flowery and dreamlike that it overshadowed any real gut emotion that was trying to surface.
I've read his The Sea Came in at Midnight that he wroteyears later, so I understand that this debut novel was really just several tests to see what works and what might need to be hacked.
I don't think I enjoyed this, overall, but I can see it for what it is and respect that,
Oh yeah, the sex scenes were really cringey does Erickson think doggy style is the only way to fuck What is the importance of placing a memory Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when whats urgent about a memory is its essence Periodically I revisit authors I first read long ago and that I've never returned to.
I read all of Erickson's works many years ago, and have, over those years, recommended him and touted him to countless acquaintances as a woefully overlooked by the mainstream author of many gifts.
There is something unsatisfying and wilting in reviewing the fervor of youth, when literature catapulted you off your ass and maybe even drove you to write yourself.
Maybe it's best to just let them lie in your memory as they are, Is it wilting because we are afraid to say we might have been not very discerning when we were younger Is it simply the bite of anything new and different, his fang marks go deeper the younger you are Or do we just hate having the valuelessness of our past logic pointed out to us
Whatever it is, I came away from my rereadafterdecades of Erickson's first novel profoundly dissatisfied.
Don't misunderstand, Erickson is an epic stylist: he has fine finger for tone and if his imagery and poetry come across as kind of hokey or purposefully abstruse in that icky postmodern way that we've thankfully almost left behind, it is forgivable.
This, after all, is his first novel,
The story is okay, Readers coming to Erickson for the first time will find it striking and unfamiliar and likely to have the book fare better in their estimations.
Erickson's trope of constant, unyielding apocalyptic backdrops has always stayed with me, and here it is no exception,
It's the characters that I take offense to, Other reviewers here have criticized the mechanical, thoughtless sex and the dolllike tossabout female characters who seem to be little more than repositories for the male characters' violations.
Maybe that's part of the theme of film and cinema and performance, who knows But their machinations are unclear and thus the point and purpose of the story.
The end came from me when the guy who knocked up his sister sells her to her other brother who wants to rape the crap out of her so the first brother can finish making a movie that comes across as ath grade English class project.
. .
Let me make clear, I'm no prude, If it advances the plot, pretty much anything goes, but I found myself shrinking away from the novel because things like seem to serve no discernible purpose save to make you gasp in disbelief.
I call it the "Burning Girl" syndrome, which originated in that episode of Game of Thrones when the little girl gets burned alive for no other reason than to simply burn a child alive onscreen.
Those guys should have their heads examined, Erickson, not. I'll give him another chance and move on to "Rubicon Beach", Ryan wrote: "There is a high level of purposeful vagueness throughout, as if this world contained only descriptions, never answers, " Exactly. It was very frustrating, as I flew through the firstpages, only to realize this book was going nowhere, Which would be fine if it was at least entertaining, but it wasn't even this just terribly contrived and horribly conceived, Erickson is one of those polarizing authors whom I seem to love while other people are driven away, It's hard to deny the surreal, dreamlike quality of his stories in fact, the best way for me to describe this book is to say that "it was like reading a dream".
The world slowly disintegrates about the main characters, Cities fall inexplicably into ruin, Herds of white buffalo foretell vague portents, Time falls out of joint and a young couple falls apart,
I originally picked up this novel after nosing around Wikipedia for something different in terms of reading material, I hadn't heard of 'slipstream' before but I had read some Auster and Murakami and had enjoyed what I'd read, DBS just amazed me. I'm the kind of reader who can live or die by the emotional content of a book does it move me or not and this book just totally wowed me in that respect.
May not be for all readers, Use as directed. .