Review Arafat Mountain Sketched By Mike Kleine Format Printed Matter

never know what Im going to get when I dig into a Kleine book,

Scratch that.

I know it is going to be different,

But itd be a hasty generalization if I called that element of different bizarro or surrealism or absurdism.
Kleines books are often experimental, and each foray into experimental prose or poetry meanders in surprisingly different directions,

That being said, if

you like one of his books, you may not like the next, And vice versa.

But, if you know or think you know what Kleine is up to in his work, then youll enjoy it.


I have said in other reviews that there are two kinds of people in the world: innovators and perfecters.


Innovators come up with brilliant ideas,

Perfecters hone those ideas into something perfect and presentable to the world,

You can tell from Kleines work that hes an innovator who is growing into the role of perfecter.
Hes cut his own path, and in this book hes beginning to play with his surroundings, Hes seeing how broad or narrow the path needs to be for him, Hes figuring out where the clippings need to go, and which methods are going to stay and which will be removed.


But hes doing it on his own terms, Hes exploring something vast and for the most part untouched in prose, Experimenting with voice and character and setting, . . everything really.

You ever wonder what itd be like if there was a parallel dimension where intellectual thought started today Where all of the modern concepts and the seminal works of philosophy didnt exist How different would our entire frame of thinking be We may never know.


You ever wonder what itd be like if there was a parallel dimension where the conventions of storytelling began with a fresh slate I think we have a chance to find out with Arafat Mountain.
Herein rests a story so different I have a hard time decoding it,

I felt like a broken god trying to sift through countless minds, but only getting literal slices, sometimes too small for me to orient myself.
So my mind began forcing connections, Sometimes a character or theme might reoccur, and Id be struck with a sense of familiarity,

But ultimately I still felt disoriented, It was at times unsettling, but I liked that, I liked that a work of literature had that effect on me without frustrating me, If there had been a few familiar narrative conventions upon which to hinge, I may have gotten frustrated with the absence of others.
But it is abundantly clear early on that this books is doing something entirely different, And for me, entirely new, Even the style plays with conventions of grammar, Sentences that dont make sense and do at the same time, I liked this.

And Im excited to see how my mind processes this and tries to incorporate these techniques into my own work in the future.
Because above all, experimental writing like this is inspiring for thinkers and writers alike, If you check it out for no other reason, check it out because it will make you think about writing in a different light.
Some of whats here may not work with you or for you, But Im willing to bet something will, Heaven is Arafat Mountain.
And that is all I can say, i really liked this book,

it was interesting,

it kind of seemed like a "fuck you" to every other book, maybe,

i really like the way Mike Kleine writes sentences, like this one, "A bird makes the sound of a bird in the sky and they hear the sound of waves.
"

a satisfying follow up to the incredible "Mastodon Farm", i'll definitely be reading more of Mike's work,




Finding a book like this being written today is pretty exciting, Its a playfully odd book, with an apocalyptic theme, It is opaque. It consists mainly of simple declarative sentences, Very little passion is displayed, even as characters who are names without faces die for sometimes mysterious and sometimes obvious reasons.
Writerly wit is often displayed,

Let me give you an impression, Its my impression, and does not relate literally to the book, Somewhere in the universe there is an envelope, and we are seeking the envelope, It is a mystery, and it contains a secret message, We are foredoomed to never find the envelope, and also, we already know what the message is, so its not really a secret.
The message says “the secret is outside of the envelope, ” There may be thousands of such envelopes, or there may be only two, Were not sure.

The chateau on/by/in Arafat mountain is one such envelope,

The point being that this book seems to inhabit a universe in which cause and effect are broken, in which events occur provisionally, in which characters are doomed, though some escape on voyages of a hundredmillion years or else are murdered or evaporate, in which there is much doubt, searching, uncertainty, and a sense of mystery and special significant places and events which are yet identical to everything else and thus neither special nor mysterious.


There are lists,

There are experiments such as a brief description/episode repeated many times in sequence, yet its integrity is progressively corrupted until new permutations of the original bubble up, vanish, and the whole passage breaks down.


There is popculture awareness, there is brandidentity, there is fashion and Ferraris, And death, of course. And gods. In a list of islands, all the names are capitalized, except for “god Island, ” And theres an indistinct boundary between “real,” televised, and cinematic,

When I started reading, I felt there was a strong association between this authors creation and the work of Alfred Jarry, but then I thought I would just let the book be what it is and not make a point to compare it to something else in reviewing it but then he went and mentioned pataphysical tribes and forced my hand.


Theres something protosurreal and protodada in this, but it cant be “proto” because were already in the future.
But then, theres time travel, so there you go,

Its an accomplishment if an author today, a newly arisen author, can make me want to turn back the clock and reappraise Dr.
Faustrollyears later.
The authors personal style of fragment is endearing, “They sleep for a little bit and keep dancing the rest of the day, because: drugs, ”

Theres a dearth of detail, and then there are surprisingly specific and comical details in the midst of abrupt non sequiturs: “Teddy Hoover loses his shoe during the home invasion.
”

There are anagrams and alien sex, The author knows what “nondiegetic” means, The author is a card,

The moments we are sure of death, we get unresolved and unresolvable tension instead,

We get parallel universes, even though this universe is its own parallel and may consist of anywhere from two to infinite dimensions.
We get cosmic horror, and our desire to believe in purpose is turned against us,

We also get some pages of commas and underscores, and some keyboard hammering,
Now I will stop, Oh yeah, I was probably supposed to put in that disclaimer where I mention that I received a reviewcopy of the book, but I have no personal connection to the author.
Im not a real reviewer, so its odd for me to review books from out of the blue, But this one turned out to be a good one, Cheers.
I won this book through a GoodReads Giveaway, and it is my first dip into the world of bizarro fiction.
As such, it's hard to rate on a star scale, which is inherently comparative, I've never read anything remotely comparable to this, It hasn't turned me away from the genre, but it hasn't exactly turned me on to it either,

If this book is about anything, which I'm not sure it is, it is about the apocalypse, It features a tumult of characters that occasionally recur but never develop, A lot of things happen, but the plot ever advances, There isn't really a plot at all, I'm not quite sure how I got through the hodgepodge of ramblings, but more than just get through it, I ripped through it in one sitting.
Why did I want to keep reading this book I didn't understand, knowing full well that there'd be no revelation at the end I have no idea.
Magic perhaps.

Along the way I learned about peradams and pataphysics,

I would never recommend this book to anyone, but I'm glad I read it, Someday, after much thought, I will have something of substance about this wonderful book, For now, I say that I love it and encourage everyone to pick it up, This probably my favorite of the Mike Kleine books Ive read, While the others feel like they are grabbed out of a larger universe and that is the design, this work seemed to be all encompassing.
Arafat Mountain as all the things, Bouncing off and looping back dozens of pages later to tie up or unravel further a loose idea,

I felt this was Kleine at their most literary, Some passages/musings in here I reread multiple times in the moment to gather more of their emotional complexity not something Ive done with later Kleine works as much things have leaned more abstract and I find the enjoyment of recent work comes from a breezy read through and then coming back to it much later for another full read through.


That signatures of later work is surely here but there was more indulgence in the pages of this one and emotional weight given to the characters, even if in silly or small ways.


A fun and funny read like all the others by Kleine Great work, .