Vanessa Place
Paperback | Pages: 488 pages Rating: 4.03 | 86 Users | 20 Reviews
Point Appertaining To Books La Medusa
| Title | : | La Medusa |
| Author | : | Vanessa Place |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 488 pages |
| Published | : | August 10th 2008 by Fiction Collective 2 |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Novels. Literature |
Interpretation As Books La Medusa
La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.
"Is the brain all these little movies, one synapsing into the next? Or I mean is culture that? Who are all those people on the freeway next to me, or dying in the blink of an eye when I forget about them. Vanessa Place's La Medusa is a novel of a million (I am sure there is a more precise count) brilliant suggestions about the mind and time and us. What seems impossible is that she is pulling "it" off in this impressive tome that moves like traffic when you have gotten it impossibly incredibly light. No wrong moves here. We get home fast." —Eileen Myles
"Dazzling and daze-inducing, Vanessa Place dares to ask the dangerous question: What happened to Modernism? Why did what was ambitious, difficult, serious and experimental in Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Beckett give way to a glittering string of infinite jests - high-wire acts, virtuosity, transcendental Camp? La Medusa returns to James Joyce's Ulysees to find the inspiration for an investigation into the nature of experience. Los Angeles takes the role of Dublin. The brain and its double cortex generate the stylistic intricacies that the organs and senses do in Joyce. And this is above all a Female Epic in which the swirling city-universe is explored and shaped by the petrifying eye and intellect of the wily Medusa, her coiling locks extending everywhere. "
—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW Public Radio
"La Medusa, Vanessa Place's monumental polyvalent, polyglot epic novel of Los Angeles in which the postmodern morphs into random-access postcontemporary, in which the device of the narrative text in film script form has replaced that of the epistolary novel, is like a shocking rock slide of polished stones of the first water, cut by master jeweler, faceted into ten thousand-and-one sides — and the whole spill run in relative slow motion with no drag, no yawns, all be-bop, hip-hop Now. And sardonic: it zaps, out Fante-ing Fante and out-Rechy-ing Rechy. Looked at metaphorically in terms of motion pictures, Medusa is an epic silent, as long as Von Stroheim's Greed and every bit as cumulatively powerful. But one thing is certain: no matter how good the picture may turn out to be, the book will definitely have been better." —James McCourt
Mention Books In Pursuance Of La Medusa
| Original Title: | La Medusa |
| ISBN: | 1573661457 (ISBN13: 9781573661454) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Appertaining To Books La Medusa
Ratings: 4.03 From 86 Users | 20 ReviewsComment On Appertaining To Books La Medusa
Radical, beautiful interconnectivity and obscure correlation.This mega-novel of de-centralized consciousness, the collective consciousness and polyphony of voices of a city without borders, is a monolithic construction, but not a seamless or impenetrable one. Instead, it's a kind of open structure bleeding out in every simultaneous direction, each bit an access point, if possibly a mysterious one. The bindings barely contain it, as I said with Infinite Jest, it seems to be continue infinitelyVanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press/Random House. Information As Material
Images and ideas remain: c-store pies, soft bodily expression. A sound feast. Read this before scholars on hovercraft discover it in the year 2056.
I gave up on this book, and I'm really sad about it. It's 488 pages long (I know Goodreads says it has over 600, but I double-checked), I'm halfway through, and I still have no sense of plot or direction, so all I keep thinking about are all the other books that I want to read. The writing is BEAUTIFUL, but the alternating characters tend to be static in their actions. Dr. Bowles will come back repeatedly, always in his car, thinking. Myles P and Stella have stopped in Needles, CA, and for
Each metropolis preselects its suicide like an officer packs a capsule, for if a city lives by remembering, mein Leibnitz Herr, the opposite must also be true, ergo a city dies from forgetting, and such death is by the citys own hand, it turns it neglected bungalows to gallows and potholes its veins.Wasn't Leibnitz snowed in somewhere and instead of completing a mathematical treatise, instead developed a system for irrigation? I recall reading that somewhere in the shadowed corridors of my
At a cottage recently, a friend of mine picked up this book and read the back: 'A polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness.' He looked at me dubiously and said, 'You knew this and still wanted to read it?' I agreed that I had. Chunks of free verse and be-bop and concrete poetry, divided into lobes, like a brain. Several characters chiming in. Something about a dead guy, an abused kid, a truck driver and his wife, a doctor, and the Beverly Hillbillies. Pictures of the lobes, to assist in
3 stars for fun, 5 stars for importance, so 4 stars total (you can see how arbitrary a star-system [no, not the one that destined our existence {but maybe that, too?}] really gets).I struggled more with this book than I have with any book in a long ass time, to be frank. I think due in large part to Place's context as a poet--much of this prose is really kinetic poetry, wrapped around loose concepts of narrative and character. The scenes and interactions are incredible--and I'm sure one could
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