A Revelation from Njihia Mbituru: Alfred Bester’s, The Stars My Destination. Synaesthesia. Lead into gold and back. Prose that bends and twists back in on itself (and on the page too). Dread. Heat. Vertiginous delight. Foyle in his floating closet at the beginning of the novel, adrift and alone, full of a rage impossible for a single body to contain yet which is sustained through the novel and out past its completely beguiling end. Reading this fine book is every time for me like doing a headstand on a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling fragmentation grenades. It seems that something is already going wrong—that is, counter to the general run of aesthetic pleasures you get from a book—and that therefore one ought to stop, or implode. But of course that does not happen because the opposite feels equally true: this is, you begin to suspect, the singular reading experience—that Plato is right and there are Forms and the point-to-point parity of reader and text—of this wonderful book and me, is that of ideal Reader and Ideal Book. And then the book’s over, and I’m not sure anymore. Every time. In fact, I’m not the same person I was, and to figure out the how and why of it I’d have to read the book again, test this new guy’s impressions and assessments against the other one, the man who began the book. And to do that, is to be changed again, and again. But really it’s just a great, great book, sloppy & and dashdownily corny in parts but so fun and daring I generally don’t care. And like all great books its scenes, images, set pieces, locales & characters become as memory, indistinguishable from those of your own life. Gully Foyle’s adventures are yours, and perhaps a little of the man himself too, and he is you. Check out Njihias recollections of growing up an SF fan in Kenya:
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 20:25:43 +0000
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