Some Words

In the next few days I am going to finish Lolita, and I will have more to say about it then. For the moment though, it has become clear that I’m a bit blocked about what I’m writing. So I’m taking a moment for the other book I’ve read in the past few days.

As I sat staring at the screen, I started thinking about Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World which I finished in just over two days. It’s 400 pages. I say just over two days because I only had 21 pages after day two. I just had to go to sleep at that time.

It’s a rare book, in my eyes, in that I read through it quickly, but felt that there was a lot worth thinking about in it. The construction of the two entwining plots is impressive. It reminded me a bit of how Nabokov would bring little bits or images back, almost as background noise. It’s easier to say that, given that I’ve also been reading Lolita again, but I don’t have a better way of putting it. Usually that slows me down. I find myself going back and checking. For some reason that didn’t happen with Hard Boiled, but it still didn’t end up feeling light. Though it read like light reading.

Spoilers will follow.

I felt that in the end, the thought experiment broke down a bit. The shadow/person dichotomy of the End of the World portion of the novel left me a bit curios as to how the shadow’s suicide could effect the narrator in the Hard Boiled Wonderland narrative. If the shadow is the mind, then sure, the death of the mind fits with the first narrative, but I had taken the river in plot two to be the output of the program in plot one. If that were the case, the shadow dives into the output of the program, releasing it into plot one, just when plot one is supposed to end in functional brain death. Maybe I read too much into the river as a symbol. The book makes that kind of thing easy. I also felt that the sudden turn around, while believable as the action of a consciousness constructed by a self constructed world, seemed a little sudden. That’s just nitpicking though. A surprisingly fun book, given how melancholy it left me feeling at the end.