Review by New York Times Review
MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI might be America's most successful experimental Action writer, which is a bit like being the world's tallest dwarf. It's not right to say that experimental fiction has been ghettoized - few ghettos are so elegantly art-directed - but its profile is as low as it is oddly shaped. The occasional experimental writer may get a small shimmer of publicity (David Markson, nice to have you aboard), but for the most part our weirdo formalists, our oddball language players, our "and this chapter you have to read upside down" acrobats are relegated to near invisibility. One sees Danielewski, however, all over the place. His hovel "Only Revolutions" was a National Book Award finalist in 2006, and its predecessor, "House of Leaves," has managed the more impressive feat of hopscotching past critical acclaim into the hands of actual readers. There aren't too many first novels published in 2000 that you can still find in airport bookstores, let alone ones chock-full of textual trickery, but "House of Leaves" remains a piece of experimental fiction that is read as much as it is appreciated. When you flip through "House of Leaves," it looks difficult - some pages resemble sparse E. E. Cummings poems, others dense Talmudic texts - but at its heart the novel is a ghost story, and it's to Danielewski's credit that the chills and thrills are visceral and well crafted. It's also what one remembers about the book. The secret doors and dark hallways stay in the brain, while the hypertextual asides and the ergotic layouts fade away, leading to the uneasy feeling that the book might be successful despite itself. The same might be said of Danielewski's new novella, "The Fifty Year Sword," which is another ghost story of sorts. The work previously appeared in small, private printings and as a live shadow play, but its arrival as a proper book again looks more complicated than it turns out to be, and that's a good thing. The novella consists entirely of dialogue - fragmented dialogue at that, a flurry of voices interrupting one another as they tell a story that also consists largely of fragmented dialogue. This nesting-doll approach is coded by speaker, with quotation marks of various sizes and colors to identify the players. Furthermore, there are stitched illustrations by the design collective Atelier Z, which decorate, interrupt and occasionally obliterate the text. But all this sounds more complex than it is. I entered "The Fifty Year Sword" prepared to be bewildered, but the color codes fade into the background as we're drawn into the narrative: at a party tense with marital discord, five orphans are entertained by a storyteller. His tale is something of a goth hero's quest - "I am a bad man with a very black heart," he begins - that leads him into the mountains, where his fellow climbers, trapped in bad weather, "pop up all over the mountain, always . . . swept away by mist before reappearing somewhere else." The words "somewhere else" are on their own page, the blank space around them giving us an extra punch - though one can't help wondering if these sorts of punches are worth the paper. "The Fifty Year Sword" is buoyed by Danielewski's deft hand with weird detail, not his rainbows of punctuation and enthusiasm for the tab key; the book has the feel of a fairy tale narrated by a Greek chorus - two traditions that are, to put it mildly, not exactly newfangled. "The Fifty Year Sword" is a successful piece of experimental fiction, but I just can't shake the urge to ask its creator if he might please stop experimenting. As with "House of Leaves," it's not the innovation that sticks, it's the story - even if that unsurprising fact is itself the oldest story in the book. Daniel Handler is the author, most recently, of "Why We Broke Up" and, as Lemony Snicket, "'Who Could That Be at This Hour?'"
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 28, 2012]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This first American edition of Danielewski's novella, published in a different form in the Netherlands in 2005, has the theatrical quality of a children's ghost story, complete with stitched-art illustrations (designed by the author), sweeping themes, and fairy-tale tropes. But the tale told by the Story Teller, hired to entertain the children, is nested in the all-too adult story of Chintana, a seamstress suffering through the aftermath of a painful divorce. The smallest daily rituals-opening a can of "bitter tea leaves," putting on shoes-require terrific force, and she has visions of inflicting violence. At her twin's urging, Chintana attends a Halloween party at an East Texas ranch, where she comes face-to-face with the source of her marriage's destruction and discovers the Story Teller's thirst for revenge. Danielewski (House of Leaves) knows that typographical landscaping can be a narrative tool. With rare exception, he unfurls his tale down one side of the page in quoted speech of different colors representing five orphans whose obscure connection is hinted at in an author's note; text is juxtaposed or shares space with illustrations. Tension builds visually; some scenes slows to a sentence per page (a trick the author's fans will recognize), vertically tearing the white space (readers resistant to textual hijinks may be frustrated). More of a narrative poem than a novella, this would be well suited to an oral reading and may be best thought of as an objet d'art that chillingly holds us accountable for our worst thoughts. Illus. Agent: WME Entertainment. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this brief, dark tale, Chintana attends a Halloween party where she encounters Belinda Kite, the woman who stole her husband, as well as five orphans. A mysterious stranger arrives carrying a box and tells a story about his travels around the world in search of a special weapon. The journey takes the teller through haunted regions until he finds a weapons dealer with an unusual set of swords. Some are capable of killing the sense of smell or taste, others certain colors, and still others take lives. The narrator is sold a sword in exchange for a memory, and when he concludes his story, the five children open the box he has brought. Chintana senses the children are in danger, but then her nemesis, Belinda, intervenes. VERDICT Absorbing, spooky, and playful, with copious illustrations but minimalist text, the narrative consists of a series of quotations from five narrators whose history is given in an ominous prelude that may or may not explain just what is going on. Shorter than the author's other two novels (House of Leaves; Only Revolutions), this new work offers a less demanding introduction to his unusual literary creations. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/12.]-Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sometimes arid, sometimes entertaining ghost story for grown-ups by pomo laureate Danielewski (House of Leaves, 2000, etc.). Chintana is in a bad mood. A talented seamstress, she's just been divorced, "forced/to acknowledge,/yet again,/to yet/another insitrusive customer,/her husband Pravat's surprising/departure." The odd portmanteau "insitrusive," apparently a blend of "insistent" and "intrusive," is emblematic; Danielewski likes nothing better than to make up words, with some coinages better than others. (The world flat-out does not need the verb "reconsiderate.") The odd hiccup-y breaks and caesuras also attest to Danielewski's method, which is to break what ought to be prose down into a sort-of-poetry--not terribly good poetry, that, and oddly punctuated, but still inhibiting a reader tempted to skim and speed. Chintana is stuck in East Texas, that grim place of horrors, her time spent in a house that has had more than one spectral guest in the past. Here, as with House of Leaves, Danielewski distinguishes speakers with quotation marks of different colors; even there, the jumble of words, matched by fugitive images, lends itself to a certain confusion, the printed effect of listening too closely to the dialogue of Robert Altman's Popeye. The story, as it is, has its charms, including the implement of the title, a very dangerous weapon that is powerless to produce a visible wound until its recipient turns 50: "Just as/quickly too he slid behind/me and I/felt a sting between/my shoulder blades/and then a fire and a cold and a sudden/something/seep of hurt." The spectral events and unspectral revelations that follow are sure not to improve Chintana's mood. After all, she's already feeling "desacreated." Like House of Leaves, likely destined to become a cult favorite. Harmless fun for those who aren't fans already.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
