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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Based in disaster-torn Los Angeles, this is an incredible piece of original writing, encompassing everything from a cynical statement on American society today through to our deepest and most personal experiences. Erikson has a wondrous way with words that head straight for the heart. Those who've enjoyed Michael Marshall Smith's twisted plots will particularly like this book.
Format:Paperback
I am not a great Erickson expert, but the part of Arc d'X I've read (I admit I had to stop reading it, though not because I disliked it) is way better than this novel.
Be it clear: Erickson is a very interesting writer, and this is an original novel. But it has it weak parts. The first 40 pages are not very exciting; the plot takes off when the protagonist and his girlfriend Viv start making an avantgarde porno short. Only then the reader realizes that it's a book on Los Angeles/Hollywood as a city of dreams, ghosts and fantasies. It is also a book on women (LA women, sang Jim Morrison), which is partly autobiographical partly oneiric.
Erickson's amnesiascape is science-fictional landscape, dreamscape, and something else in between. It is not the surrealistic quality of the narrative which bothers me. I like David Lynch, so I can appreciate weird plots and weird visions. But the problem here is that sometimes the intensity of Erickson's dream decreases and it plods. While some episodes run, or even fly. This suggested me that Erickson is a very good writer when he feels like, but here and there his inspiration fails him and he turns into a rather unfocused and slighly boring storyteller.
One might compare this novel to Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon, which covers a surprisingly similar fictional territory (maybe with less sex and less movies) to see what I mean: Lethem was not as accomplished a stylist when he wrote his second novel, but his imagination was way more creative and powerful than Erickson; it never let Lethem down.
So, all in all, I can admire Erickson's ambitious plan, I can enjoy the accomplished parts of this novel (which are excellent, and might be edited out and published as standalone short stories), but I have to warn you that some parts are rather disappointing (also the ending is a bit too weak). This is definitely not a good starting point if you want to see what Erickson's all about. IMHO Arc d'X is the one you should try before this one. This novel is probably only for Erickson completists.
Be it clear: Erickson is a very interesting writer, and this is an original novel. But it has it weak parts. The first 40 pages are not very exciting; the plot takes off when the protagonist and his girlfriend Viv start making an avantgarde porno short. Only then the reader realizes that it's a book on Los Angeles/Hollywood as a city of dreams, ghosts and fantasies. It is also a book on women (LA women, sang Jim Morrison), which is partly autobiographical partly oneiric.
Erickson's amnesiascape is science-fictional landscape, dreamscape, and something else in between. It is not the surrealistic quality of the narrative which bothers me. I like David Lynch, so I can appreciate weird plots and weird visions. But the problem here is that sometimes the intensity of Erickson's dream decreases and it plods. While some episodes run, or even fly. This suggested me that Erickson is a very good writer when he feels like, but here and there his inspiration fails him and he turns into a rather unfocused and slighly boring storyteller.
One might compare this novel to Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon, which covers a surprisingly similar fictional territory (maybe with less sex and less movies) to see what I mean: Lethem was not as accomplished a stylist when he wrote his second novel, but his imagination was way more creative and powerful than Erickson; it never let Lethem down.
So, all in all, I can admire Erickson's ambitious plan, I can enjoy the accomplished parts of this novel (which are excellent, and might be edited out and published as standalone short stories), but I have to warn you that some parts are rather disappointing (also the ending is a bit too weak). This is definitely not a good starting point if you want to see what Erickson's all about. IMHO Arc d'X is the one you should try before this one. This novel is probably only for Erickson completists.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
more emotion, less events.
20 July 1998
Format:Paperback
This is a great book, my personal favorite of Erickson's. The style is more confessional and deals more with the emotions of the charachers than the events of the story, which are typical of Erickson: shattered time zones and the chaos of a city caught in the aftermath of an apocalypic earthquake. The book reads like a dream and when you're done you can't remember what world you are meant to be a part of, you won't recognise your own house or your oface in the mirror. Reading this book, or any Erickson really, will completely redefine everything you ever took for granted. You'll never think the same way again. And it's worth it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
One of the most inventive novels of the past decade
22 Sep 2002
Format:Hardcover
It is a shame that this book is out of print, because it is one of those books that I would love to recommend to friends to read. The book is many things at once: provocative, sexy, imaginative, fun, sad. The back cover features a blurb comparing him to Pynchon, Nabokov, and DeLillo. Although I don't see the comparison to Nabokov, I would add my own comparisons: J. G. Ballard (especially books like CRASH and VERMILLION SANDS), William S. Burroughs, and even Neal Stephenson. The authors mentioned would prepare a would-be reader for the unexpected and the unusual; it might not prepare the reader for the beauty of his prose.
I fully expect this book to be in print again in the near future. Until then, I would urge any fan of literature to search this book out and read it. It is often beautiful, frequently haunting, and always original.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A dark illumination
6 Dec 2000
Format:Paperback
I liked this novel about as well as any I've read in a long time--though if you are looking for heavily plot-driven fiction, this may not be the book for you. Things *do* happen in Amnesiascope, conveyed through the narrator's hilarious, pathetic, decadent but conscience-ridden monologue, but this is a novel which is less about plot and much more about voice and place. Erickson's romantic-cynic narrator explores what's left of a millennial L.A., where strange, warped things exist without ever being quite fully explained, and the rest of the world goes on unchanged.
Stories involving a noir, Apocalyptic L.A. can sometimes be boring and cliched these days, but L.A.'s noir side works with bittersweet absurdity here. That is because it is written from within the heart of L.A., fully cognizant of the city's flaws, but with a crazy grief and a crazy love that goes deeper than the surface perceptions of this city often portrayed by the media. Amnesiascope (and L.A. and the narrator) is demented, cynical, and heartbreaking, but also a place where individuality flourishes; it is hallucinatory and real; erotic and kinky, but with a deep and struggling romanticism buried beneath the wreckage of the narrator's life and his ruined city. Because ultimately, this novel is a heroic call to keep living life on your own terms, to say the things that need to be said, to reinvent yourself every time a part of you is killed off, and most romantic of all, to keep trying to be free in a society that wants to box you up and define you by its own boring cliches.
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