Synopsis
Written in 1908 and hailed by artists such as Kandinsky, The Other Side describes a dream kingdom that becomes a nightmare and a journey to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia that is also a journey into the subconscious'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A difficult book to describe, since so much of its impact comes from the atmosphere of strangeness and the unsettling visionary quality of some passages. It recounts how the narrator, an artist, comes to live in the Dreamland, daily life in this odd place ruled by a distant and god-like monarch, and its ultimate catastrophic end.
So what's it like? It bears a resemblance to some of Haruki Murakami's work - especially Hard Boiled Wonderland. In fact I wonder if Murakami has read it? The only other remotely comparable work is Gustav Meyrink's The Golem - another obscure work by a European author dealing in the night-time of the mind.
Actually it is unlike anything. It's not even like itself.
So what's it like? It bears a resemblance to some of Haruki Murakami's work - especially Hard Boiled Wonderland. In fact I wonder if Murakami has read it? The only other remotely comparable work is Gustav Meyrink's The Golem - another obscure work by a European author dealing in the night-time of the mind.
Actually it is unlike anything. It's not even like itself.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
masterpiece of surrealism
29 Oct 2002
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Perhaps I should have said a masterpiece of fantasticism. I believe the author was an artist in the school of the fantastic or fantasmic in the early 20th century. His only work of literature, this book is truly one of the strangest pieces I have ever read. I was initially introduced to it by my college German prof who had a love for this kind of apochryphal lit, and passed on that love to me. I have since read this many, many times. I don't want to give too much away, but the basic story has a young man and his wife invited to live in a newly founded realm in Asia. This realm has been founded by an old school chum, Patera, whose concept is that only things that enhance moods can be permitted into the country, and these things should usually be old and have a kind of emotional evocative power, so to speak. The young couple find themselves in a realm of moods, both depression and manic, and it is a very strange trip, indeed. I recommend this book to anyone who doesn't have a compulsive need for analytical, linear reason in a book!
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
From pedestrian beginnings to a searing nightmare of reason.
31 Dec 2002
Format:Paperback
One senses that this indulgent and dazzling exercise in ferocious derangement and, arguably, allegory, must read less awkwardly in the original German. You will not read this for its literary style, which is clumsy at times, but for its pure, rarefied, winningly repulsive air of pre-War Euro-decadence, for its uncanny presentiments of the coming horrors of the 20th century, and for its profligate richness of bizarre imagery. The book is fuel for dreams of the weirdest kind. This is appropriate, because in it Kubin seeks to portray a "Dream Realm" -- very far from the one Morpheus rules over in The Sandman -- created at the whim of a ludicrously wealthy and myserious aristocrat. This Dream Realm, aka the city of Pearl, is situated in Asia, but represents, among other things, a vision of pre-industrial Europe stagnating, suppurating, and sinking into its indolent self -- but at least avoiding the horrors of modernization and liberalism! With a wink, then (the book is quite funny in a scabrous way), Kubin deals with such issues as race, the media, psychoanalysis, religion (gnosticism in particular), death, and sexuality. He does so inconclusively, but with unflagging inventiveness, and a real eye for the startling mental picture and the horrific detail.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
A prophetic classic
12 Sep 2002
Format:Paperback
Two aspects make this book worth reading today:
It was written 1908, before the world wars, and
its haunting images were most prophetic.
Secondly, a key idea makes this books both a psycholgical
and surreal experience: The mood of a man and the state of his
soul are mirrored in the physical and social state
of the city he reigns.
It was written 1908, before the world wars, and
its haunting images were most prophetic.
Secondly, a key idea makes this books both a psycholgical
and surreal experience: The mood of a man and the state of his
soul are mirrored in the physical and social state
of the city he reigns.
Alfred Kubin is better known for his illustrations (of say
E.A. Poe's short stories), and this is his only work of
fiction.
If you want a book where everything becomes clear at the end,
you want something else. If you enjoy being disturbed,
go ahead and read it!
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