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1.0 out of 5 stars
Verbal flotsam, Aug 5 2003
By A Customer
For the past year, I had come across Steve Aylett's name several times; it had been crossreferenced with the names of authors about whom I'm particularly avid, such as Ballard and Ellis. This prompted me to pick up SHAMANSPACE. What a bitter disappointment. It is shameful that I invested money and time in this drivel---121 pages of nothing, in BIG PRINT so that your grandmother could read it.Even at 121 pages, in LARGE PRINT, the book is too long. I have no problem with linguistic expansion or inventive/neologistic writing, but this is mere verbal waste: one empty, meaningless sentence follows another, with no connection between them. The surrealistic experiments (SOLUBLE FISH, THE MAGNETIC FIELDS) had a formal consistency to them; this "book" has none. In other words, it doesn't follow the logic of the world, but neither does it even have an INTERNAL LOGIC. The prose poetry is lifeless, graceless, and bad; Alett dispenses with the usual cliches and invents his own, which are infinitely more insipid. SHAMANSPACE resembles the "work" of Mark Leyner without the humor or occasional cleverness (I do not say this to praise Leyner, who is nearly as execrable a writer). If any good could come from this trifle, it will be an enhanced feeling of self-confidence on the part of ordinary readers who will now be emboldened to publish their laundry lists. A complete throwaway.
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