True to its name and as is clear to see, our country possesses an unfathomable geography. Unfathomable geography be damned, the unnameable country must be real because they're working invincible roundtheclock to invent it, depriving limbs lips ears, horsewhipping furiously for dream of curving and straight streets, edifices, architecture, yes, but also geography, whole rivers dammed and forded, pits dug, perished workers thrown into: let them cry out in joy, Quincy would yell, let them realize their place is here and nowhere else, planting spiders, cultivating webs, harvesting thread for wear or garrison.I kept falling asleep while reading Fire in the Unnameable Country; I honestly couldn't get through more than 20 pages of it before my eyelids started drooping. And it's not because it's boring exactly, but with precisely zero science to back me up, I think that this book -- with its quasi-invented language and choppy style -- was engaging (and exhausting) a different part of my brain than what I ordinarily use for reading.
Recall, though I have yet to tell you…this book includes: thoughtreels; spidersilk; The Mirror; Black Organs; young men who handle raisins or blow pepper or eat raw onions like apples in order to connect with their creativity; young women who read thoughts on shortwave radios or loom hosiery or feed blood to dying ghosts; and a higgledy-piggledy overview of one man's genealogy -- and the lamentable history of the unnameable country in which he lives -- told by a character with glossolalia (someone who also happened to gestate in his mother's womb for 8 1/2 years and was finally born on a flying carpet).
I read this book based on this article (which I only skimmed to avoid spoilers), but reading it now, it explains Ghalib Islam's process and intent for Fire in the Unnameable Country so I won't repeat it here. I do think, however, that he put some clues into this book like:
he is not a political man, but a writer in the style of certain modernists for whom poetry is a description of the effects of war on language.And:
let us no longer delay the inevitable…now that you realize the author was only designing another hoop-and-fire game for you to play, to jump through for his entertainment.On this book's cover, Margaret Atwood invokes Calvino and Burroughs, but I was able to read If On a Winter's Night A Traveler and Naked Lunch without falling asleep -- this style is wholly the author's own. And it's interesting that it's Atwood on the cover -- according to that article cited above, she served as Islam's mentor during the writing of this book, which likely explains the many anti-American passages, like:
No, we could not love the Americans because they had imprisoned us with mirror-streets and spied on us with everywhere cameras of a counterfeit movie set; they had burned us with a deceptive phosphorescent fire, which resisted water, and had deprived us of the ability to earn an honest living and driven us to hidden organs of income.This review is a favourable one that does a good job of explaining the art of Islam's effort and this review sums up my own reading experience:
Fire in the Unnameable Country is yet another of these wow-filled books by wildly ambitious, wildly talented new writers that are impressive to hear about as literary constructions but not especially enjoyable to read as actual novels. Islam has a lot to say, perhaps too much in this vertiginous first effort.
