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Indlæser... Trump Sky Alphaaf Mark Doten
Books Read in 2023 (1,070) Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. This curate's egg of an experimental novel reminded me more than a little of the storied sandwich of many a joke which consists of two luscious slices of bread with an odious meat inserted between; it begins with an intriguing (if presented with the unpleasant literary parlor trick of twentysome pages of runon sentences) narration of World War III being initiated by the President of the United States as he pilots the flagship of his worldwide zeppelin passenger fleet, and ends with a hilarious sendup of his rhetorical style as he narrates the last day of the world as we know it. In between, unfortunately, one must wade through two hundred pages of a leaden (but nonetheless thin), uninteresting, fragmentary, at times incomprehensible, plot presented mostly with huge dollops of computer jargon and internet in-references. Contrary to the reviews, this book is rarely funny; I've not read a blacker book, and I'm hardpressed to think of a single likable character herein, certainly not the narrator, who manages to be at one and the same time self-hating and ego-tripping. If you come to this with a solid background in computer lingo and chatroom bafflegab and low expectations, you might not be let down. ( ) I mean, I don't know. I read this at the wrong time, and I knew it. It was just a race between the "for-sell-by" date on the internet and twitter references passing and my interest in it. Can I even critique this in any meaningful way? I've emerged feeling like I'm trying to evaluate sober the movie you saw drunk last night. Yes, I mean, I know what happened, but I can't say anything about it. And, it's not just, I think, a case of the usual aggrievement for me (although it is, also, that, to be honest): namely, the mainstream/non-genre writer doing genre shit and not caring enough/being willing enough/having balls enough to actually treat their genre shit like genre shit, the Leftovers [both novel and series] being the case par exemplar, although it operates a bit differently here. There, they're dismissing the genre in the service of a general Flattening Out of everything. Here, we have an MFA-ish novelist writing something genre that doesn't understand those beats [ending the final twenty pages with her editor and his troubles and the two of them deciding whether or not to run for it while in the snow at prospect park and ending with a line of them doing it like this is the fucking Giver or something or that we're supposed to feel anything about either of them as characters or even together (??) ~ the thirty page internet meme deathhole disquisition leading itself to ... where?], something satirical that doesn't actually know what it's satirizing [the gd hot air balloon, and the final livestreamrambling speech are heightened, exaggerated representations of a core trumpiness, but so heightened as to mask the fact that his general "point" about trump and the situation is -- in addition to just being jumbled -- wholly based on fear of his nuclear rashness, something that needn't be heightened along the lines of the blimp], something experimental that spends much of its time in straightforward narrativization/prose/plot land [as if he just got tired of it all after that twenty-page, unbroken-paragraph opening section, which (most damningly) was not even that engaging] something surreal that spends most of its time in Normy land [the general's unexpected BJ], and something political that doesn't care about politics [think about Birdcrash -- who is the villain here?] Regardless, the story: post-nuclear apocalypse, near 300 million dead in US [ha, come on man], caused by Trump but after a worldwide internet outage by some hacktivist collective days before that spurred global upheaval, in the aftermath a reporter works on an article abt internet humor and we thus see chapters devoted to reimagining actual meme culture as it would look applied to the apocalypse, and from here she is kidnapped and tortured by the dude who took down the internet [drilling holes in her head] cause he's crazy and wants to make an internet of birds [ok that's the best part].
...a funny book and a sad one, a bright one and a dark one, a distant sci-fi dystopia and a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy. It imagines a world in which the president — the actual current president, albeit in fictional form — has ordered a nuclear strike and wiped out much of the world’s population, after which he travels over what remains of the blasted planet in an obnoxiously lavish airship, dispatching a stream of dunderheaded, self-justifying tweets as he goes. The beginning is outrageous fantasy but reads like transcription. Doten channels Trump’s verbal tics and rhetorical poverty so perfectly it’s chilling. (“Happy to be flying back to NYC! Beautiful night! Fake News Media WRONG as usual!!!” he tweets, as horrific destruction unfolds below.) ...Dizzy with metaphor, “Trump Sky Alpha” is a cautionary tale for a time when we have become inured to flashing yellow all around. May this fiction, for one, not leave the page. A blistering and heartbreaking satire in which president Trump brings about a nuclear apocalypse.... Featuring a disturbing not-so-distant future, Doten’s novel is haunting, incisive, and surprisingly touching. An acid satire that might have been funnier in sunnier times.
"One year after the president has plunged the world into nuclear war, a journalist takes refuge in the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone. On assignment, she documents internet humor at the end of the world, hoping along the way to find the final resting place of her wife and daughter. What she uncovers, hidden amid spiraling memes and twitter jokes in an archive of the internet's remnants, are references to an enigmatic figure known only as Birdcrash, who may hold the key to an uncertain future."--Amazon.com. No library descriptions found. |
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