What a major dissappointment! After HOL, I couldn't wait for this. I bought it (silly me) without even bothering to open it up and scan a few pages, figuring it had to be good based on how good its fabulous predecessor was. What a waste of money! I'm all for experimentation...but this is simply experimentation for experimentations sake...so who cares? Not me. I wasn't around back when Finnegans Wake came out, but I've got to imagine that Joyce fans back then, who had waited nearly 20 years for the follow up to "Ulysses", must have experienced a similar dissappointment , only worse, when they realized after a few pages into FW that not only was it not anything like "Ulysses," but that it was completely meaningless.

I think it's fair to criticize me for comparing OR to HOL, rather than judging OR on its own terms, and coming to the text of OR with an open mind. I tried to. Believe me, I tried and tried. I read the first (or was it the last--or both?) 20 or so pages of OR again and again, trying to decode or decipher the text, but ultimately had to conclude that it was just bad prose poetry...gibberish, a pseudo-literary bowel movement a la Finnegans Wake, only, in ORs defense, a bit more readable. Can Danielewski maybe get away from being gimmicky and showing off how "creative" he can be and get back to writing fiction that doesn't sacrifice story for technique? Is that too much to ask from an obviously gifted writer? ( )

Disappointed. ( )

I had a lot of trouble getting started with this book. The presentation is fascinating and beautiful. It's really two books, from two perspectives: Sam and Hailey. Each story takes up half of each page. The publisher suggests you read 8 pages of one, then flip the book over and read 8 pages of the other. To me, this was very confusing because of the dates and the accompanying historical events that are on each page as well. Are Sam and Hailey living in the same time period? Are they some sort of time travelers? Eventually I just stopped looking at the dates, and just read the main text. The stories parallel each other a lot, but do have some differences of time periods (one will have WWI references while the same pages in the other will refer to Vietnam). Eventually, it got to be so it wasn't so confusing, and I was able to figure out what was happening. The "Only Revolutions" internet forum was also useful for helping me understand what was going on.
The novel gets an automatic 3 stars for being so, well, novel. Because it was so confusing, I ended up quitting on it, so it gets knocked down to two stars. Yes, that's right, I didn't finish the book and I'm still rating it. It's my blog. I understand why critics were raving about it. It's unique and interesting in the presentation. But ultimately, the story wasn't enough to make me struggle through the tedious language and free-form prose. I just wasn't into it. ( )

Maybe not the easiest book to describe. I see it as a kind of a road novel in free verse following the adventures and ramblings of two forever 16 year olds--Sam and Hailey and spanning the years 1863 to 2063. Included in the layout of every page are historical timelines and benchmarks the pivotal point at which Sam's voice is turned over to Hailey's is the Kennedy assassination in November of 1963--so each is given 100 years to describe the (same) events and the love they will share together ntil a bitter end separates them. Not altogether as chaotic as it may seem--it is not alway easy to follow either. There is an Ulysses (as in Joyce) like quality to Danielewski's work. He is in my mind the most ambitious american writer to come along in decades however whether most Joyce fans would agree with that comparison after reading both House of Leaves and Only revolutions I don't know. House of Leaves in a sense peters out with an almost cliched ending and though a great book it could be also described as a glorious failure because of its rather not unique ending. Of course that is only my opinion. Only revolutions likewise ambitious I think will be for many also very annoying--not only for a kind of structured use of free verse in which the two solipsistic and anarchic teenagers describe their adventures together--never growing old;(kind of like Oscar Matzerath's) and who aren't altogether always very sympathetic; but also for literary devices such as stretching or elongating or compacting multiple words into single ones thereby creating a language somewhat of their own. I have to say all in all I like the unusual formats and the ambition displayed by Danielewski in his work so far. It certainly isn't the same old same old. For that I'd give it a thumbs up. ( )

I once knew a young man who got hooked on speed long before it became the scourge and ubiquitious subject of the nightly news that it is today. He wrote me notes – rambling, chaotic in shape, full of meaningless drivel. I could not help remembering that incident nearly thirty years ago as I read this book.
Actually, I enjoyed Danielewski’s first novel, House of Leaves, which was experimental, but it did have the semblence of structure in the main text, and a reasonably recognizable structure in the footnotes. But, I am afraid he has gone off the deep end. His experimentation here seems to have grown into an affectation -- chaos for the sake of chaos.
If ever a book was meant to exemplify the benefits of the “Rule of 50,” this is it. Don’t waste your time or your money.
-Jim, 5/29/07 ( )