Anna Moschovakis

Since the day of the big earthquake, the ground had not stopped moving. The aftershocks had been going for years, most people are on indefinite furlough (if they even have a job still waiting for them) and each tremor threatens to be the next big one. So people had learned to live with the shaking Earth.

If you expect to hear an explanation of what happened to get us here, that won't be the book for you. The unnamed narrator has no idea of what is going on outside of her own home (and show more occasionally in her neighborhood in the rare times when she ventures out). What she does know is that she burned her own career to the ground (she used to be an actress) and that her only way to survive is by trying to organize her own life and relying on others for most of her needs. That latter part becomes harder when her roommate disappears at the same time when our narrator starts entertaining ideas about disappearing her for good despite being dependent on her (and jealous and probably a bit in love with her at the same time) And through all that we get glimpses of the narrator's past - framed in the terms of Method acting which had made her who she was.

The overall frame of the novel sounds a lot like a play on Hegel's lord–bondsman dialectic - and with a good reason I suspect (the author has a BA in philosophy). I am not sure if the novel was supposed to be that or if it happened just because it makes sense based on where the author's interest lie - the acknowledgements essay mentions her interest in self-actualization and the Method but not Hegel. I am not sure if I am not projecting a bit because I just happened to read something about Hegel a few weeks ago and things just lined up in my mind. But then this is sometimes how connections are made I guess.

It is a novel which barely goes anywhere - it is about the inner world collapsing while the external world cannot stop moving. The author plays on that difference in speed successfully and that helps the narrative actually get a momentum. But it remains open ended - I do not think the plan was to ever answer the questions - the whole point was asking the questions. In that it succeeds. But if you pick up this one expecting a dystopian novel or even a conventional novel, you are likely to remain disappointed. show less

interesting!

i had high hopes for this book going in--i love its title, and was intrigued by its description of "hallucinatory"--and having read the full novel now, i think i was both satisfied and disappointed. this novel lost me and found me and lost me and found me again, and i think by the conclusion i have settled on "found" and on "liking" this book, but--i kind of want to just turn back to the beginning and read it over again, give everything a second look.

this is a book i want to show more annotate, and dissect, and write an essay about--not to share, but just to comprehend, to organize my own thoughts on it. fascinating work. inspired a little idea for a writing project i might or might not start. show less

Two short passages from Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love:

At this point, Eleanor's thinking became unfamiliar. Had she not been aware of just how familiar her thinking was to her in general, how expected it had become, even in its extremes, in its total enthusiasm and its total skepticism, its most rational gestures and its most impulsive ones? All of it now seemed dull and pathetic, as if thought were a giant mountain and she had spent her life so far considering one side show more of it only, attempting to scale it, duly scraping her hands and knees, her sights set on the mountains unattainable peak, without it ever once occurring to her - how stupid she'd been! - to relinquish her frontal perspective, to let the mountain become unrecognizable. As if it had never occurred to her to walk to the other side.

(I had experimented, after reading his comments, with removing the lover completely, which entailed among other things losing several scenes in which sex acts were described. But my decision to include these in the first place was made deliberately, in response to a sense – which I didn’t share with the critic now, too embarrassed to bring it up in person while still absorbing his candid marginal responses to my portrayal of said acts – that depictions of sex and sexual dynamics in novels, especially heterodynamics, especially in novels by women, tend to invite a particular kind of reductive critique, or else sensationalism when such dynamics happen to be central to a book. For reasons that remained obscure to me, I had an urge to face this vulnerability – to some extent, at least – rather than defend against it by writing a novel in which nobody fucks.) show less

Not sure what think or what I’m left with. Interesting enough to finish, a split narrative between a woman and the book she is writing about another woman, Eleanor. It never coalesced for me. I suppose that was the post-modern point. But it’s tedious.