Gojiro

Mark Jacobson's Gojro reinterprets the cultural legacy from the perspective of Godzilla, here named "Gojiro" in homage to the original Japanese name of Gojira. Gojiro, along with his friend Komodo, who was scarred by the bombing of Hiroshima, travels to Hollywood to make a new movie. Along the way, the two discuss the relationship of nature and man. Jacobson's plot revels in post-Cold War metaphysics, but there's very little character growth and Gojiro's angst-filled monologues and actions repel the reader.
As a fan of the Godzilla franchise and a student of Cold War culture, I really wanted to like this book and kept giving it a chance, but it's nearly impossible to get into and so overloaded with metaphysical jargon that the reader show more can't follow what's going on half the time. At times, Jacobson appears not to know if he's writing genre fiction with the goal of making his readers think, or a philosophical primer that uses genre elements to ground his thought experiments. The end result is something of a jumble best understood by those who tried to expand their consciousnesses during the height of the Cold War. show less

Growing up I was always a fan of Godzilla movies, in all their campy hooky glory, but really I always knew there was a level of political and philosophical idealism to them I could never appreciate because i was American, Marc Jacobson gave me a strange level of depth to how those movies effected me as a view for whom they were never really intended