Paul Bryant's Reviews > XX

My copy of this enormous behemoth arrived yesterday. Wow, it’s a thing of beauty. I stumbled over XX in Waterstones last week and had exactly the same thoughts as karen brissette

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

who if I may quote her says

this could either be GREAT and RIGHT UP MY ALLEY, or it could be A PRETENTIOUS NIGHTMARE

Exactly...

If you haven’t seen it XX is as much of an art object as it is a science fiction novel, It's full to bursting with this kind of thing –







plus a lot of actual normal pages containing characters and plot, I assume.

The first maximalist graphically wild novel I came across way back in 2000 was House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.



It was exciting to read but I didn’t end up loving it. Still, I was keen to get Mr Danielewski’s even more graphically CRAZY book The Familiar Volume 1, and that one remains the most beautiful novel I ever saw – alas, though, the story was for me unreadable tosh.



So I wasn't inclined to go for the full set of Familiars -



(Congratulations and a free hour of counselling for anyone who read all five.)

The third of these monster experimental novels I got was theMystery.doc by Matthew McIntosh and that was a 2.5 star near-disaster – again, fascinating and exciting to read until you got the idea the story itself was flimsy and egregiously navel-gazing.




So these huge intriguing graphic/printing/text design experiments mostly seem all dressed up with nowhere to go.

I hope this one turns out to be The One.