What a charmer!This is exactly the sort of novel that I find myself groaningly -- nay, head-strikingly -- slogging through, page after page, in a fruitless quest for plot or message. Typical first-novel junk: a blocked writer, who cannot get over the decade-old loss of a woman, is pushed into the process of self-discovery by external forces. Do new writers write about anything else?But Russel Hoban is not a new writer, and this is not his first novel. More to the point, he is a good writer, and Medusa Frequency works. It works very, very well. While not a compelling page-turner, it lurks at the edge of the mind, waiting, a lyrical and playful retelling of an age-old story.That story is, of course, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Hoban twists into an analogy for the creative process. Got art trouble? The head of Orpheus will turn it into heart trouble for no charge. Trapped in the singular worldview of a first-person narrative? Buy one of the supporting characters a beer, and see what happens.All of this with Hoban's characteristic skewering of the arts. A viewing of an experimental film rings disturbingly true, and had me squirming in reminder of the seats at the Anthology Film Archives. "I don't think film people should be allowed near words, it's bad for everybody", Hoban says through the narrator, but clearly the opposite works out quite well.In many ways, the novel is Proustian, if one refuses to take Proustian to mean "a long rambling meditation on the past" and instead defines it as "exploring the workings of the mind through narrative":You know how you'll hear a sound while you're asleep and there comes a whole dream to account for it and in the dream there are things that happen before and after the soundAnd if such mind-wandering fails to grab you, there are plenty of likeable-fellow moments as the main character languishes around the month-old coffee cups in his cluttered apartment: In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff.Sounds like somebody's got a case of the -- well, you know.
What did I think? This is a strange little novel. If I didn't stop reading between chapters, I completely forgot what was going on, even if only a few hours passed. My favorite character was a disembodied head that was actually the hallucination of other characters. The writing involves some really fun word-play, including made-up words and some hilarious dialogue (kinda metafictional, or maybe just extremely dry, but either way I laughed out loud several times). Some of the reviews mention the science fiction element, which might have kept me away had I not been seeking out novels with references to the Netherlands, but the science part turned out to be such a small part, it was insignificant. Despite the 3-star rating, I am interested enough in Russell Hoban's work to read more.
Do You like book The Medusa Frequency (2002)?
I picked this up on a whim because I loved the structure and narrative of Riddley Walker. While this doesn't share the futuristic post-apocalyptic world of Riddley, it is no less bizarre. Much of the novel's dialogue occurs between the narrator and the disembodied, hallucinated head of Orpheus, which is both hilarious and jarring.The narrative is difficult to follow for the first half of the novel, but I eventually got used to the novel's patterns of unpredictability and existential woe.I recommend this as a short, perplexing, but satisfying read that shifts time and perspective in fits and starts.
—Zach
A clever little book, maybe a little too clever. But it's a quick read, and enjoyable along the way, and adds up to more than I thought it would. The Greek references are interesting, but a simple Wikipedia search will get you more or less up to speed on figures like Eurydice, Orpheus, Hermes, etc., and the book is perfectly readable with little to no knowledge of mythology. A lot of humor in here too; I chuckled out loud a number of times. In a lot of ways it reminded me of The Crying of Lot 49 - a lot of the stylistic tics here seemed out of Pynchon to me. Not a classic on my shelf, but definitely worth a read.
—Chad Walker
Weird, delightful, sad, and hilarious. A short novel in the first person. Herman Orff, a writer trying to write his third novel, becomes so desparate that he meets up with Istvan Fallok, his musician ex-friend. (At one point, the two of them both dated a woman named Luise. The love of their lives, and she dumped them both. She had dated Istvan first. Hence the ex-friend-ness.)So. Naturally, Istvan zaps Herman's brain with music from a machine. (Electrodes and everything.) This zapping leads to hallucinations that are supposed to help Herman write his third novel. These hallucinations star the severed, sea-soggy head of Orpheus, the mythical Greek fellow who invented music, who longs for Eurydice, who has trouble remembering his past.Further weirdness ensues, and Russell Hoban's infatuation with story, myth, art, loss, and humor shine through every page, often lyrically, but never indulgently.I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants a healthy dose of well-executed literary weirdness.
—Old Man Scaps
