Publication
Pantheon (2015), Editie: 1st, 880 pagina's
Physical description
880 p.; 6 inches
ISBN
0375714944 / 9780375714948
Language
Collections
Series
Description
From the universally acclaimed, genre-busting author of House of Leaves comes a new book as dazzling as it is riveting . . . A page-turner from start to finish, ranging from Southeast Asia to Mexico to Venice, Italy, and Venice, California, with characters as diverse as a therapist-in-training whose daughters prove far more complex than her patients, an ambitious East-L.A. gang member hired for violence, two scientists on the run in Marfa, Texas, a recovering addict in Singapore summoned by a powerful but desperate billionaire, a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine just might augur far more than he suspects, and at the very heart a 12-year-old girl who one rainy day in May sets out from Echo Park to get a dog only to find something else . . . something that will not only alter her life but threaten the world we all think we know and the future we take for granted.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member JimElkins
Danielewski is a rum novelist. He has affinities to experimental, conceptual, hypertextual, metafictional, and other avant-garde writing, but his versions of those practices are awkward. He has the same relation to contemporary experimental fiction as David Reed had to abstraction in the 1980s, or
I think this continuous partial misunderstanding of avant-gardes is true both of Danielewski's writing and his graphics.
1. Writing
"The Familiar" is a combination of nine narratives -- the number evokes of the lives of a cat, which is also a "familiar." Various ethnicities, nationalities, trades, and classes are diligently and exhaustively represented, using clichés of places, characters, situations, and narratives. The writing is plot-driven in the way that trade paperbacks commonly are. Here is an example, from a scene with two policemen:
"Long time, Oz," Officer Nyra Carlton bristles. And smiles. Same as when she had her clothes off. Always bristling. And smiling. "Still think I'm a bitch?"
"Well some people think I'm an asshole."
"You're kidding," Nyra smiles. "Who thinks you're not an asshole?" (p. 163)
This is trade paperback writing. "Bristles" is a cliché. It's hackneyed writing to add "And smiles" as a separate sentence. And the line about "when she had her clothes off" is almost a parody of bad pulp paperback fiction.
Some readers will want to understand this as broad parody. It is intentionally broad, but it is not parody, because there is no ironic distance: the policeman "bristling" and imagining the woman naked are the sort of mechanisms drive the story forward. But with writers like Richard Price around, why read characterizations like this?
I think Danielewski imagines that clichés of ethnicity and identity are meliorated by the interpolation of Armenian, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese characters. But graphical details like that they merely interrupt pages of serviceable prose. The chapters with the character jingjing, for example, are awkward in comparison to William Gibson's evocations of mixtures of Chinese and English, or even to David Mitchell's.
2. Graphics
Danielewski is known for the visual nature of his books, and that is what prompted me to read this. (In connection with the writingwithimages project.) But his typography and design are gauche and often poorly thought through. Some examples, divided because they're separately debatable:
(a) Characters are identified by typefaces. There is a list at the end of the book, which is helpful for learning the books' characters. But if you're going to alternate typefaces, why choose such common ones? Why represent the book's main character, the girl Xanther, with Minion? (Is it a private joke, because she's something of a minion?) Why use Garamond, Imperial, Baskerville, and other common faces? It makes a small amount of sense to represent the Chinese character jingjing with a monospace font, rotis semi sans, because Chinese typefaces include monospace roman for transliterations of non-Chinese words, but other than that none of the matches make sense.
(b) And why print the default fonts so large? One character, Özgür, is represented by an enormous boldface Baskerville, which makes the pages of Danielewski's book look like they're printed for people who need large print to see. The pages scream for no reason.
(c) There are some effective graphic interventions, such as a series of double-page spreads in which a line about counting raindrops becomes streaks of rain, but many more that make almost no sense. Each chapter begins with a color illustration; the chapter title and an epigraph are superimposed in text boxes with black borders. The colors are bright, sometimes garish -- more like advertising or cheap science fiction than like serious graphics, photographs, or illustrations. The borders around the text boxes make them look like what they are: badly done homemade desktop publishing. Many of the images are manipulated using the simplest tools and filters: he would have been better advised to let someone else do the work for him. In this respect the graphics in "The Familiar" are like the awkward homemade graphics in William Gass's "The Tunnel," which he once told me -- unbelievably -- were intended to be as ham-fisted as the narrator's writing.
(d) The upper outside corner of each page is colored, with the colors keyed to the characters and chapters. Again the colors are garish and seem randomly chosen. Danielewski either has no color sense, or he is trying to go for maximum visibility, Edward Tufte fashion.
(e) The Astair and Xanther chapters make use of multiple parentheses. For example:
"As might be expected with such a ridiculous (and arrogant(?) (even wince-worthy) pursuit ("Quest!" Fabler had shouted in his office) the paper had not come easily." (p. 121)
But expressive punctuation has been done so much more expressively, so much more inventively, so much more wildly and sensitively, by Arno Schmidt. In other chapters the parentheses serve more logical purposes, for example:
"Astair had no doubt (though) that when Xanther saw the dog (((might have happened already (even now?) when) she threw those gangly arms around its neck (petted it and brushed it (and later walked it and watered it and fed it))) when she named it) all Astair's doubts would join that dim... (p. 445)
But this has been done so much more excessively by Raymond Roussel in "New Impressions of Africa."
(f) The unintentionally hokey and gauche quality of the graphics extends to the cover design (thick laminated, with a punch-through number "one" and a diagonal cut flap) and even to the endorsements: on the half-title page, they are typeset to run diagonally down the page and into the gutter, as if to suggest there are many of them. Each is surrounded by a little microscript frame, reading "praise praise praise." But the device of running boxes is uninteresting, over-familiar, and unspecific to the subject: it is the rote application of an inappropriate, unmotivated graphic device.
I won't conclude this review, because there are 26 more volumes coming; the second is about to be released as I write this. So these themes may need revisiting.
Show More
George Rochberg or Alfred Schnittke had to postmodern music: that is, he produces unmodulated juxtapositions of styles and modes, in the assumption that they produce new and expressive effects. Danielewski is also similar to Reed in that his books are popular facsimiles of really challenging avant-garde practices. I think this continuous partial misunderstanding of avant-gardes is true both of Danielewski's writing and his graphics.
1. Writing
"The Familiar" is a combination of nine narratives -- the number evokes of the lives of a cat, which is also a "familiar." Various ethnicities, nationalities, trades, and classes are diligently and exhaustively represented, using clichés of places, characters, situations, and narratives. The writing is plot-driven in the way that trade paperbacks commonly are. Here is an example, from a scene with two policemen:
"Long time, Oz," Officer Nyra Carlton bristles. And smiles. Same as when she had her clothes off. Always bristling. And smiling. "Still think I'm a bitch?"
"Well some people think I'm an asshole."
"You're kidding," Nyra smiles. "Who thinks you're not an asshole?" (p. 163)
This is trade paperback writing. "Bristles" is a cliché. It's hackneyed writing to add "And smiles" as a separate sentence. And the line about "when she had her clothes off" is almost a parody of bad pulp paperback fiction.
Some readers will want to understand this as broad parody. It is intentionally broad, but it is not parody, because there is no ironic distance: the policeman "bristling" and imagining the woman naked are the sort of mechanisms drive the story forward. But with writers like Richard Price around, why read characterizations like this?
I think Danielewski imagines that clichés of ethnicity and identity are meliorated by the interpolation of Armenian, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese characters. But graphical details like that they merely interrupt pages of serviceable prose. The chapters with the character jingjing, for example, are awkward in comparison to William Gibson's evocations of mixtures of Chinese and English, or even to David Mitchell's.
2. Graphics
Danielewski is known for the visual nature of his books, and that is what prompted me to read this. (In connection with the writingwithimages project.) But his typography and design are gauche and often poorly thought through. Some examples, divided because they're separately debatable:
(a) Characters are identified by typefaces. There is a list at the end of the book, which is helpful for learning the books' characters. But if you're going to alternate typefaces, why choose such common ones? Why represent the book's main character, the girl Xanther, with Minion? (Is it a private joke, because she's something of a minion?) Why use Garamond, Imperial, Baskerville, and other common faces? It makes a small amount of sense to represent the Chinese character jingjing with a monospace font, rotis semi sans, because Chinese typefaces include monospace roman for transliterations of non-Chinese words, but other than that none of the matches make sense.
(b) And why print the default fonts so large? One character, Özgür, is represented by an enormous boldface Baskerville, which makes the pages of Danielewski's book look like they're printed for people who need large print to see. The pages scream for no reason.
(c) There are some effective graphic interventions, such as a series of double-page spreads in which a line about counting raindrops becomes streaks of rain, but many more that make almost no sense. Each chapter begins with a color illustration; the chapter title and an epigraph are superimposed in text boxes with black borders. The colors are bright, sometimes garish -- more like advertising or cheap science fiction than like serious graphics, photographs, or illustrations. The borders around the text boxes make them look like what they are: badly done homemade desktop publishing. Many of the images are manipulated using the simplest tools and filters: he would have been better advised to let someone else do the work for him. In this respect the graphics in "The Familiar" are like the awkward homemade graphics in William Gass's "The Tunnel," which he once told me -- unbelievably -- were intended to be as ham-fisted as the narrator's writing.
(d) The upper outside corner of each page is colored, with the colors keyed to the characters and chapters. Again the colors are garish and seem randomly chosen. Danielewski either has no color sense, or he is trying to go for maximum visibility, Edward Tufte fashion.
(e) The Astair and Xanther chapters make use of multiple parentheses. For example:
"As might be expected with such a ridiculous (and arrogant(?) (even wince-worthy) pursuit ("Quest!" Fabler had shouted in his office) the paper had not come easily." (p. 121)
But expressive punctuation has been done so much more expressively, so much more inventively, so much more wildly and sensitively, by Arno Schmidt. In other chapters the parentheses serve more logical purposes, for example:
"Astair had no doubt (though) that when Xanther saw the dog (((might have happened already (even now?) when) she threw those gangly arms around its neck (petted it and brushed it (and later walked it and watered it and fed it))) when she named it) all Astair's doubts would join that dim... (p. 445)
But this has been done so much more excessively by Raymond Roussel in "New Impressions of Africa."
(f) The unintentionally hokey and gauche quality of the graphics extends to the cover design (thick laminated, with a punch-through number "one" and a diagonal cut flap) and even to the endorsements: on the half-title page, they are typeset to run diagonally down the page and into the gutter, as if to suggest there are many of them. Each is surrounded by a little microscript frame, reading "praise praise praise." But the device of running boxes is uninteresting, over-familiar, and unspecific to the subject: it is the rote application of an inappropriate, unmotivated graphic device.
I won't conclude this review, because there are 26 more volumes coming; the second is about to be released as I write this. So these themes may need revisiting.
Show Less
LibraryThing member greeniezona
What on Earth possessed me to buy this book? I mean, of course I know, I was there. I loved House of Leaves so deeply, and then when I finally wasn't too intimidated to read it, I loved Only Revolutions, too. So one day when we were on our way to Grand Rapids, and I didn't have a book with me to
Never mind the fact that this is the first book in what's going to be a 123 book series (slight exaggeration). Never mind that each book is sure to be a 900 page behemoth like this one. Never mind that 880 pages color-cded so that you can keep track of which narrator is speaking is hardly what anyone would call a summer read.
If you know Danielewski, you know this is complicated book.
I have complicated feelings about this book.
For one, I loved Xanther right away. Xanther who seems to be the main narrator out of all the many narrators of this book. Xanther who is prone to obsessive thought processes, who cannot help but follow her brain down wandering/wondering rabbit holes about how many raindrops are falling. Xanther who gets the best word art.
I did not love Zhong. First of all, I've never been much of a fan of writing in vernacular. Add to Zhong's vernacular the use of slang and also words in multiple languages. It feels like trying too hard. And reading it is harder because it's so occasional. You can't get into the groove of how to read Zhang when you're a dozen pages in and you switch to a new narrator, having to start all over again with Zhang hundreds of pages later.
I'm thinking of this like a graphic novel -- there's a lot of set-up to do with world building and character introductions and the whole story might unfold over a hundred issues, so that first trade paperback is really just sort of a teaser, it hardly gets you into the story at all. I am interested enough in Xanther and Astair (Xanther's mother) and the familiar that I've bought the second volume. Hopefully there I'll get more buy-in to some other characters. We'll see.
Show More
read in the car (unacceptable!), when we stopped at Barnes and Noble on the way and had wandered around and around without anything catching my eye... Well, this was sure to at least be interesting.Never mind the fact that this is the first book in what's going to be a 123 book series (slight exaggeration). Never mind that each book is sure to be a 900 page behemoth like this one. Never mind that 880 pages color-cded so that you can keep track of which narrator is speaking is hardly what anyone would call a summer read.
If you know Danielewski, you know this is complicated book.
I have complicated feelings about this book.
For one, I loved Xanther right away. Xanther who seems to be the main narrator out of all the many narrators of this book. Xanther who is prone to obsessive thought processes, who cannot help but follow her brain down wandering/wondering rabbit holes about how many raindrops are falling. Xanther who gets the best word art.
I did not love Zhong. First of all, I've never been much of a fan of writing in vernacular. Add to Zhong's vernacular the use of slang and also words in multiple languages. It feels like trying too hard. And reading it is harder because it's so occasional. You can't get into the groove of how to read Zhang when you're a dozen pages in and you switch to a new narrator, having to start all over again with Zhang hundreds of pages later.
I'm thinking of this like a graphic novel -- there's a lot of set-up to do with world building and character introductions and the whole story might unfold over a hundred issues, so that first trade paperback is really just sort of a teaser, it hardly gets you into the story at all. I am interested enough in Xanther and Astair (Xanther's mother) and the familiar that I've bought the second volume. Hopefully there I'll get more buy-in to some other characters. We'll see.
Show Less
LibraryThing member amanda4242
Ugh. An unpleasant collection of stereotypes masquerading as characters doing very little worth mentioning. I'll grant Danielewski the benefit of the doubt and say that he might just have been setting-up things for the other 20-odd books in the series, but it seems like he is saying, to quote one
Show More
of the few decent lines in the book, "I've said what matters...but all that matters he had shouted in an unintelligible way." Show Less
LibraryThing member jrthebutler
Volume 1 of a 27 part series. 830 pages covering 5 or 6 different story lines; the main one? An epileptic girl goes to get a dog, but finds something else.
LibraryThing member Wolfman08
This first volume (of a planned 27 volumes) of The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski is very much an introduction to a series. There are multiple story lines, but the main one focuses on a twelve year old girl (Xanther) who is soon to acquire a new pet on a rain soaked Los Angeles day.
Each chapter
Anyone who has read Danielewski's other works (House Of Leaves, The Fifty Year Sword, Only Revolutions) will be familiar with the unique style that he brings to the table with the unusual format of text littering these pages. Some pages have only a single word, while others have an immense amount ("How many raindrops?") which are made to look like what the character is looking at (a rainstorm).
I found some of the characters more engaging (Xanther and her parents ([Anwar] and (Astair)), Oz, Luther) and others less so (Jingjing). With this many stories and characters, favouritism for some is always a likely possibility.
Given the number of characters and story lines introduced in this novel, even with 800 plus pages, we don't spend a significant amount of time with anyone but Xanther and her family. This means that there is little in the way of plot advancement for many of these characters (how much can happen in one day?) - it's mainly sequences of 'slice of life' moments that we see in this volume.
In order to get the most out of the book, you need to think of The Familiar as a television series and One Rainy Day In May as episode number one. If you can't do that then this book is likely not for you. This is only the beginning, everything will either come together or unravel at a later date, but until then it is too soon to make any definitive call on the series. This may mean that it would be worth while to wait until several volumes have been released before reading them, and deciding based on that whether The Familiar is for you. Sometimes you need more than one episode to make up your mind.
Putting aside the different fonts, the coloured text, and the creative formatting, the heart of this book is the familial relationship between Xanther and her parents. If for nothing else, this makes Volume One of The Familiar worth the effort.
Each chapter
Show More
concerns one of the nine main stories, which are mostly kept separate from each other in this volume. The fonts, language, tone and style differ in each of these perspectives to better differentiate between the characters therein from the rest. Anyone who has read Danielewski's other works (House Of Leaves, The Fifty Year Sword, Only Revolutions) will be familiar with the unique style that he brings to the table with the unusual format of text littering these pages. Some pages have only a single word, while others have an immense amount ("How many raindrops?") which are made to look like what the character is looking at (a rainstorm).
I found some of the characters more engaging (Xanther and her parents ([Anwar] and (Astair)), Oz, Luther) and others less so (Jingjing). With this many stories and characters, favouritism for some is always a likely possibility.
Given the number of characters and story lines introduced in this novel, even with 800 plus pages, we don't spend a significant amount of time with anyone but Xanther and her family. This means that there is little in the way of plot advancement for many of these characters (how much can happen in one day?) - it's mainly sequences of 'slice of life' moments that we see in this volume.
In order to get the most out of the book, you need to think of The Familiar as a television series and One Rainy Day In May as episode number one. If you can't do that then this book is likely not for you. This is only the beginning, everything will either come together or unravel at a later date, but until then it is too soon to make any definitive call on the series. This may mean that it would be worth while to wait until several volumes have been released before reading them, and deciding based on that whether The Familiar is for you. Sometimes you need more than one episode to make up your mind.
Putting aside the different fonts, the coloured text, and the creative formatting, the heart of this book is the familial relationship between Xanther and her parents. If for nothing else, this makes Volume One of The Familiar worth the effort.
Show Less
LibraryThing member lissabeth21
Incredibly ambitious, dizzyingly complex, and utterly enthralling. I am itching to know where these diverse people and stories are going and if they will ever connect or resolve in any way.
LibraryThing member jonfaith
In other words: I am not original. I am merely a blend of current texts neither influenced nor influential because all that I reveal can at any point be reconfigured via any of the above-mentioned subset voicings.
The above quote arrives two-thirds of the way through the first (and likely my last)
There is some gorgeous writing here. There are also pages and pages of a single word repeated at different angles: why? One explanation is to delineate something via font and image which language can't. If that is the rub, then stick to film.
There are at least a half dozen plotlines. One expects some healthy fleshing in a 22,000 page project, unless "mewl" and "cry" receive the obligatory 9000 pages of distortion and elongation. Another aspect of this project which pisses me off is when people speak a foreign language Danielewski employs the native graphemes. What kind of shit is that?
As I noted above, there is some touching narrative about the host family some spectacular passages about the monsoon gripping Southern California and I have to give it three stars -- despite my internal rumblings and protestations.
MZD is a Pseud. Spread the word.
The above quote arrives two-thirds of the way through the first (and likely my last)
Show More
volume of the planned 27 volume series The Familiar. The highlighted section reveals the nature of the Narrative Constructs, the explanation behind these mysterious statements and explanations which litter the novel form its first pages. The existence of the Narcons isn't a spoiler, it is barely a plot device. Like so much of this, it is filler or masturbation. It isn't that reader will or won't "get" it. The point remains, why? This vague/arty/lazy situation places the author and reader in a strange predicament. There is some gorgeous writing here. There are also pages and pages of a single word repeated at different angles: why? One explanation is to delineate something via font and image which language can't. If that is the rub, then stick to film.
There are at least a half dozen plotlines. One expects some healthy fleshing in a 22,000 page project, unless "mewl" and "cry" receive the obligatory 9000 pages of distortion and elongation. Another aspect of this project which pisses me off is when people speak a foreign language Danielewski employs the native graphemes. What kind of shit is that?
As I noted above, there is some touching narrative about the host family some spectacular passages about the monsoon gripping Southern California and I have to give it three stars -- despite my internal rumblings and protestations.
MZD is a Pseud. Spread the word.
Show Less
Awards
occamsrazorlibrary-award (2016)
NPR: Books We Love (2015)
Original publication date
2015-05-12