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I finished and thought it was one of the most unique books I've ever read... some sort of flawed masterpiece or brilliant mess.
The thing about discussing it is that there are so so many different things that could be touched on with almost equal importance and so it's a bit daunting. I suppose I'll write about some of the things I liked and leave it at that. It was easier to follow and a faster read than I was expecting. Some parts, including the beginning, are indeed difficult but once I got the swing of the novel the story sections flowed well. I thought it might be boring and while I did find it overlong I generally was interested to see what would happen next. In fact, at the end I was sad to leave the characters.
I liked the 1960's/70's counter-culture focus. This book could have easily felt dated but I didn't find it so; instead I found it immersive and complex, and fascinating to delve so deeply into this time period and compare things to today as well. I also found many of the characters to be layered and complex and I was surprised to find myself feeling a warmth for most of them after awhile. One specific thing is that I liked that the novel presented such a wide spectrum of not only sexuality but personality within sexualities - that's incredible coming from a bestseller from over 40 years ago, let alone one today.
The setting of Bellona was intriguing - the idea of a singular post-apocalyptic city mostly abandoned and just left to itself while the rest of the world forgets about it, and that the few people now living there more or less want to be. A city something like if Hurricane Katrina had not only partially destroyed New Orleans, but had also stuck around as an eerie, ever-present and atmopshere-encompassing storm cloud ready to finish the job at any moment. Bellona is a Sodom or Gomorrah, a limbo or netherworld, that may seem terrible to most but holds its own allure and peculiar rewards to those who want to venture in.
I liked the meditation on the nature of art; it deals specifically with poetry but it could be transferred to any art. Along similar literary lines, the book was very Joycean and not only because of its sometimes difficult writing style - it also concerns youthful artistic endeavour like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it structures itself on Greek mythology like Ulysses and it starts and ends on the same broken sentence like Finegans Wake.
The schizophrenia of the book was, in retrospect, well done. This is really why the book can seem so hard since it was necessary for some parts to be almost indecipherable and other parts confused - days missing, reality blurred, time altered.
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