Mettiamola così: opera prima di un (futuro) genio letterario – qui solo in nuce – di una bellezza strana, che io non ho saputo cogliere appieno. Il mio problema con questo libro è che l'ho letto dopo aver letto il bellissimo “Contro il giorno”, quindi viziata da un'aspettativa che sarebbe certo andata delusa. Cominciare dall'ultima opera di un autore e raffrontarla con un'opera prima è, di solito, un errore fatale. Ho ritrovato in V. le mille storie incastrate, i frammenti di vite e persone eterogenee, di epoche e luoghi diversi, tanto che non si capisce dove l'autore ci voglia portare. Questo accadeva anche in “Contro il giorno”, ma lì c'era una nostalgia per epoche che si andavano rivisitando, una malinconia e pessimismo cosmico struggenti, una critica al sistema occidentale e un'ironia spassosa che facevano vibrare corde profonde o divertire. Tutto questo qui non c'è.

C'è amore per la narrazione in sé, c'è la sua visione astorica della Storia (che non esiste, ma esiste il puzzle che ciascuno si costruisce con i pezzetti che gli capita di vivere); c'è l'amore per i derelitti, gli strani, ineffabili uomini dell'altra faccia dell'americano medio arrivato e consumista, c'è la simpatia per gli anarchici (perché fanno saltare in aria la Storia?) e per le spie (perché cercano di tesserne le trame, suppongo), ma nessuna delle tante storie narrate mi ha davvero coinvolta o divertita. Capisco comunque bene, perché al suo apparire V. fece gridare la critica all'Osanna. Un ventiseienne che scrive per frammenti, per visioni oniriche, per brandelli di vite grottesche, un po' strambe e che ha ben chiara in mente la sua visione di mondo (caotico, ineffabile, soggettivo), non può non destare interesse.
Per nostra fortuna la maturità ha arricchito questo scrittore geniale anche della capacità di coinvolgere, oltre che di tessere trame labirintiche, e di toccare nel profondo l'animo del lettore, cosa che, secondo me, lo fa passare da virtuoso della letteratura al grado di grande scrittore. Ma non ora, non qui.

I have just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963). This is one of those works which is so disturbing to readers who feel they must understand every reference, every symbol, every character. And what if the novel has hundreds of characters, most of them with highly fanciful names like Herbert Stencil or Benny Profane or Rachel Owlglass or Pig Bodine. For good or ill, something happened in the twentieth century that resulted in a great divorce of art from the common everyday experience of reality.

One can find it in James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake), Samuel Beckett (The Unnamable), Georges Perec (Life: A User’s Manual), William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!), and Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans). And, in fact, all over the place.

Because my academic training is in film history and criticism, I was able to make a connection to one of my favorite directors, the Spaniard Luis Buñuel. In an interview with André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze that appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in June 1954, Buñuel wrote:

For me it is natural to tend to see and to think of a situation from a sadistic rather than from, say, a neorealistic or mystical point of view. I ask myself: What must this character reach for? A revolver? A knife? A chair? In the end, I always choose whichever is most disturbing. That’s all…. [Quoted in Ado Kyrou, Luis Buñuel: An Introduction (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963)]

If one looks at Pynchon’s novel V., one finds a search for a feminine entity referred to as V., presumably because that is the first letter of her name. In the course of the novel, there are dozens of characters who could qualify, and Pynchon is in no hurry to identify which one is right. The candidates include Victoria Wren, Vera Meroving, the goddess Venus, Veronica Manganese, a rat named Veronica in the sewers of New York, Madame Viola, Hedwig Vogelsang, the Blessed Virgin, or ??? Then again, V. could be a place, such as Valetta (Malta), Venezuela, the mysterious Vheissu (never explained), Vesuvius, or the V-Note Jazz Club in Manhattan ???

Thomas Pynchon is not terribly interested in providing closure, but he does know how to suck you in and keep turning those pages until you get to the strange death by waterspout of Sydney Stencil in 1919.

V. My mistress. My love. My place of belonging. My Venus. My Vhiessu. My Victoria. My Veronica. My Valleta….the light at the end of a dream street. The plunge from the steepest of cliffs……

V. The person, the idea and the pursuit:
V’s origin lies in United kingdom, growing up as a young catholic girl named Victoria wren. Her life’s journey is one of transformation. Symbolized through her trysts in transvestism and lesbianism. Her path towards the inanimate (the wider world around. As natural as the wind. As matter of fact as that the sun will always shine. As devoid of feeling and as nebulous as coincidences and accidents), towards the loss of her humanity, towards transcendence into the ether of abstracts, concepts and things beyond mortality was paved through her willingness to fall and fall further away from god’s grace. Adopting decadence as a way of life, that slow death of the soul. And It is in that final death, that V is born again as an idea, a concept, something that permeates through the very consciousness of humanity. We are all infected with V in one way or another. The pursuit of V. is not something unique to stencil and his father before him. It is something that we all partake in. We are all those who look for V in one form or another, V’s on larger and smaller scales. Each with his own romantic ideal of how things should and shouldn’t be. But deep down, we know and stencil knows that the truth of the matter is much simpler, much more mundane; that V. Is within our grasp. Always has been. That it is not truly a pursuit. V. is the escape that we envision from a life of suffering. The ultimate end or just an end. The death that is love (Profane’s unwillingness to love, to truly be vulnerable was symbolic of this fear of death. Of losing who he was. Even though he was stuck in a cycle of nothingness. Stuck in the self-induced mindset of the schlemihl, the unlucky one. But even to be the unlucky one is to be special in some way. The one that this world’s implacable inanimate has taken notice of. The one that animates the inanimate. But profane’s reality is one of wandering. One of mindless pleasures, taking whatever this world gives him. It is only in the end that he truly escapes the cycle. Infected with V all alone, he succumbs and accepts that blissful silence. The end of the cycle is the end of playing to Their tune. The end of following Their designs. The end of Their providence over your soul. But did They really exist? Were you truly that special? So special that the cabal that ruled this world actually took notice of you, actively sabotaged you? Or were you just no one in particular, nothing notice…nothing to remark about? Nobody special). To love V. Is to love death. To love a freedom that is purer than any form of freedom that can be found in this life. The “freedoms” that we accept in this life are but compromises, lesser, bastardized versions of V. the death of the soul. The death of an identity. Ideas of escape that tangibly keeps us trapped in Their world. These “freedoms” that they allow us, to allow our souls to fall into decay are but other forms of control. We are aware of this. And we who do not seek that ultimate end to our lives, that true freedom, must continue the farce. Must continue the search. Must continue the pursuit. Must continue the cycle. Must continue to live in Their world. Must continue to labor under gravity’s tyrannical rule. Must exhaust every possible lead (just like our old buddy stencil) all the while knowing that V. can be reached with but the mere acceptance of a single thought. The one that tells you to just stop walking, to run towards the light at the end of that dream street. To plunge from that cliff into the dark dark depths.

Fausto’s relationship with god:
To Fausto, god was something he believed in fervently before the war in Malta. As befit a citizen of Malta, a country where Catholicism is the dominant branch of religion. Hence his pursuit of priesthood. God to him was an ideal of peace, prosperity and the good times. It is during the war that a certain detachment and loss of faith will come to afflict Fausto. As he asks Why? Why must it be so? As the bombs drop on Malta, as its buildings fall and its streets no longer lead anywhere, as the corpses pile up, an epiphany or more a way to preserve god’s image in his mind strikes Fausto, he attributes the bombs falling to the way things just are. The way they always have been. Part of a state of mind that suggests that the bombs are as implacable and inanimate as the wind for example. One cannot command the wind. It blows in whichever direction it blows. A certain passivity that decides not to question god or his own faith in god. A sort of covenant he has struck with god. A bargain where Fausto will still believe in the existence of a god, but god cannot expect worship from Fausto. He still contextualizes his suffering in a way that a wavering Christian might. He still believes that god is not dead. This period of bargaining and acceptance for Fausto are the periods of time where he is Fausto the 2nd. But the single event that throws Fausto into a complete loss of faith is the death of his wife, Elena. Upon losing Elena, fausto loses all that was human about him. He could no longer afford to believe in an ideal that does not hold to the reality he sees around him. A period of shuffling as a hollowed out corpse is what characterizes Fausto’s time as Fausto the 3rd. A period of absolute nothingness. Not even purgatory. He no longer sees the world from the lens of Christianity. That is until he chances upon the disassembly of the bad priest…it is during the last moments of a dying woman, that Fausto regains a kind of empathy, a compassion for the sinful soul of another. He is reminded of his duty once as a priest. The duty he had abandoned so long ago now. And so he mouthes a prayer for this dying woman. And thus Fausto 3rd returns to humanity and begins then the slow transition into Fausto the 4th. As Fausto the 4th, fausto cannot truly reconcile his experience with the war, his reality of death and pain, with the ideal of a benevolent, all-loving god (this fracture is also evident in his inability to reconcile his many different identities into one. Choosing to leave each part of himself with a piece of his history, soul and emotions. Each part a separate identity, a wholly different person, a particular period in his life. The whole can never be regained, an unbroken man exists in innocence and a simple world. And Fausto is anything but unbroken). He comes to believe in god’s existence again, but he does not believe that god resides or presides over war in particular. He sees war as the ultimate loss of everything, as the blank space in god’s vision. He looks at god as only something that can exist in peace, not in war. Not in this chaos. Not this overwhelming death. So god for him becomes more a prayer for good health, peace and happiness for his daughter who’s faraway from here.
“And God at this moment is far away. May he be closer to you.”

One last thing:
Pynchon’s tendency to take seemingly unrelated parts and ultimately connect everything somehow in the end…..i just love that shit man.
To Pynchon, a book is the never-ending conspiracy. The one that keeps us speculating and on the edge of sanity. Paranoia to Pynchon is a way of life even at the risk of going insane. It is healthy to keep doubting. To keep an honest outlook on this uncertain world. To keep just keep living. To not accept things for the way they may seem from the outset. Nothing is ever truly simple. And remember, keep pursuing V until the ends of the earth…..

After 70 pages or so that bored me silly I decided to give it up. I know the author was young (a mere 26 if I remember correctly) but this does not completely justify the sponge-like absorption of so many and so different influences (from Heller to Joyce and Virginia Woolf and magic realism and so on), that cannot really talk to each other so that the narrative seemed to me like a fabric whose threads were all cut and left hanging.

Maybe, another time (another life) I will try to read a maturity work. But for now, I've had enough.

For once, these one-lined reviews on the cover has it right. I doubt if people actually read the book before writing those lines/words : Fantastic, soul-crushing, zeitgeist, terrifying, razor-sharp—It might just be anything for any book and could just be right. For all these 496 pages I didn't care for who or what V. is, but there hadn't been an enjoyable read as this one. I should've started Pynchon with this one and moved to Gravity's Rainbow. I'd have to reread Mondaugen's chapter again and move onto GR for the second time, or just read full bibliography and come back to GR again at last. V. and GR had been so good that COL49 and IV seem a bit inferior (or needs a reread), even what I've read of Bleeding Edge (200 pages) is just not on par with early Pynchon.

A reread; my last may have been as long ago as 1995. I noticed a lot of new stuff this time around, maybe because I'm a more focused reader, but more likely because I have more experience with Pynchon's idiosyncrasies as a writer. It certainly also helps that Wikipedia was invented between then and now, to say nothing of the rest of the internet.

One thing I've learned is that, if, in passing, Pynchon mentions some historical geopolitical event, it's rarely just some finial or curlicue to add interest — there's a good chance that it's load-bearing structure. For example, one of the characters in the Florence chapter briefly talks about being present for some ugliness in Khartoum around 1884 or 1885, by way of explaining why he wanted to get away and go on an expedition to a completely different place afterwards. This reference appears to be incidental, but if one takes the trouble to look it up, they will learn that that ugliness was the eleven-month Siege of Khartoum, which was followed by the Battle of Omdurman in which British forces killed some 12,000 Mahdists while only losing 47 men from their own side. Combine this with the Egypt chapter's Fashoda Incident setting and the horrific flashbacks to von Trotha's response to the Herero uprising of 1904 and you start to make out a broader and very disturbing picture. By the end I realized that I had the answer to my question, "Why 1956?": the Suez Crisis, which closed the book on Great Britain's power in Egypt and which Wikipedia helpfully describes as signifying "the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers." Aha.

Another thing I noticed is the repeated use of the word decadence in the portions of the book that take place in '56. It would be a natural assumption to think that this is meant in the sense of simple hedonism, since there is certainly plenty of that in V. (not to mention the whole extra-textual beat generation thing that would have been fresh in the mind of 1963 readers), but in fact the word is meant in the much more negative sense of cultural decline. At one point Pynchon just comes right out and says it: "'A decadence,' Itague put in, "'is a falling-away from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.'" So, if we take the character "V." as a symptom or symbol of some enormous historical development (and the book repeatedly drops hints that we should) and mix in all the various references, you could argue that the point of the novel is that something pretty uncool has been happening in our world since the middle nineteenth century.

In typical fashion, there are also certain things relating to the theme that loom so enormous that Pynchon simply omits them for being too obvious. The Holocaust is mentioned just once in passing, despite it taking place only eleven years before book-time and despite the main character being half-Jewish and his romantic partner being fully Jewish, but a great invisible authorial finger is pointing directly at it. In another rare explicit passage, the spy Sidney Stencil is bemused by the twentieth-century bafflement over where the barbarity of World War I came from, since the nineteenth century seemed so darn civilized. Pynchon very harshly disabuses us of this innocent foolishness by describing the German genocide of the Herero people — Auschwitz prelude.

This time around I also paid more attention to all the stuff about Malta — in my earlier readings I think I was experiencing Pynchonian detail fatigue by the time I got to those parts — and so I was better able to see how it fit into the larger story. It's more British colonialism, of course, and fascinating in a ghoulish way because its strategic importance to Britain in World War II led to twenty-nine months (months) of heavy bombing by the Axis.

Another thing I noticed was that I was a little more conscious of little flaws in the book on rereading it again. In the past I felt that the prose was not quite as quicksilver-agile as that in his later work, but in addition to that I now sometimes felt that the story had been stitched together from different pieces that didn't always fit. I certainly could have used a lot less of the Whole Sick Crew material, since it's simply not as interesting as the the more intense historical stuff. The book also suffers from characters whose psychology and motivations are implausibly abstract; put two of them together and their conversations can be frustratingly cryptic. "Mondaugen's Story" is the worst offender in this respect, on top of also being psychologically traumatic.

Still, though, there are many wonderfully engrossing bits, and lots of jaw-dropping prose, and where else are you gonna read about alligator hunts and nose jobs and and iridescent monkeys?

What to say of Pynchon's half-century spanning epic?

Like Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's first novel (published, I think, at an astonishing age 26) is concerned with questions of life and death, here both at the internal, personal scale of our relations to people, things, and the outer world, and on a broad international scale of war, colonialism, and political intrigue. Linking the two, Herbert Stencil, adventurer and obsessed historian, tracking the intertwined history of his British foreign office agent father and the enigmatic V., represented in various forms across 50 years in a slow progression towards the inanimate. Questions of the animate and inanimate worlds serve as central life/death dichotomy here, and the novel is filled to the brim with significant objects, automatons, prostheses, and bouts of tourism/colonialism (both of which, it seems, are joined in their ability to take a living place and convert it to small spheres of inanimacy, both literal, in a truly chilling Sudwest setpiece, and metaphorical, everywhere else people cluster around notable buildings and monuments (embodied by frequent references to mid 19th-century travel guide writer Karl Baedeker)).

Stencil himself, curiously, seems to be one of only a few characters in the teeming cast not occupying an obvious spot on an animate to inanimate continuum, as his obsessions simultaneously encompass the human and inhuman worlds (people, but lost to the unliving past). His off-the-scale foil is ultimate sad-sack ex-seamen Benny Profane, whose role as uber-schlemiel seemingly places him at both the far left position of animacy (the born bungler's natural enemy, we are told, being the inanimate objects that conspire to trip them up like so many banana peels (which, fortunately, appear nowhere in the novel -- it would just be too much)) and the deepest inanimacy of sloth and of one who, giving in to his perceived (self-created?) role, inevitably sabotages every human relationship he finds himself in. Potential Profane paramour Rachel Owlglass, on the other hand, may sit at the fulcrum and be as a result the novel's healthiest character overall.

What can be said? Lots apparently, and yet much, much more than I can possibly describe here. What matters most is that the novel is beautiful and tragic, a marvel of both clockwork convergent plotting and the ultimate nonconvergent spinout of human passions. And one which manages to be considerably more gripping and less opaque than some of the subsequent Pynchon I've read.

I've seen the book described elsewhere as "cubist". It is an accurate term, evoking both the book's violent modernism and chorus of impossible angles. Angles which, we find, are still capable of describing a human portrait.

My battered trade paperback copy of V. began disintegrating in my hands even as I began reading it for the second time after more than twenty years—which seemed fitting, somehow. After all, the contents of Thomas Pynchon's first novel, originally published in the very year I was born, haven't all aged well either.

Oh, and don't expect to learn who—or what—or where—V. is, or at least not within the pages of this novel. There are many possible Vs. Pynchon doesn't even mention the titular mystery directly until page 53 (although there are Vs aplenty beforehand, to be sure), and, as late as p.386, we are still being told that "in this search the motive is part of the quarry." In between, Pynchon throws out V's like chaff from a burning biplane spiraling in to a crash landing.

Any landing you can walk away from, I guess...

And yet... V. remains a fascinating, exuberant, dreamlike conflagration of outrageous ideas; feverish hallucinations; terrible verse and worse puns; spycraft and stagecraft; modern myths and urban legends, all jammed together with Pynchon's trademark panache. Only parts of the book are terrible (some appearing much more so over time). Other passages are more lyrical, like say the first time we meet Rachel Owlglass at a Manhattan party thrown by the Whole Sick Crew:

You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements, making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.
—p.52

I did like this quote, too—it is, I suspect, a large part of why I write reviews myself (even motley, grab-bag reviews like this one):

That was the only real compensation, he supposed—God knew it wasn't the pay—a response from the children; buffoon's treasure.
—Girgis, p.86

*

V. is definitely mid-20th Century male-oriented fiction; "girls" outnumber women who have actual names, like Rachel, by a significant margin.

The first part of V. that I had real trouble with, though, was the interminable and gruesome (albeit, I assume, medically-accurate) description of Esther Harvitz's nose job. Why one would even want to trade one beauty for another this way is an exercise best left up to the reader. Even more excruciating, though, was Esther's subsequent reaction to her new face. I will not try to excerpt or quote from this section—but be aware that if you want to know just how a rhinoplasty was accomplished in the mid-1950s, the specific facial bones that need to be sawn through and broken, the tissues excised and discarded, the sutures and bandages required... Chapter 4, pp.101-110, delivers the goods—just before Esther drops her skirt.

*

Now, I was intrigued at seeing Pynchon's mention of prominent union leader Walter Reuther (p.112), whose childhood home in Wheeling, WV, still stands at the end of the quiet lane where my wife grew up.

However... a lot of V. is just... dumb. If you can read a passage like this without snickering, for example, then you're a better person than I:

Mafia his wife was in on the bed playing with Fang the cat. At the moment she was naked and dangling an inflatable brassiere before the frustrated claws of Fang who was Siamese, gray and neurotic. "Bouncy, bouncy," she was saying. "Is the dweat big kitties angwy cause he tant play wif the bwa. EEEE, he so cute and ickle."
Oh, man, thought Winsome, an intellectual. I had to pick an intellectual. They all revert.
—p.123

Or if you can read even this paragraph's beginning (it gets worse later) without cringing:

All her characters fell into this disturbingly predictable racial alignment. The sympathetic—those godlike, inexhaustible sex athletes she used for heroes and heroines (and heroin? he wondered) were all tall, strong, white though often robustly tanned (all over), Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and/or Scandinavian. Comic relief and villainy were invariably the lot of Negroes, Jews and South European immigrants.
—p.126

*

Continue reading V., though, and you'll find more inspired food for thought later on:

"Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway."
—Evan Godolphin, p.194

We also find out that social bubbles are nothing new:

People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
—p.225

*

Then... I ran into the stark brutality of Kurt Mondaugen's experiences in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Chapter 9 uses the "N-word" throughout... but that's the least of it. This chapter's unrelenting cruelty went far beyond mere words, and while Thomas Pynchon expresses no approval of the genocidal European colonists, he also conveys little empathy for their Black victims.

This was the most difficult chapter of all to read, at least for me, and I would not blame you if you wanted to skip it altogether.

*

However great a novelist I believe Pynchon to be, I have found that I can't stand his verse, in general—most of the poetry in V. (et. seq.) is awful, self-indulgent stuff. One exception to the doggerel, though, appears as by Fausto Maijstral:

At the Phoenicia Hotel

I remember
A sad tango on the last night of the old world
A girl who peeped from between the palms
At the Phoenicia Hotel
Maria, alma de mi corazón,
Before the crucible
And the slag heap,
Before the sudden craters
And the cancerous blooming of displaced earth.
Before the carrion birds came sweeping from the sky;
Before that cicada,
These locusts,
This empty street.
—p.317

Fausto observes, shortly thereafter, that

Poetry is not communication with angels or with the "subconscious." It is communication with the guts, genitals and five portals of sense. Nothing more.
—p.318

There are worse words to live by than these, too:

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.
—pp.365-366

*

Wha.

I haven't said much about Benny Profane, who is ostensibly the protagonist (or at least the central schlemiel) in V., and who is given to exclaiming "Wha" when he doesn't understand something (which is often). This omission is, at least partly, because Benny doesn't get many good lines—the most scathing remarks are to him, not by him.

For example:

"Can't you stop feeling sorry for yourself? You've taken your own flabby, clumsy soul and amplified it into a Universal Principle."
—Rachel Owlglass, p.383

*

What movie does this make you think of?

He indeed was visited by dreams in which he had shrunk to submicroscopic size and entered a brain, strolling in through some forehead's pore and into the cul-de-sac of a sweat gland. Struggling out of a jungle of capillaries there he would finally reach bone, down then through the skull, dura mater, arachnoid, pia mater to the fissure-floored sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul.
—p.471

*

A note on the particular edition I read: V. is what comes up for the ISBN on the back of the book, but this edition has the front cover I actually see.

You may also find the Pynchon Wiki about V. to be illuminating, although I will note that I avoided consulting it much for this review, afraid that my own reactions would be unduly colored by its bewitching depth of detail.

*

Very late in V., quite near the end in fact, Pynchon describes the outbreak of armed conflict not as war, but merely as a "suspension of peace" (p.480).

Seems as if Pynchon understands a few things after all... every now and then, V. actually manages to justify its continued existence.

Which is pretty good show, really, for a thing at least as old as I am.

men

There is an image that I will always remember from this book. The main gal, V, wears spike heels all the time, and lives in NYC, right? And so there's this scene where she is described as the kind of girl who can walk over sewer grates in these heels, and always lands square on the intersection of the beams in the grate, you know? So she never falls in or fucks up her shoes.

Ignore talk below of my previously setting this aside - I am giving it try #2 and am enjoying it much more - perhaps it's the timing - it begins on Christmas Eve and the first chapters unfold during the week between Christmas and the new year...

I know that Pynchon isn’t quite at his best here and that he would only get better and better with each work; I’m aware that there are a handful of sections that are imperfect—not to mention a bit dated—and it’s clear he was just getting his footing… but man, I’m 25 years old, and knowing that he wrote this thing when he was younger than me is absolutely insane. The way Pynchon explores humanity (and, reductive as it may be, that is all I can say in the confines of brevity [which, given how busy I am at the moment, will sadly have to suffice]) is just awe-inspiring. I like to think of V. as a series of threads, heaped atop and tightly among one another: tangles and connections are a given, but are they merely a matter of fortune in the form of proximity? or is there a greater design that goes beyond fate and fortune that drives this big ship of fools, i.e, mankind. A struggle for fulfillment, and the need to feel alive—animate—in the sprawling sea of that pesky decky-dance.

4.5/5