Uneven. That's my ultimate word on this book.

The comparisons to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nabokov are almost laughable, and I can see why those guys come to mind in terms of tone and themes, but the prose doesn't even approach them. This novel had a grand idea and Erickson developed an intricate riddle for the reader to solve as she reads it, which I always appreciate, but the language is so flowery and dreamlike that it overshadowed any real gut emotion that was trying to surface. I've read his The Sea Came in at Midnight that he wrote 15 years later, so I understand that this debut novel was really just several tests to see what works and what might need to be hacked. I don't think I enjoyed this, overall, but I can see it for what it is and respect that.

Oh yeah, the sex scenes were really cringey - does Erickson think doggy style is the only way to fuck?

Having only ever read The Sea Came In At Midnight and detect a fluid, yet discursive narrative style that I’m eager to see whether it casts across his writing in general. The books were written fourteen years apart (published, rather, 1985 vs. 1999) and the narrative digressions are breezier with the earlier book. There’s an amazing concatenation of character strands that fascinated me in The Sea Came In At Midnight (as much as it didn’t quite satisfy as a whole) that suggests a more mature writer.

Days Between Stations was his first novel, and I don’t mean to say the digressions are leaden. Not at all, but it is certainly moored, another way to say made heavier, by a silent-film centered around the death of Marat. The book centers around this, in multiple eras, and joins Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions in a kind of sub-industry of novels dealing with faded, near, alternative, shadow stars from the early days of cinema. (And both are pleasing in the same way.)

So, I came in expecting one thing, something along the lines of to the well-travelled, skimming brevity of lonely yet vibrant lives and ideas of the later novel, and got something more dreamlike and strange. This isn’t Erickson’s fault, although the title suggests road trips, discovering America, buttes and deserts.

The oneiric portions roll off me, however, and it feels he’s straining for affect. The portions in the Paris brothel early on feel too cooked-up to be impactful, the digression with the Montreal youth and his father (and the flintlock!) too narratively frothy to sink in, and the Adrien/Michel, eyepatching, love triangle stuff too ungrounded to really sing to me. (I remain a guy who hates to hear about other people's dreams.)

This feels like apprentice-work, but unlike most novels of the kind, it's far too assured and unique to be dismissed out of hand. He remains a writer I find very intriguing and I look forward to reading more.

"You got Pynchon in my sci fi!"

"You got sci fi in my Pynchon!"

"I hate Pynchon!"

"Go to hell! This is delicious!"

"I don't know, pretty bland and incoherent to me."

"Well, do you want the rest of my big ol' bucket o' Pynchon? I gots some rainbow gravity, some Mason-Dixon..."

"NO FOOKIN THANKS!"

"OK then just give our accident two stars."

"Yeah that's what I just did, Steve-O."

Thomas Pynchon isn't exactly a heavy blurber, so when I saw his rapturous blurb for this 1986 book, I decided to give it a look, even though I'd never heard of the author. Holy cow, how could I never have heard of this author? I have since learned he's been championed by Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, and Richard Powers. This, his first book, is just about perfect - a melancholy meditation on identity, romance, apocalypse, and silent film. The main plot hinges on a a mysterious film that's been in production for 70 years but has never been screened - I have to think DFW was influenced by this when he came to write "Infinite Jest."
Erickson is still writing - in fact, he's just published his ninth novel. I am in the happy position of having a lot of good reading to look forward to.

Este libro es un tesoro irrepetible. Lo editó Pálido Fuego y lo elogió Pynchon, dos datos que ya configuran un punto de partida más que interesante.
Ahora bien, navegar entre las aguas de la prosa de Erickson es mucho más. Una historia fascinante escrita con un talento apabullante. En "Días entre estaciones" somos partícipes de un juego compuesto de sueños, cine, amor, memoria e identidad, en un contexto de catástrofes climáticas, el cual no parece tener mucho protagonismo durante el libro pero sí enlaza y acompaña magistralmente con los temas y el contenido de las historias.
¡Brillante!

6.3

i almost dnf the book because I found the love triangles and the constant shift into dream-like sequences quite tiresome and distracting. however, the book became interesting when it started exploring the myth-making of a lost silent film in the middle part. the atmosphere switched to a period piece, and that caught my attention.

En esta primera novela se entrecruzan varias búsquedas: los orígenes de unos personajes desarraigados/desmemoriados entrelazados con otros de dos generaciones antes en la Francia de principios del siglo XX; su devenir en un contexto que amenaza con descarrilar en una catástrofe natural; y, para mi el más atractivo, el rodaje y el destino de una película llamada a cambiar el lenguaje cinematográfico. Como historias dentro de algo más grande Erickson es tremendamente sugerente, en espacial en la construcción de imágenes. En Días entre estaciones hay fragmentos de una poética vigorosa, caso de los capítulos que desarrollan una violenta tormenta de arena en Los Ángeles; un París asolado por una ola de frío glacial, con cortes de electricidad y la gente tirando de todo tipo de combustibles para conseguir calentarse mínimamente; o un viaje en barco por un Mediterráneo menguante.

La carencia de una estructura nítida que enhebre los diversos relatos, sin embargo, desencadena un curso errático, salvado durante dos tercios de novela por lo poderoso de las imágenes, sentimientos, hechos. Erickson se zambulle de lleno en una narración claramente surrealista que prescinde de certezas e insinúa, elude y sugiere mientras se pasa por el forro cualquier limitación genérica. Lo que no le evita entrar en pérdida en las últimas 70 páginas, de las cuales apenas rescataría alguna respuesta más o menos clara.

That was.. odd..

super weird but beautifully written. It almost had a Haruki Murakami feel too, meaning a blend of normal situations with very surreal and almost magical occurrences that don't seen very out of place. There was a fair amount that went over my head especially the ending. It felt like a lot of the concepts held a lot of depth, but maybe a little too deep to be clear to someone like me. I will say I'm very glad I read it and will definitely read more of Erickson.

erickson's grasp of the dream language of symbols & mysterious phenomena is just sublime and i'm excited to get into the rest of his work. couple of elements i wasn't fully convinced by, which mayyyybe could have been changed to work better in my opinion, but this is the first book (that i recall) i began all over again right after reaching the end, so i'm just going ahead and giving the full five stars.

This could be one of the best love stories I've ever read. That may not be saying much, but the lyricism of his writing, the alternative worlds he creates, the framing of these scenes wrought with eroticism and intensity, made all of it intensely believable. I swear, I'm not sure how this guy isn't a major literary icon. Consider me blown away.

A lot of people on here seem to criticize it in terms of it not going anywhere, much less his intense descriptions of the physical coupling. The sex scenes became firmly embedded in place, and the descriptions of how these psychedelic, ever-morphing, scenes blend with their bodies was the heart of the story. His use of colors, particularly blue, throughout to evoke a mellow, disheartening mood was brilliant. And he never left it. A blue coat would carry an inordinate amount of weight, not to mention the glistening bottle with the eyes of the lost twins in it. Amazing.

This is my third Erickson book, and I think the common theme is that we can hold onto our humanity even when our hold on reality becomes a tenuous one. These are normal people in extraordinary situations. I do believe he maybe a literary genius.

My first adventure into Erickson. This isn't a book to be taken lightly. I read it too fast and need to go re-read it, because it's one hell of an adventure into prose and lands i've never been.