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Eeeee Eee Eeee gets better than it starts. it starts with the reputed tao or the expected tao lin, which is a kinduv updated beavis-&-butthead routine. constant defensive mockery coupled with surreal episodes that function as escape chutes out of narratives that have veered too close to actual confession. ...a dead-on description of a painful and common moment of (contemporary?) early adulthood: boredom and angst and suicide... "how do you have fun?" is the book's repeated question. a familiar topic but covered uniquely and with honesty. funny. then, thankfully, the book is smart and/or lazy enough to switch techniques. the episodes with bears and dolphins get deeper and become less cartoons than multi-reflecting max ernst figures. it begins to risk actual characterization and its longer sentences, seeming at first ironically used, eventually are permitted to speak sincerely. the briefly appearing Jan is a heartbreaker. throughout is a sortuv nihilistic worldview that refuses to be pinned down or admit that a full articulation is possible but which is interesting for its defiance. (the poems of his i read were better, or, maybe his style better succeeds with that form... why? maybe the length of the novel reveals the style's flaws more because it's harder to sustain and his line is more prosaic than musical?...) __________________ just begun this book last night... a beautiful provocateur and sometimes asshole... an effective and unique writer... curious about this one... from this bookslut interview: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007... Q:I'd like to shift it a little to something I'm not sure you've been asked about before. What was it like to grow up Asian-American in this country? A new book called American-Born Chinese makes it out to be very hard. A:I'm glad you asked that question. It wasn't very hard at all. I think one person called me a "chink" in about 20 years. It was the person everyone called a “redneck.” There were like 10-15 Asians in my school of about 2000. It wasn't hard. I grew up in Florida. I want to say something else. In Eeeee Eee Eeee the main character's parents were born in Germany. His name is Andrew. In earlier drafts Andrew's parents were from Taiwan. I did Microsoft find-and-replace and changed Andrew to Klaus one day, because I thought Andrew was too long. I wanted a one-syllable name. I think that was the reason. Then I changed Taiwan to Germany and Shanghai to Berlin, since people named Klaus are usually from Germany. Then I didn't like the name Klaus and I changed it back to Andrew. I want ideally in my fiction to edit race and name in the same way I might move or delete a comma -- in order to better communicate how existential facts manifest in conscious human beings, so that the reader can look at the sentences and read them and then feel emotions.

2020-09-12 17:47