Zoori
7/1/2013
The beginning of the book is very promising: the narrator, Desiderio, starts telling a story about his youth, and how he saved the world. It all started when the Doctor Hoffman, a famous scientist, decided to free humans from any reason by altering the nature and reality, and by bending the time and space equation. This way everything becomes possible.
The main character, Desiderio, is one of the few people who is immune to the effect of the machines designed by Hoffman which unleash human imagination. That is because he has a very strong sense of reality and does not get overwhelmed by those mirages. He works for the government together with the Minister of the town, the only one who is trying to save the city during the time of the 'Reality War'. The Minister is a person 'who had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty', therefore, he is very rational and has a limited imagination. The Minister manages to keep the situation in control by establishing various departments (such as Reality Testing Laboratory) that help maintain some order and developing weapons like the Determining Radar Apparatus which detects and destroys the unreality atoms. However, the Doctor is a very powerful and wealthy man, therefore, he quickly invents other devices which are undetectable by the Minister's machines. Finally, the balance is threatened when Desiderio is sent to find and kill Dr. Hoffman.
After a strange incident related to a young girl's death Desiderio is forced to run away from the police and hide himself among the River people. He spends quite long periods of time with people of different backgrounds in the circus, then he travels with an eccentric and cruel count of Lithuania (surprisingly, our country produces a lot of monsters), and others. This is also a search for the love of his life – the black swan-woman named Albertina who he meets in a dream (if that, of course, is a dream).
His journey is centered on a discovery of his sexuality, as he challenges the limits of the taboo, the forbidden, the pervert, and the twisted. Desiderio experiences all possible ways of making love, including getting raped. The reader gets to discover all the details of these events, and sometimes gets overwhelmed with the description.
The detailed account of the events in the beginning drew me into this story of the antithesis, (e.g.: salty sugar, pineapples with the colour and texture of strawberries, walnuts of caramel taste, etc.), hallucinations, constant change of reality and alteration of common objects (I love this part): 'Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children. Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones. The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel.' All descriptions are unbelievably detailed and alive, expressed by the usage of queer language combinations.
Unfortunately, when I got used to it, this world no longer amazed me so much as it did in the beginning. All the alterations of the reality get confusing, and at times repetitive. One gets drawn into the details, and that makes it difficult to follow the main storyline as well as get the 'hidden' message.
I do recommend this book for those who appreciate a surreal world of wild and unlimited imagination, however, it took me a long time to finish it, as I happened to miss the purpose of the story apart from the exploration sexuality.