The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

The Narrator-the new novel by Michael Cisco, author of The Traitor and The Divinity Student-is also his most sophisticated. Cisco's prose, by turns phantasmagorical and exhilarating (reminiscent one moment of Robbe-Grillet, the next of Artaud, with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti, the imaginative virtuosity of Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison), is like a stark sequence of strong iron bars, brimming with dark ambiance. Combining unmatched craft with masterful storytelling, this is literate fantasy unlike any other, intricate as the most elaborate dream, in which the narrator himself is the most ambiguous thing of all.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Weird Fiction, Literature, New Weird, Speculative Fiction

306 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2010

About the author

Michael Cisco is an American weird fiction writer, Deleuzian academic and a teacher, currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999.

He is interested in confusion.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war.” William Shakespeare – Julius Caesar.
The Narrator is an absurdist war parable… Often scary, sometimes ludicrous… It is the stuff hallucinations are made of…

So now I am moving among these monuments, trembling phosphorescence in the pale stones beneath lost grey sky. The path descends across the cemetery, and now the few distant visitors and groundskeepers drop out of sight. The path cuts into the ground, and becomes something like a stone-lined trench as I follow it around the base of a low hill. I am thinking of dead men, and the stories that they leave behind for us to repeat. It was to this task that I had proposed to dedicate my life, and now the fiat of someone I’ll never know or see has quashed that purpose.

A student at the College of Narrators is unexpectedly drafted and now he is on his way to the army camp. Soon after some days spent in leisure and a ritual dance macabre, his unit is on the march to the port town. However their company more resembles a troupe of itinerary comedians than military troops…

The lieutenants evidently deserted as well, so their horses are pulling an extra cart. We have three. The entire company, by my estimate, is not more than seventy. This includes the Clappers, who walk in a compact mass toward the rear of the column; they wear jingling apparatus, all manner of bones, wooden and metal things hanging on thongs around their necks, dangling from their brims like bead curtains in front of their faces. When soldiers fight with their bodies the Clappers fight with their spirits by means of complicated interlocking clapping and chants to Eihoi the Wild Horse.

On their way, they stop by the big nuthouse and recruit lunatics as warriors… In the port, in the complete tumult, after many troubles they embark the warship and sail to their final destination – the mysterious island full of ancient ruins and mystical sorcery…

The war is up there on the island, where we’re going to meet it, but there’s no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream… Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside.

The gory massacre on the island is incessant… No one can win… Therefore, the company departs for the enigmatic ruins to ask for help from the mighty spirits dwelling there in the ancient graveyard… The closer are the ruins the more the consciousness of the soldiers is distorted…

We go on now like sleepwalkers following the darkness shed by Makemin’s turned back.
A hollow howling noise, like wind sobbing at the mouth of a mine, rises behind us as we near the city’s brink. There are the landmarks I’d seen in the charm, the road to the cemetery curves off to the right, through irregular, soft ridges, and trees bristle pitch black above them.

War is stark madness… The spirit of war is death.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forget all the critics telling you about this or that fantasy novel saving the genre by bringing adult themes to the stock tropes of the genre. And why should you forget them? Because the real salvation of dark fantasy and if I maybe so bold literature in general is in the writing of Michael Cisco. There isn’t writing this savage and disorienting happening really anywhere else. Set in an alternative world (whether an alternative earth, future or completely secondary isn’t ever really answered) wracked by an unreasonable war, eerie ruins, political oppression, and surreal events and creatures. The story is the journey of the titular narrator Low through this world, his friendships, his love for the cannibal queen, and other adventures most notably the final sequence which is an unrestrained riff on Tarvosky’s Stalker and Brothers Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. Nothing can really describe the actual experience of reading this book veering from wild inventions to observations of human behavior that burn with recognition. Not for the feeble of sentiment as violence and grotesquery haunts nearly every page. Brian Evenson’s blurb mentions both Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and William S Burroughs and the cover mentions M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, and Ligotti, and Cisco is firmly in their company while being utterly unique.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books are intimidating. I've enjoyed Cisco's novels and stories immensely but it's pretty dense prose, and this a long work but I think it is the best of the three novels by Cisco I've read.

Reading this is proof that there's certain experiences you can only get through reading. This could never be properly filmed. There's so many slippings in and out of dreams here, changes in perspectives and an obsession with the vast, colossal and immense. It's a "full-body experience," just take this passage that touches on three senses at once:

One by one, spots in the landscape light up, and now I’m looking at an irregular streak of clear, colorless light in circles, some overlapping, looking like the sun shining through a leaf that’s been bored by caterpillars. There’s a smell in my nostrils like jasmine, if it came from an animal and not a plant, from a fragrance gland. Like the glandy saliva of a flower-eating animal. And a deep, delicious warmth cracks in a little seam across my chest, starting just above my breast bone on the right side and tearing down toward my abdomen.

It's prose poetry; beautiful, incredibly disorientating, often grotesque and purposefully overwhelming in stimuli. There's creatures that eat corpses and leave memory in place of what they devoured, not specific memories, but "memory" itself. And then there's the time their party comes across an artificial, but alive arm in a riverbed, or a sort of megalith you cannot stand to look at, or a dozen other things. This book is full of weird little extra-sensory experiences, in a world full of obscure dangers. This very small example, almost an afterthought in an early chapter, but it illustrates my point well:

There’s a spot I faced as I slept, where a heap of stones receded into a jumble of details I didn’t bother to make sense of at the time, and as I glance at them again I feel a memory come on, a dream of a black-streaked mouth in the stones, that spoke dream talk to me along the wind. I remembered the voice, but not in the way I normally remember voices. I didn’t hear it in recollection, but my memory started making vocalities at me and it was the affect of the voice that it partially imitated; distracted, sexless, neutrally old, talking off at an angle and to itself, but I was meant to overhear. I only overheard it speak. A strong definite sound, but it trembled. It was a death’s bed murmur, words maybe addressed to death, or through it, by a dying speaker. I get away from the beach fast...

It's the nebulous, sand-through-the-fingers prose, "anything can happen" feel that makes this so magical and unique. There are some cases where this doesn't work, and everything twists and collapses into itself and goes up in a puff of smoke. And some of the descriptions of buildings or landscapes, strange and Lovecraftian, can be a bit confusing and vague.

This isn't casual reading. My advice is to make sure you're in the mood for this, retreat to a quiet place, read slowly, stay focused, take breaks, let the imagery wash over you. Caffeine might help too. But this work isn't really meant to be overly dissected and deciphered in my opinion, it's to be experienced.

A few more quotes:

It’s as if the sensation of being watched, like barely palpable wisps of air slithering on the skin of my back, or creeping just below the skin, were given a counterpart in sound. It billows over us like a sail.

As always, a great spiral foam of dreams spins out of you like a galaxy...

The sheer black trench of the Idle runs away from me, black wrinkles in a grey ribbon, and on its far side is the spiracle mound of the death precinct, from which on some nights it is recounted one can see the titan form of a grinning mortuary student rearing up to set a green death taper in the sky. There’s the Embalmer’s College, crouched like a toad dropsically bloated with venom and warted over with cupolas...

The mist lifts and lowers; it does this languid dance dreamily over the dank earth and lifts long shoots, limp and elastic, above its level, and I watch a slender probe trailing off and losing itself in the air in front of me. The body of the mist forgets and expends this pinch of its stuff without noticing it; before it vanishes, it acquires a sort of demeanor, like something not far short of a tranquil personality.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

As much as I can tell from a few encounters its practitioners, the New Weird subset of forward-thinking genre fiction over the last 20 years or so seems situated between the polls of Lovecraft, surrealism, and the science fiction new wave, whose social themes and experimentation weren't always as readily picked up by the fantasy writing of the time. Throw in for good measure a bit of the alien causality of Roadside Picnic, and in Cisco's case postmodernism, and you may have a decent idea of whether this is the sort of thing you might read. Which is to say, a fantasy story with the unearthly immediacy of a dream and a deep concern for its own process of unfolding.

The plot concerns Low, whose studies as a narrator are interrupted, but not overlooked, by his sudden conscription into the military, where control of the dominant narrative may be of vital utility. The interests of the book lie in this self-interrogation, along with various interruptions and disturbances of narrative expectation, in attempting to capture the nightmarish arbitrariness of war, and in the utter strangeness of landscapes and cities over which the action unfolds, where much is suggested and little explained. At times I feel Cisco tips a little too far into necromantic particulars of that inescapable sub-theme of war, death (which is not constrained to this story but a major preoccupation of the only other Cisco I've read as well), but everything remains genuinely bizarre and original enough for it to stay clear of adolescent morbidity. There's really not much out there like it.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Q: Who do you consider master world-builders, and what did you learn from them?

Michael Moorcock: I hardly know what this means. I used to draw a rough map if the story was a 'journey' adventure and made up the rest as needed for the story. My worlds are always inner (unconscious) worlds made manifest. I just learned to tap and shape that unconscious. I've never really understood 'world building' and it seems to derive from D&D etc. about which I know almost nothing.

I honestly believe this is what Howard was doing and what Leiber was doing. I grew up reading Freud and Jung (as it were) and I respond well to plots about people creating their own worlds in their minds. When writing s&s I made my landscapes and weather conditions fit the mood of the characters in straight Romantic tradition. Everything is co-opted into narrative and to a lesser extent character development. Realism or quasi-realism wasn't what I was attracted to in s&s and it's what I rejected in fantasy/sf. It became a convention to suspend disbelief by making the invented world as 'believable' as possible. I preferred mine to be as supportive of the story as possible and not bother to suspend disbelief because my readers already knew what they were reading and why. You don't have to persuade someone who has picked up a fantasy book that it is 'real'. What they want is a good story and characters, some good marvels, and maybe a bit to think about.

You can draw a pretty clear line, I think, from this opinion of Moorcock's (where the created world is a manifestation of the character's "inner world") to M. John Harrison's Viriconium experiments (in which the artificiality of the created world becomes clearer through the interventions of gnostic insects and dreaming readers) and Vandermeer's weirder Ambergris pieces, detouring through the subplot of K. J. Bishop's _The Etched City_ where a character realizes she belongs to a different narrative and quickly vacates the book, to _The Narrator_. I guess the mythical examinations of Rothfuss's Kvothe books are supposed to follow in this tradition too, but they miss the mark widely, to put it nicely.

An aside: I guess I should explain that this is a fantasy/New Weird novel about Low Loom Column, conscripted out of the College of Narrators to fight in a war whose purpose is unclear to both the reader and the characters. That's pretty much the extent of the plot.

Anyway: readers are never meant to conclude or believe that the world in which the narrator of the _The Narrator_ is consistent or rational or self-supporting. You see what I'm getting at here? Unlike many other fantasy novels these days, there is never much of a pretense here of solid, consistent world-building. "I could say she looks like da Vinci's 'Lady with Ermine' if there had ever been such a thing," Low tells us. [81] Cisco is thoroughly and consistently deconstructing the role of narration in that kind of fantasy, and even beyond that, Cisco never makes clear exactly how much Low himself believes in his narration.

Indeed, the whole thing might be a dream (taking place in a land called, tellingly, "Mnemosems"), as when Low and his guide, named Jil Punkinflake, encounter a girl sleepwalking along the street:

"This is their dream," he says pointing vehemently at the earth, and then adds in a bitter, wounded tone, "and we are their creatures. They disguise themselves and trick us, toy with us, draw us into their empty themes, leave us stuck in their follies... trifling with us and then, when we need them - where are they? They're gone."
And then he turns away from me and plunges his face into his hands.
Later, he looks up again, to the sky, the street, and murmurs, "Now we forget, now is the time." [35]

Later, Jil Punkinflake becomes convinced that Low, the narrator, is in fact the dreamwalking Narrator of the entire book and turns on him - until he seems to forget the whole thing (as urged by Low?).

Or maybe it isn't a dream, but an almost-conscious meta-textuality (or both?). Low is a narrator by profession, although it's never clear exactly how much of this book is his own narration (which takes shape as a kind of paper golem that he creates almost inadvertently(?) and which proceeds to lurk at the edges of his vision for the remainder of the book). Indeed, Low's abilities as a narrator appear to be lacking:

"I may never be anything better than a journeyman narrator now. If I ever were to write an account of these events, which are in any case written, my narrative would be incoherent and inconclusive; I never know enough to say." [16]

And even beyond that, Low's self-image appears to be a book ("I see myself as I must appear sitting in this chair, from a point of view high in a corner of the room - rows of tattered, torn-open books dribbling leaves to the floor, tables and stone floor strewn with paragraphs, verses, illustrations, choruses, familiar endings" [41]), and characters (sometimes referred to exactly as such, and not as people, and sometimes as books, even) vomit ink disturbingly often. Low, meanwhile, uses oceanic/nautical metaphors a number of times throughout the novel, each time afterward reminding himself that as a mountain native, he's never seen the sea and shouldn't be using language like that.

You want more? A ghost at a seance's "voice is thin and weak, projected from some other narrative, as he is not at home in this one." [40]

Or when Low goes to the narrator's marketplace, where the common alphabets created "long ago by a handful of ancient masters and gods" are sold, and current alphabet makers and narrators are engaged only by the rich:

"I find unaccountable difficulties always arise in searching out the narrative sections of any marketplace, but of course how could I know that? Anyhow there always seems to be some sort of distraction, or the sort of wrong turn that, having drawn you into the trammels of its mischief, dodges behind the innocent turns and loses itself among them like an absconding pickpocket... the creation of a new symbola is not simply a matter of drawing a series of substitute markings; it is a magical undertaking, in which an ordination must be created that will allow for the improvisation of signs that will become permanent, and which must be commensurate with the client's requirements and expressive, at every point, of a rigorous internal coherence. Some clients will get phonetic alphabets, others syllabaries; some symbols, others pictures, depending on their needs, wants, personalities, whatever exigency is expressed in their need for a writing way of their own. Furthermore, the characters must seem appropriate to their sounds, or concepts, and this is where no amount of unassisted technical ability avails. The association of symbols is conducted in often grueling, if simple, rituals that can last for weeks; some accomplished artisans have died in pursuit of them. There is no telling at the outset what will cause the most difficulty; in some cases, extreme refinement of nuance may bring the symbolist to the point of complete collapse, while in other cases it may be an intolerable simplicity and directness that suffocates her." [32-33]

I realize that this is less a review than a series of questions and confusions, but that appears to be Cisco's M.O. here - this is a very difficult text/narrative/narration to pin down, and I don't even want to admit how many revisions this review has already gone through. It's pretty telling that all of the other reviews I've read have gotten various details wrong (or maybe just interpreted the novums of this world differently than I did, who knows). What is real here, and what is imagery - and, even further than that, what is real to Low and what is false narrative to him, and then what, if any, are the readers supposed to accept as the "real" aspects of Low's world?

It should also be mentioned that _The Narrator_ is a war story, although a fragmented and incoherent one. Low and his compatriots blunder around under orders they don't agree with in order to fight an enemy which is vaguely defined, at best (purposefully nonsensical), only to be set upon by their enemies (the "blackbirds," so called because their armor is composed of an alloy that allows them to flit about like birds) in scenes that usually begin with Low attempting to figure out what that popping/raining/whizzing noise is. He realizes it's gunfire once blood and guts and death start to erupt all around him, at which point the narrative usually descends into madness and frenzied violence. Armies and war itself, Cisco points out, are variously a plague, an embodied horror, or a shared insanity, an irrational and surreal experience that finds itself reflected in the content and presentation of this text.

All of this to say nothing about the sheer weird beauty of many of the episodes of Low's journey (and this a very episodic narration - shades of Moorcock again).

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I may never be anything better than a journeyman narrator now. If I ever were to write an account of these events, my narrative would be incoherent and inconclusive; I never know enough to say.

In his third year at the College of Narrators, despite having applied for an allowed exemption, Low Loom Column is drafted into the army as a result of some presumed administrative error. With hopes of clearing up this misunderstanding, he arrives in the city of Tref (aka Dusktemper) whereupon he is spotted by an Edek—a governmental spy who will now always know where he is, dashing any potential thoughts of desertion.

And so, after befriending some students at the local Embalmer’s College and experiencing a brief but bonding romance with a mysterious woman known locally as the ‘Cannibal Queen’, Low heads off to war with a ragtag company of soldiers led by the diabolical Captain Makemin. As the company moves through the land they come upon an asylum abandoned by its staff. After freeing those locked within the asylum’s walls, Makemin conscripts them into his understaffed regiment. From there marches off what may perhaps be the strangest army regiment ever found in the pages of literature.

Makemin and his crew skirmish with the enemy by land and sea as they make their way to the island of Meqhasset. Our narrator Low serves in the dual capacity of medic and Makemin’s translator due to his knowledge of languages. Much of the time spent in battle involves Low observing and describing horrific violence while attempting, usually with futile effort, to save his fellow soldiers from imminent death. Low also facilitates much of the information gathering Makemin relies on in order to track the enemy. In short, he is privy to most of the military machinations at play in the avenues of war, while remaining mostly an outsider—an unwilling draftee who would have much preferred to continue his studies as a narrator.

Cisco is an atmospheric writer and he effectively conjures the dark absurdity of war, replete with its brutal repetition of senseless killing, collateral damage, and jingo-fueled forward propulsion. He has said that in part the book was intended as a ‘fantasy Catch-22', and certainly there are parallels to that novel—including central themes and even an island setting—although The Narrator largely lacks the humor that Heller employs to balance out the horror in Catch-22. That is not to say this weakens Cisco’s novel; only that it is a main distinction between the two books.

Until Chapter Six, which begins on page 336, the book felt very episodic in nature and it was not always easy for me to stay engaged for long periods of reading. Makemin’s company lurches aimlessly around, suffering heavy losses and very few battle victories. Interleaved throughout these violent sequences are dense poetic passages that demand a close reading. However, once the regiment turns toward the interior of the island the narrative takes on a clearer trajectory and the setting becomes even more compelling. The ‘interior’ of the island evokes strong similarities to the Zone as depicted in the Strugatskys’ novel Roadside Picnic (as well as Tarkovsky’s loose film adaptation of that book, Stalker), which immediately caught my attention and basically held me riveted until the book's ending (which I must say was unexpected and quite satisfying).

With The Narrator Michael Cisco has crafted an incredibly elaborate—and at times eloquent—statement on the futility and tragedy inherent in war. It is at times frustrating and perhaps even indecipherable, and at other times feels like kind of a slog, but why should a book about war feel any other way?

I’ll never write anything—what could I possibly say when I haven’t understood anything? What one word could I possibly write about war, as though I could pick it up and handle it like it were a sane thing? It’s more than I can handle—I can feel the war close like black water over me—it has me—I’m in its stomach. All my strength is pouring out of me.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fucking trip from cover to cover. Maybe not as huge a favorite for me as "Animal Money" is, but this is undoubtedly the tighter narrative [har har], and as far as sheer enjoyment goes it's only barely slacking behind the aforementioned novel. This is possibly Cisco at his absolute best when it comes to the sensorium overload he loves equipping his works with - like "Animal Money", so much working beautifully and almost overwhelmingly on a page-by-page basis, this time in service of a much shorter story but one just as dense and rich with imagistic and thematic meat to chew on. The kind of work that demands you to slow down, absorb every sentence thoroughly and get these absolutely brilliant, unique, and totally insane images engraved into your frontal cortex. And the phantasmagoria here is upheld with a backbone just begging to be used more for weird fiction, and after reading this any more would be a tough act to follow - War, because after all what is stranger than mass murder systemized to power incomprehensible hegemonies?

Reading this [along with two of Amos Tutuola's wonderful little novellas back in July] has increasingly made me feel more aware of the umbrage I take with a lot of contemporary worldbuilding, or at least the way many contemporary authors of fantastic fiction utilize worldbuilding as a technique. Far too much over explaining, hyperspecific detail that gets bogged down in the narrative when the time comes to actually tell the story, far too little space to allow both the reader and the author to let their imagination fill in the blanks. This is exactly what Cisco does the opposite of here, and one of the major things that draws me to his work. This isn't worldbuilding, it's more like world painting - Cisco seems to let the world expand out instead of drawing it inwards. Very little is explained, and explanations are kept to the minimum when they exist - the world overflows with detail but it is all natural, nothing is lingered upon, Cisco trusts the reader to simply experience it and draw their own conclusions. Fantasy, which is fantastic, benefits from a lack of handholding, because when we don't have a frame of reference our imaginations run as wild as intended to be for a book like this.

And boy oh boy is there really a lack of frame of reference here, in terms of just how original and how vivid this world is. The settings and landscapes Low and his party travel through are among some of the most alien I've ever encountered in speculative fiction, and the world is so dissimilar to ours in just about everything - human customs, flora and fauna [which all seem to have a direct sensory impact on our human characters], architecture and nature - everything is just so genuinely extraterrestrial and genuinely surreal, and it paints such a vivid picture. There are times when what Cisco is describing is so genuinely foreign that it's nearly impossible to imagine, and I had to scan sentences slowly and continuously to really let it all sink in. This is the kind of surrealism that the early surrealists would be proud of - organic, absolutely painterly prose, crafting something beyond the bounds of traditional human imagination.

The story is also extremely gripping as a narrative and metatext, not only in its progression but how every question it asks [or leaves out] is in service to the greater picture coalescing here. Our plot concerns Low Loom Column [great name], a youth who serves as a "narrator" who is ensigned into the military to serve an oblique war. There's no real explanation for what exactly a "narrator" entails, or why Low is enscripted, nor if Low is even really narrating the story. I won't go too deep into this, because others have said it better than I could, but a big core of this book is asking who actually quite literally controls the narrative when it comes to war, which is in reality a completely arbitrary and meaningless thing, a systemized bloodshed enabled by the powerful against the weak. The repetition of brutal battle scenes and arduous journeys through these nightmarish landscapes, as well as the lack of clarity on any, is why this works - how can one ever really know War? Is there anything more absurd, strange, and terrifying than the fact that our governments can wipe us all out for power, and ensign us into going toward our own destruction? This book portrays war as an actual nightmare, infusing the entire concept with hallucinatory dream-logic, in maybe the most unique take on this type of story I've read yet. And throughout, I felt a genuine kinship with the characters as they trudge toward doom - feeling like a part of their unit, putting myself in the shoes of Low and Jil etc., feeling as overwhelmed and terrified as they are in their spellbinding journey.

I want to say more here but this story is so imagistic, so contained within the experience one has with it, that I don't want to risk spoiling anything even intermittently. But as if I didn't have enough proof already Cisco just continues to absolutely kill it and solidify himself as one of the most inventive sci-fantasy authors working today, and maybe period, and I'm never going to stop shilling him until he's at least tangentially less underrated than he is now. If the idea of "sci-fi Apocalypse Now/Blood Meridian on peyote and a steady dose of Dali" appeals to you then this is something you definitely want to read. 450 some odd pages, and I could have stayed here for twice the length.

"A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we're going to meet it, but there's no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I'm not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I've already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I'm no more than one sharp breath from waking. It's a breath I can never manage."

[P.E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liminal territories

This the story of Low Loom Column, a student in a local academy of Narrators in the Alak Empire, drafted in the army, sent to an out-and-out disquieting island from which no foreigner ever returned... The weird in this Weird novel shows up at the very onset, and only strenghtens on the road to the military theater, escalating to bewildering peaks of oddity, disorientation and widespread doom.

I was keen on reading this one, following my discovery of the writer with the delightfully weird The Traitor (2007) and its endlessly puzzling main character.

Deep down, I can see many similar traits between the two: be it the unorthodox main character, the unforeseen life-changing journey, the strong, singular characters met on the way, the subtle mix of literary elements from the Gothic, the fantastic, fantasy, science fiction, war fiction; both stories demand that the reader pieces together their own interpretation of the behaviour and mind states of the main characters.

At the same time, the story of the Narrator is profoundly original, and boasts some acutely otherworldy moments, much more so than in The Traitor, which did not lack them in the first place. It is precisely there that the main difference lies between these two stories. The frenzy in The Narrator reaches actual summits that were mostly alluded to, left to imagination in the former novel. I have found the former approach much more efficient, as far as immersion and pervading weirdness go. The Traitor, by leaving a seemingly familiar environment as a pasture to the reader's eye, allows you to formulate assumptions, to consider some elements as part of the scenery, to envision certain characters as certain archetypes or a complex medley of familiar literary characters. Wite in particular, but that also applies to Wite's sister and to the namesake 'Traitor' himself. In The Narrator, you don't have this luxury, its world is thoroughly strange, wild, almost ineffable from the start What a madcap foray into the very limits of language indeed..., which doesn't lack irony, as we are to follow a Narrator, after all. On another note, you are left to suppose how much does the Narrator make things happen before or as he perceives them. Note that in the story there is one specific moment when we are faced with the baleful apparition of a dreamer, that is a sort of sleepwalker that dreams up the world where Low and the other protagonists fret and get busy... How much of a dreamer he is, himself? Who knows? All seems to be left to your personal reading.

As much as I prize its creative licence, I can't say I felt any sort of bond with the characters - Low, Makemin, Punkinflake included -, neither did I any form of connexion to its bizarre, shifting imbroglio of a world. Perhaps that was not the aim. Saskia might have struck a chord, but in the end she proved to me as illegible as the rest of the characters. The concluding chapter only stirred the pot even more, and did not help me construing anything approaching a definite impression about this disjointed novel.

In the end, I settle on three stars, for the sake of some sparse memorable moments of deep confusion: the odd romantic trysts, the strolls with the Death priests, the encounters with the Predicanten and the spine-chilling Edeks, some acutely disturbing dreams or dreamlike visions, the drafting of the inmates of a prison-asylum, the sceneries in the remote island where the absurd war between the Alak and the "blackbirds" rages on... In short, a collection of pictures of the Sublime, as ephemeral, as haunting and fleeting as a fever dream.

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Suggested Soundtrack


Also see:

Candide
Voyage au bout de la nuit
Das Schloß
Il deserto dei Tartari
The Ghost Pirates
Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, 1. díl – V zázemí
Пикник на обочине
Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu

[fonz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitivamente estoy ya muy mayor para este tipo de novelas, un abuelo en bata y pantuflas que se ha quedado roque cada quince páginas, viéndose obligado a releer una y otra vez el mismo párrafo con las gafas en la punta de la nariz mientras se veía incapaz de aprehender lo que estaba leyendo, saltándose de manera inconsciente líneas enteras porque su cerebro sencillamente no daba para más. Y es que la estrategia de enterrar un escurridizo y complejo subtexto en nada menos que cuatrocientas páginas de una prosa espesísima y narcoléptica quizá no haya sido la elección más adecuada para que los que tenemos el cerebro ya muy perjudicado por los sinsabores de la vida, entremos en la novela. Ciertas partes en las que el narrador (y su narración) va desmoronándose al enfrentarse a la naturaleza caótica, absurda, cruel y salvaje de la guerra arrojan algunas imágenes potentes, pero acaba cayendo en la inane y tediosa acumulación de situaciones absurdas e inconexas y en este aspecto del relato no resiste la comparación si lo enfrentamos a la abundante literatura sobre el tema bélico, ya sea desde lo personal ("El miedo" de Gabriel Chevalier, una obra cuyo argumento resulta muy similar a este "The Narrator"), lo académico ("El rostro de la batalla" de John Keegan) o lo periodístico ("Dispatches" de Michael Herr) por poner sólo tres ejemplos.

[Bryan Lee Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Cisco has been a favorite of mine for almost ten years, from when I read his 1999 International Horror Guild Award winning, The Divinity Student. Cisco is not strictly horror, he lands in a category I can’t quite place, dark fantasy, Lovecraftian, gothic, something unto himself. His hallmarks are tremendous world-building, extremely rich visual description, character driven plots, unusually rendered and memorable side characters, and worlds as mysterious and magical as they are unorthodox. Cisco landed with Prime books for The San Veneficio Canon, The Tyrant, and The Traitor. Prime seemed to be a good fit for him, but the imprint proved difficult. A blog entry some time ago on why you should avoid Prime books began, “I think I remember what money looks like.” The Narrator takes place in a tangential connection to The Traitor, by use of a language and culture called Alak, and mention of the Soul Eaters, a sort of marginalized religious figure, but this does not play prominently in The Narrator. It seems to be a time period on the future of the same world, and events are not related between the two books.

The mess with Prime resulted in only one novel being released in six years despite his assertion of having fifteen done. Another book is set to be released by another publisher in the spring, a couple other titles are known, but have not found a home.

The Narrator was released in October 2010 by Civil Coping Mechanisms, which promoted it as his most mature and ambitious novel yet. The title character, named Low Loom Column begins the book at a university, training to become a narrator when he is drafted into military service despite having an exemption. When he tries to protest he is told time and again it is a futile effort, and he is forced to report to the nearest city for service. He continues seeking ways of getting out of conscription, even considering desertion, as he meets others from his unit, notably the conscripts Jil Punkinflake, and Silichieh, and Captain Makemin. He has some time in the city before they gather and move out, which he spends in his occupation. He records a séance, and provides his services for a wealthy and mysterious resident of the city, the cannibal queen who is said to have killed and eaten her husband after the death of her child, and who is socially imprisoned in her mansion. Here he illustrates just what a narrator does, he records the story that is told to him.

Forgive me a brief foray from the plot at this point, to set up what Cisco is so good at. Cisco can write sentences better than anybody. Long and lush descriptions, brilliant similes and metaphors, a tremendous mastery of language which always inspires me. While still in the city, he lays out the matter of the book in this paragraph.

“I find unaccountable difficulties always arise in searching out the narrative sections of any marketplace, but of course, how could I know that? Anyhow there always seems to be some distraction, or the sort of wrong turn that, having drawn you into the trammels of its mischief, dodges behind the innocent turns and loses itself among them like an absconding pickpocket. No shortage of the real ones either—at the wine store, Jil Punkinflake took my wallet slowly from my hand as I was about to restore it to my pocket and deftly slipped it into my shirt, where my vest holds it now against my skin. I ask him about the narrative market and he gives me a swift, canny look. With a nearly invisible toss of his head I realize he is one of those go-betweens who are involved with the narrative merchants, the storiers and letterers and calligraphers and abcedarians. We flit out into trough like stone lanes.”

Here Cisco lays out exactly what to expect in this book. This is a story about story, existing on many levels simultaneously, and it will steal your wallet if you aren’t careful. Low is an unreliable narrator, as unreliable as this narrative market. It is also here that he is seen by an Edek, and once the Edek sees you, there is no sneaking away from conscription. They assemble, and we find Makemin is a hard officer, intent on making a name for himself, and forget about his pending divorce, mostly by taking out his personal anger on his troops. Low tries to avoid him until on the march our of the city, Makemin notices he is a narrator. Low is given a horse, and ordered to ride alongside him to record the story of his unit.

They are attacked on the road, enemies described as “blackbirds” ambush them as they make their way out of the city. They take some casualties, but curiously, the blackbird dead hover above the ground. Their first stop is a mental institution. In the run up to the war, the caretakers locked the residents in, leaving them to die. Makemin releases and treats many, and then conscripts the able bodies into his unit. A woman, Saskia describes how the Blackbirds have metal body suits, cast specially so lightly they float, and can therefore attack from the sky, cover great distances in a jump, and be gone in seconds.

They make their way to the shore, where they commandeer a ship to make it an island which is a strategic stronghold for their side of the war. Their ship is attacked en route, and they suffer large casualties before reaching port. The port is designed to be very easily defended from the sea, and mountains protect the city from the inland side of the island, but the enemy is known to be on the opposite shore. The unit disembarks and makes friends with the natives, largely through Low's translation skills, and soon marches on the enemy, Makemin eager to make a name for himself. Early exploration reveals a larger than expected enemy presence, and Makemin is forced to make a decision, return to the city and defend it from there, leaving the rest of the island to fend for itself, possibly leaving it to become a stronghold, or wait for reinforcements in the form of Predicanten, (also known as predicates), soldiers locked in giant armored suits, essentially walking insane tanks. There is another option, however. The interior of the island is said to possess ancient magical weapons, enough to destroy any army, if the spirits of the island decide they like those seeking to use them. If not, well, no one makes it back alive. Only Low, the Narrator, has the ability to translate the languages needed to convince the spirits to fight on their side, and so he leads a final expedition into the interior to gain the spirit weapons before the opposing army realizes they are there and makes its own attempts. But to describe it like this is to leave out all of the details that make a Michael Cisco book so rich and engrossing.

The book is rich in ambiguity. It is never clear what the matter of the war is, or who the enemy is, nor is it clear how anybody in the country feels towards the war, the enemy, or the soldiers. There are mentions of separatists, but these seem to be more an ethnic minority and never figure into the fighting. Even the soldiers have very little to say about the why of the war, and only discuss the circumstances they find themselves in.

The Narrator is a book that rewards a slow read due to its rich text and subtle storyline. This is certainly an gifted author coming into his own, though I think The Tyrant left me more satisfied emotionally as a reader.

Cisco succeeds here at writing a rich story on several levels, not just telling a story of this military regiment, but a story of people, a nation, and a story about story telling, and the strength narrative holds personally and culturally. It is interesting to see how the pursuit of story affects the characters through the book. For Low, being a narrator should have been a blessing, a way out of this war, and it soon becomes a burden, but a burden he must carry as his training requires. Makemin does not set out in search of honor, glory or country, it is to make his own story, and all along the way, story drives every character. Low is the historian on the spot, setting each down, it is only with reluctance that he takes control of the narrative, and it is up to the reader to decide how unreliable a narrator he is.

Cisco also succeeds in re-imagining the unreliable narrator story, creating a narrator always suspect, seemingly capable of everything he undertakes, and yet incapable of the tasks he takes on.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Cisco, The Narrator (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010)

Every modern (along with many ancient) war on the planet has produced a definitive novel—The Killer Angels, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Thin Red Line, Purple Mountain, the list goes on. But war, especially in recent times, has gained something of a broader definition than it had during the days when heavily-armored men spent hours lining up on battlefields to charge each other with lances. Nowadays, we go to war against ideas. Few people would consider attempting a definitive novel about the war on terror. (One assumes anyone who would attempt one about the war on drugs is, well, too stoned.) But as far as I can discern, that is exactly what Michael Cisco has given us in The Narrator—an absurd book that chronicles, albeit in urban-fantasy mode, an absurd, unwinnable war. It is the very absurdity, the unwinnable-ness, if you will, of the war on terror that makes The Narrator such a strong addition to the literature of war. Well, that and Michael Cisco's narrative style.

We begin with Low Loom Column, a somewhat unassuming student, being drafted, despite having put in for a student exception. Protesting all the way, he leaves his home in the mountains, from which he has never been far, and heads for the city of Tref, where he is supposed to meet up with his regiment. While in Tref, he befriends a number of students from the local mortuary school, including the urbane, witty Jil Punkinflake, and has a whirlwind affair with a local widow known throughout the city as the Cannibal Queen. Alas, the lackadaisical nature of the army comes to an end, and Low, along with Jil and a few of the other mortuary students, set out for the coast with Makemin, their commending officer, and his regiment. While their initial encounters are lighthearted, not dangerous at all (the regiment, which is severely undermanned, picks up strength—as well as another former mortuary student in the gangly, obsessed Thrushchurl—by liberating an asylum from the enemy), once they get to the coast and prepare to set off for the island they will be defending, things start getting nasty, and Low and his friends all handle the stress in different ways. Low, being the regiment Narrator, is supposed to be the one apart from the action, the dispassionate recorder of events, the historian. But he has also been pressed into service as Makemin's translator, the only member of the regiment who understands Lashlache, the language of the enemy, as well as the company medic. It is impossible to stay dispassionate, and the strain begins to wear. Low's very capacity for language begins to break down, and we, reading this account, are left to wonder: are things really as absurd as they seem, or has Low Loom Column simply gone insane?

The jacket copy compares Cisco's language in the book to both Antonin Artaud and Alain Robbe-Grillet, “with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti.” The comparisons are warranted, and as a worshipful fan of all three of those writers, I do not make such pronouncements lightly. I would also add a comparison to the mythpunks, those writers whose depth of language is as much a feature of their work as their worldbuilding (Sonya Taaffe, Jeannelle Ferreira, Catherynne Valente, Wendy Walker, etc.). But all this aside, the novel I found myself returning to time and again was Heinrich Böll's first novel, The Train Was on Time. I had thought that comparison would wear off as Cisco's situations got more and more absurd, but instead, the opposite was the case; the farther apart the two novels grew on the fantasy vs. reality level, the closer they seemed to grow thematically (Böll's novel, after all, is an examination of what we now know as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and many of Low's symptoms as time goes on could be explained that way as well).

The novel does contain a somewhat ridiculous coda—its only weak point. It does serve to answer the question posed at the end of the plot synopsis I gave above, but that could have been done any number of ways without stretching the reader's credibility quite do far. Still, that's a very few pages at the end of what is, in every other way, a masterwork. “What one word,” Low asks himself (or us), “could I possibly write about war, as though I could pick it up and handle it like it were a sane thing?” Michael Cisco abandoned that idea from the outset, and it was the best decision he could have made in writing The Narrator. **** ½

[Mangrii · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,75 / 5

Low es reclutado por un error burocrático para combatir contra el ejército de mirlos invasor. Tras pasar unos días por la extraña ciudad de Tref, una urbe donde hay desde embalsamadores hasta Edeks y reinas caníbales, Low se une al ejercito de Makemin para viajar hasta una guerra de la que no sabía nada y hasta un lugar al que nunca quiso ir ¿Por qué no escapar? Una edek lo ha visto, y no puede huir. Su destino esta anclado al de este ejercito y su viaje hasta la remota isla de Meqhaset.

El Narrador es un libro engañosamente fácil de leer, pese a que su prosa densa cargada de metáforas, aliteraciones, adjetivos y cierta experimentación no lo parezca en un primer momento. El juego de palabras es su arma arrojadiza y la magia visual creada por Cisco funciona como un hechizo para el lector. Cualquier párrafo de Cisco esta cargado de detalles y sentidos, de imaginación y experimentación, que llevan un paso más allá la sencilla trama -una marcha hasta la guerra- de El Narrador. Sin embargo, es ya su propio narrador (por redundante que suene), el primer punto experimental de la historia.

La novela, construida en primera persona de tiempo presente donde Low ejerce de narrador, converge en ocasiones con su función de Narrador y a veces, se convierte en un cronista de sus experiencias o las historias de otros. Así, diluyendo las líneas, Cisco presenta a un narrador que podría no ser el mismo narrador durante toda la novela. A veces, incluso se corrige a si mismo o deja entrever ciertos errores gramaticales. Es en esta experimentación formal donde Cisco reluce y deconstruye los tropos de la narración, retorciéndolos hasta más allá de nuestros ojos. Por tanto, El Narrador puede ser una novela que te expulse por cómo está contada y su poco confiable punto de vista, pero que también te enamore por lo mismo.

Errante, incomprensible y repleta de muerte, las escenas de El Narrador nos conducen por un camino de confusión donde impera el sinsentido de cada individuo, que obedece un rumbo ciego hacia una más que probable muerte. Es el punto de vista de Michael Cisco sobre la guerra. Las secuencias de batalla son abundantes, sin significado y caóticas. Cisco transmite de forma magistral el desasosiego de la guerra, la capacidad destructiva de la misma y el horror que puebla un campo de batalla. El Narrador sabe captar a la perfección la confusión y el tedio repetitivo de la guerra, donde lo grotesco y lo perturbador suceden en apenas segundos. Ese lugar donde unos luchan contra otros de forma forzada, obediente e inevitable. Muerte y sufrimiento transpiran y te atenazan a las páginas de El Narrador.

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like what I should say here is that Cisco is clearly a smart, intentional writer and that even though I found this book, like most (but not all) of his short stories, very difficult to actually enjoy overall, plenty of his imagery and ideas are cool, and the books overall are either just not for me or not something I'm smart enough to understand yet. But I'm not quite humble enough to do that. Instead, I'm going to try and put that discrepancy in more specific terms. What I don't understand here is what it is about Cisco's ambition or vision that requires him to leave out the one thing that makes a story like this readable. It's a fairly linear story, with one point of view character, a consistent cast of side characters, New Weird world building that isn't any less amenable to clear storytelling than Bas-Lag, mild meta-fictional elements but at least to the extent I picked up on them, nothing more ambitious or experimental than the much more accessible Slaughterhouse Five. Even putting to one side for a moment the question of whether experimental fiction in general needs to or ought to abandon character motivation to achieve its goals, I just don't see how this book justifies that.

As it is, The Narrator feels like a cool car that could go some interesting places. . . but it doesn't have an engine, so if you want to get there, you have to pull it yourself. Over and over again I would get to a scene with an interesting environment or a monster or a dramatic moment and think, "this could have been a cool part of a good book." But instead it is just one indifferent flash of descriptive text in the monotonous stream the protagonist slouches through with no agency, goals, only the most minimal reactions, and no stakes. Everything is submerged in a haze of stream of consciousness weirdness, and that can be a cool thing to achieve in its own right. But Jeff VanderMeer does it all the time without losing the person behind it, the story they're percieving through that bizarre, dreamy lens. I just can't see any value in this absence, only missed opportunities to deepen the impact of shallow spectacle, sparse drama, and literary experiment alike – not to mention the chore it makes of the mere act of pushing through the dense text. Maybe there really is something here that I'm just too doltish to see, but to my eye this just feels like a misguided antipathy to good storytelling motivated by a mistaken conception of what makes art "elevated."

[Teodor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not gonna lie -- as with all Cisco novels, I found The Narrator is best imbibed in slow, deliberate gulps and in a place where it will command your full attention (like an insulated studio room where any noise is naturally filtered through a shaft). Cisco's imaginative sweep, especially his surreal set-pieces, are a pleasure to take in, so it's a shame not to train your attention towards all of its details. He's also cavalier about the workings of plot, so your milage will vary depending on how much you can stomach a picaresque war story that will evoke stuff like Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness in a surrealist fantasy/sci-fi/horror setting, but whose dramatic and thematic payoff appears to be elusive at best. But any pat explaining-away of the weirdness would have diminished the core of experience - which is to show the absurdity and horror of war without any hand-holding and narrative filters: the weird stays weird, and there is no exit clause. But if Cisco is cavalier when it comes to conventional plot structure, it doesn't mean that he's an undisciplined writer. The strangeness here is presented in the most lucid way possible, with a visual precision that's almost jarring for being so precise and consistent. There's an impish playfulness when it comes to genre orthodoxy - the 'narrator' trope that characterises the book is bent out of shape many a time - but Cisco takes the construction of his fever-dream world seriously.

[Ignacio Senao f · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una genialidad Una genialidad cuyo eje central es el poder de la imaginación mostrando un mundo en el que cada ser tiene un papel el cual nosotros nos costaría imaginar sin la ayuda de un estimulante tan poderoso como es esta novela. La historia es secundaria, lo que vale es dejarse llevar.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one I struggled to finish. Too reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer's more rambling works.

It begins on a promising note, set in a bizarre world where our "hero" is drafted into a war he doesn't want to fight.

But multiple scenes of descriptions of weird structures, dreams (I hate it when a novel is generously peppered with these) and typos left me uninvolved with the plot which just fizzled out.

[Vincenzo Bilof · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I write this now, I have just finished the book. I am kind of shaking. The book…
I might be a bit late to the party by suggesting that reviewing one Cisco book requires a review of all of his work, at this point. In my mind, having read several of his books, I have to say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to review a single book without considering the others. I am probably going to skip my review of The Tyrant for now, and The Celebrant, because The Narrator seems to be at the center of the entire mythos. A part of me feels like this is a sequel to The Tyrant. I still have to read The Great Lover, but I would imagine it might be a sort of polar opposite to this one…
So the really isn’t a reason for me to write anything about this book now only other than I feel I must. This is the most “accessible” of Cisco’s books to read, and because it is the most “realistic” it is the most honest. It is brutal in its intensity. One of the authors who commented on the book’s back cover compared it to Alien and Full Metal Jacket. That’s not even close. It’s more like Michael Cisco meets war. The book, I think, is about going INTO war, and that is what Cisco did here. All of the symbolism revolved around the idea that the book itself was going INTO war. Not the characters, or the plot, but the narrative. And here it seems the book becomes rather “unreal” or “surreal” when we compare it to his other works, but that’s wrong. That’s wrong because insanity and its very definition seem to fit with Cisco’s idea of war and reality and… love. Yes, love.
The fact that I am even writing a review now is a testament to the fact that The Narrator really got into my head just as war might seep into someone’s consciousness. The book features a sort of evolution of war, and it is both familiar and strange. It is every war story ever told or narrated. I felt like I was reading Matterhorn all over again (arguably one of the better modern war novels). I felt like I was reading Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now… I felt like I was in all of those stories and every character from those stories was personified almost as a FLAT archetype of those characters just as the book is sort of an archetype for war. I felt like I was in a tank with General Patton. I felt like I was at Waterloo or Moscow…
This book is ridiculously beautiful and epic. Cisco is the master. The master. I feel like writing one massive review of all of his books rolled into one large piece that is just as much metafiction as his own works are. This is a book that will never, ever, ever leave me.
One last thing: I feel like every author has a line, or a passage, in each book that sort of defines the book, and it’s a hidden sentence. I like to find these hidden lines, as if I could find the one line in which the author might have written “here is what the book is about.” I feel like this book repeated the line… all the way to the “interior…”

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could tell within a few dozen pages that this one was simply not for me, but by some compulsion of hope that it would get better, I read the rest of it. I don't see the point in disparaging it here, clarifying and justifying my distaste. In brief, it is entirely, chokingly imagistic: everything is described and nothing matters. Learned my lesson and will steer clear of "dark fantasy" from now on. 450 "vivid" pages, not one moment of memorably piqued interest, except perhaps early on when it seemed that language, books, text, etc. would be prominently treated, a possibility squandered on every redundant page thereafter detailing another insufferably pointless battle (yaaaaawwwwn) or an unvarying wastescape of mud, blood, and rust. I tried, but it is just not good.

[M. M. J. Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué viaje. Esta novela es una maravilla que hace honor a su título, lo que deja abarcar una maraña de expresiones formales en cuanto a su lenguaje, su estructura y su realización poética. Es una obra bélica a la más pura desfachatez de lo que significa la violencia y la confusión. Sin saberlo, nos sumerge en la crueldad atestiguada por nuestro héroe, Low, en el sinsentido cruel de una guerra que ni siquiera parece tener razón de ser. Es quizás unas de las obras de fantasía más sólidas que he leído a lo largo de mi vida, catapultando tantos tópicos, tantas inquietudes en mí que todavía no logro procesar.

Sin duda, esta obra de arte construida a puño y letra por Michael Cisco se mueve en la genialidad literaria. De momento, no tengo más que alabanzas. Reitero: qué viaje.

[Ana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Una obra confusa es decir poco..., esperaba otra cosa.

Me he obligado a continuar con la lectura hasta el final, con la esperanza de poder descubrir algo de coherencia, un hilo argumental que proporcionase algún sentido y continuidad. No lo he encontrado.

Culpa mía por no hacerle caso a la calificación de "surrealista" de la sinopsis ni a las reseñas que lo describen como "onírico" o "confuso".

No es para mí.
La experimentación literaria no está mal si tu presupuesto para libros no es limitado, en mi caso me cabrea haber malgastado 22€ en un montón de texto sin sentido...

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantasía y new weird fuera de lo común. Poético y alucinatorio.

[D.D. Price]

“What the fuck did I just read….” Those are the words I thought when I finished the very cerebral ending of this surrealistic post-modern tromp through a hallucinogenic wonderland. This is a mind-bending and mind-boggling book, a book that alters realities and can change your perception of what exactly a novel can entail and one that will have you saying “What the fuck!” just like I did. This is my second read from Cisco, the first being the Divinity Student which was a very interesting novel albeit unpolished. Now there are some things I like about the Divinity Student more but the Narrator is a far more poetic and polished effort and one that is far more puzzling. Cisco’s prose for example is much improved, much clearer and more precise and his characters too are more interesting if a bit shallow. The imagery is just so vivid it is incredible. The Narrator seemed easier at first and more mainstream but the further I got into the book the less I realized this is the case. The Divinity Student only seemed harder because the hallucinogenic gibberish scenes go on for longer and tend to be more frequent but I learned real quick reading that book that most of those passages are largely irrelevant to the story and that I could skim them and loose nothing of my understanding of the substance of the novel. Here the boundaries are far less defined so it is very difficult to distinguish what hallucinogenic parts are necessary for you as a reader to know and which parts are unnecessary. So for that reason I have compiled some of the gibberish passages together to give an example of how tough and weird this novel is and perhaps you can even use it for future reference!

“If his own train were wrecked, and this were yet no spur, then it would be she and he. Intimate in the half-light. She was the one who started, who hid, like her kind will. There is always more second wind, hidden or trapped in pockets below the earth, or in the trees, or in each other. You spread more whenever you shall sit down to write. That’s the difference between lives; try it, and there shall be some wind to move the death out of your path. Boneless mummified words sifted through your writing fingers will receive and hold the death there, present before you and even trapped. Your turn over death and life, passing them back and forth through something like a window, and drive the death sentence through what you did not know….” (43).

"Here the companion writing their reciprocal dreams made. Read the companion voice that is prosaically called the powers of the air. Conjure with them the third person, to whom this is addressed. Address the third person with them. Do it all as sniffed by a dead arm, as seen by a silent mouth, as heard by a stopped nose, as fingered by a deaf ear, as tasted by a blind eye, as undergone by a missing person nobody missed in the first place, and related by a ghost who somehow manages just about every time to persuade you that it presides over this switching operation between stories. Who is not dead and not alive, and who, the ghost, and this ghost was born a ghost not a living person, appears in Low when he does all its work for it, as the unknown knowledge of its name which remains hidden inside that knowledge, or as the owner’s tag, hidden deep in the fur, attached to that work. These things are everywhere, one is speaking now, and its speaking is a writing on the floor, twisting its lithe, sleek body this and that, on its back and its belly, as hands try playfully to seize it. It gambols. The third person squirts and slips from those hands like a lathered cake of soap, squirms like an intestine, one admires the gleam of its lushly oiled fur. And all the while it squeals out its speeches, revealing to you what it is, or what that is, as it is as sniffed by a dead moth, as kissed by a silent guest, as heard by a stopped charm, as fingered by a deaf person, as tasted by a blind rose, as seen by an eye that was most often finally a ghost, and undergone by a tear or a tear who somehow happens to preside over this switching operation, if only because it can persuade you this operation happens between stories" (119).

"The snow coils and bounces as it fall, the whole mass rippling gelatinously in a beautiful sourceless twilight. One – not me exactly – imagines a snow world saturated with limpid lightsyrup and light shining through light. Imperturbable trees in a swarm of light shed by a milky low sky. Buildings seen from the train emerge and vanish in intensely calm, shimmering white… in a silent activity I’m being hollowed out. It’s a village. Silhouettes, anonymous and swinging in streets the snow has erased. I wake and escape through the door into the dim day; cross to the rail and see a patch of slush, or some white thing, on the waves.

The brutal sleep pushes everything else aside, bullying me with its demands. A soul in this body, or is there only body? Once a crisis, but now that I’m older, these two ideas lie locked together in an iron sleep. Back in my bunk I can’t get away from the heat of my pillow and my blanket, and I can’t tolerate the touch of the air. I shake out of my skin and back into the darkness, close, hot and stifling. I hear the dark; it drones at me" (131).

"One by one, things gradually are falling, fall back into certain places. I am one of these things. The story will have first no person at all, and now a person is coming back.

That I will start with the unhurried, the casual pausing now and then to reflect or to collect itself, approach of a visitor; a pain which is drawing nearer by hasteless degrees.

It is with adjustments in my midsection, so there I am. Coming back into it, out of some other place of stifling closeness and oppressively contained body heat" (139).

I’m not going to even attempt to analyze these passages right now. You can do it when you read it. In fact even after having read the entire book I still look at some of these passages and go…. What the fuck? Literally I only have the most marginal understanding of the most cryptic passages of the book and there are some where I probably don’t have any understanding at all. I will say though if you look at them carefully enough there seems to be a consistent cadence throughout some of those paragraphs. Cisco is a very educated man who knows language very well from his work as a translator and as a university professor so he’s able to bend language to his will and do really weird and I must say grammatically incorrect things with it. Gosh… this is one of those novels that it’s really hard for me to judge – hence the no rating – until I re-read it which I plan to do soon. Much of this novel is built up of abstractions which can make it seem incoherent. So if you don’t want to deal with too many abstract concepts then this isn’t the novel for you. Its art but it’s not a beautiful painting, its art where all the colors are blurred together the wrong way, where a tree bending to the winds might becoming inseparable from the base of a mountain, where the unreal is the real, and the impossible jumps off the page at you in quantitative leaps and bounds. Sure there are parts that are beautiful in this painting, parts that you can gaze at in absolute baffled wonder but stepping back the whole appears a buzzing mass of confusion, one that’s difficult to make heads or tails of.

My main qualm is that some of the weird gibberish seems to be weirdness just for its own sake and I’m not sure that’s the kind of weird I’m interested in. When Mieville writes something weird you know it’s going to be with purpose or even Tim Powers… but here I’m not sure that’s the case. The gibberish deliberately obfuscates the text and sometimes you know that there is supposed to be something hidden in that gibberish that is important to the narrative but the meaning gets lost in all of the gibberish and so the reader has to play a guessing game at what exactly the author intends for the reader to know. This actually can be a detriment to enjoying later passages. For example there is a scene that has quite a lot of gibberish with a reference to something that doesn’t show up until much later at the book. At first you have no idea what it is referring and it isn’t until you reach that point when the character explicitly mentions it again that the bells clang together and you rush back to the aforementioned passage but when I returned the reference is simply hidden among a bunch of profligate gibberish with no emphasis placed on the important part of that passage. I hate it when a writer hand holds his reader but seriously the writer still has an obligation to draw attention to important things like that in their work. It would have been better if the passage of gibberish had been a lot more clear in what it was describing and instead of obfuscating the reference wholly dedicated the passage to the important future event it was referring so that when you reach the point where the thing referenced was seen by the narrator he wouldn’t have had to explain it as much to the reader and the reader could have had that “Ah-ah” moment which is a very rewarding thing in literature of depth and great density like this but I just feel like Cisco’s deliberate obfuscation in this instance robbed that from me and I’m sure there are other instances of this as well that I may not even have noticed. To be fair this won’t hurt the novel as much on re-read but I just feel like some of the gibberish could be toned down whilst still maintaining the novels abstract and hallucinogenic feel. Anyone can write gibberish and based on what I’ve seen I’m not convinced that Cisco’s gibberish is bursting with meaning (I could be wrong though).
Speaking of re-reading I am a bit hesitant about that only because I’m not sure it’s worth it. Considering that the narrator Low is an unreliable narrator and that his narrative is full of contradictions, over exaggerations and outright fabrications I would like to go back and analyze to see what Low actually meant about certain events, and just generally take note of when he’s lying and telling the truth but based on what I’ve deduced from the text I’m not convinced there will be a big revelation. Cisco dilutes a lot of the meaning of his work with all of the gibberish and doesn’t really leave enough adequate clues behind for the reader to make entirely accurate conjectures. But if this is a guessing game then what’s the point? Subtlety is good when it comes to giving the readers understanding but I have a feeling Cisco is a bit too subtle and too abstract. I’m not in the author’s head so I can’t know what he meant by everything but you bet I expect him to leave enough clues for me to adequately deduce what he might have meant and come to my own fully informed interpretation, but many of the clues he leaves seem so obscured by a haze of abstraction that what you get is very vague and generalized interpretation. Literally this is what you see in reviews of this book.

In the previous paragraph I may have seemed quite critical of this book but in truth that criticism doesn’t reflect my actual enjoyment of the book. I enjoyed it immensely, it’s only that there are parts I can’t make heads or tails of and this is where the difficulty in evaluating it comes in. A lot of the plot elements may not have seemed to me to fit in with the overarching narrative arch – I hope I am wrong – but in terms of theme Cisco nailed it. The novel starts off “The Army was a horror,” and indeed the army and whole notion of going to war is one big gigantic horror. Over the course of the story Low has to wrestle with many moral quandaries pertaining to the mission he is sent on. He questions why they are sent on the mission in the first place, what the purpose is to the war, and the morally suspect actions of some of his comrades, especially their commanding leader whom he calls a murderer on numerous occasions (not to his face obviously). Low does grow a bit crazy in his anti-war sentiments towards the end of the book and that is understandable considerable the ordeals he has to deal with. “Who cares who owns what? What possession is like life? I’m surrounded by idiots? All these crazy whores have sold their bodies and souls to the war” (205). But Low isn’t the only character to change. Most of the cast change by the end of the novel from their naïve delusions of grandeur to borderline insanity or outright insanity although there was one particular character who shows amazing resilience throughout all of the ordeals and doesn’t seem to change that much in the end. The battle scenes are very chaotic and hallucinogenic with the lines being so blurred it is hard to see what’s happening or even who’s fighting who. Very, very trippy stuff.

The best part about this is that battles will happen literally out of nowhere and although these scenes can be repetitive as they are all very similar they serve the purpose in conveying quite well the horrors and confusion of battle and also its utter pointlessness. By the end of the novel you can see Low has reached this conclusion that their men are fighting and dying for nothing and they are all doing it because of the propaganda their countries institutions shower people with on a daily basis. It’s also never clear who the good and bad guys are in the war. Cisco is a smart guy and so realizes that the nature of war is a gray affair, that always in war you see both sides commit atrocities and that no side is completely in the right or free from wrong doing, and how can there be when innocence are dying in their thousands. In a recent interview I read by Cisco he responded positive to speculation that in some respects the Narrator is a response – although a very indirect one – to the black and white pro-war view taken in the Lord of the Ring of the necessary war. I’m glad to see Cisco has taken the opposite route in his work, that war is often times a pointless affair with men who are doing the fighting not even know what cause they are truly fighting for and as we’ve seen in recent times, particularly with the Iraq War that cause may be based on premises of lies.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

2025 Book #11:
The Narrator (2010) by Michael Cisco

I have occasionally referred to Michael Cisco as my favorite living writer. His stories are always erudite and literary, beautifully composed, yet rooted in the tradition of the bizarre, the Kafkaesque, the pulpy, and the surreal. I’ve loved his refusal to fit into any convenient genre framework – sometimes classified as a horror writer, a fantasy writer, or a weird-fiction writer, Cisco calls his work “de-genred” literature. Having previously read his heady, intoxicating debut novel The Divinity Student (1999) and his blistering satirical masterpiece Animal Money (2015), I held high hopes for The Narrator. This book tells the story of our titular character, a scholar and medic who is drafted into a war which he doesn’t quite understand. What follows is an extended trek across a fantastical landscape, complete with numerous battle scenes and a gut-wrenching commentary on the horrors of war. Despite its exploration of themes that I think are worth writing about, this book doesn’t quite hold a candle to the other Cisco that I’ve read. This is not to say that The Narrator is a bad book; in fact, it’s a pretty good book. Even middling Cisco is far above the average piece of 21st-century genre fiction. But this novel ended up being rather tedious to get through. The prose is mostly lucid and evocative, but the actual plot is extremely repetitious. There are only so many grayly described battle sequences I can read before they all start blending together. And this book sees Cisco toning down his usual weirdness. Unlike Animal Money, where the weirdness is always at a fever pitch, long stretches of The Narrator read like a straightforward fantasy/war novel. Perhaps this is intentional, but I find it a lot less interesting and unique. Certain of Cisco’s predilections are certainly present here (an obsession with the almost occult power of language, the deconstruction of narrative, the effortless blending of the real and the hallucinatory), and for that reason The Narrator might be a good place to start with Cisco’s novel-length work. But for those already deep into his oeuvre, this one is slightly disappointing. (low 4/5)

[Román Sanz Mouta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vamos a desgranar esta obra con total sinceridad, pues la novela empieza despacio, y es terriblemente descriptiva, detalle a detalle; localizaciones, ambientación, atmósfera, emociones desde la visión en primera persona del protagonista, ese narrador, que en ocasiones se torna onírico, y cuesta diferenciar si su percepción se corresponde con la realidad o es una ficción basada en su presente (ahondaremos reiterativamente sobre este asunto), pues cuenta la historia en directo presa de su deformación profesional. Así se nos representa para nuestra visual cada ínfimo punto en consideración y con el que interactúa o presencia este protagonista de ojos curiosos y prosa extendida, recargada, elevada. Eso puede retraer a los lectores que quieran ir directos a la acción, que necesiten agilidad en sus elecciones de lectura.

Pero es tan poderosa la premisa que demanda paciencia, porque te ata a sabiendas que pasarán cosas (y por la fama que trae este peculiar y extraño título); metaliteratura que te hará participe en el texto (o quizá estas fueran mis expectativas). Y como en todos los libros, este necesita de una apuesta, quizá más fuerte y decidida que otros, para afrontarlo, para disfrutarlo. Porque una vez está presentado el personaje a través de sus vivencias y experiencias, entramos en su mundo difuso, que incluso él no termina de entender; amores y guerras, una nueva vida.

Porque la historia va sobre un muchacho aspirante a narrador, Low, quien, reclutado debido a una mezcla de dejadez y desprecio de sus profesores (sí, es marginal el chico, ya sabréis por qué), debe alistarse para luchar en una guerra contra un invasor sobre el que no sabe nada, igual que parece desconocer tanto como resultar sorprendido por la misma realidad; todo es nuevo para este muchacho. La visión desde sus ojos y su verbo en el periplo descastador de aprendizaje a guerrero (curandero, cronista), pasando por la juventud de camino a una madurez adulta, reforzará o acabará con sus ambiciones, transformando al protagonista por completo.

Realmente, la obra empieza a enganchar y coge ritmo cuando llegan al sanatorio devastado de locos, dementes que anexionan a sus tropas en el ya iniciado viaje a la guerra (sí, porque es una novela bélica, a su manera). Entonces, la multiplicidad de los personajes, la variedad de sus carácteres y las nuevas apariciones, dan mucho más color a la obra y permiten a ese narrador salir del modo reflexivo para interactuar. Pasamos a unos episodios de crueldad, con batallas tremebundas que carecen de piedad, escenas de un realismo brutal regado de fantasía con diversas influencias que no deja de ser tremendamente original (conflictos, artefactos, vehículos, magias…). Además, desde esa visión directa, en detalle, con todos sus colores, y edulcorada o embrutecida por el estilo del protagonista y también narrador (¿a que huele a metaliteratura pero no del todo?). Lo dual de la voz directa pasando de los conflictos a sus periodos meditabundos nos permiten conocer más de este peculiar y sensible muchacho, y también saber de sus nuevos amigos y amigas, por quienes aprehende los sentimientos, e incluso la envidia (pues hasta nos compara su estilo con el cuento de otra narradora encubierta).

La perspectiva puede serlo todo. Las historias devienen en diferentes según los labios de las que broten y las formas en que os las susurren, y no solo por ser vencedores o vencidos, es cuestión de estilo, cadencia, intensidad, emociones. En la guerra y en la literatura.

Insisto. Onírico, lisérgico, alucinógeno, fantasioso, realista, brutal, sensible. Adjetivos todos que encajan según la parte, que muta sin previo aviso, que se transforma ajena al permiso del lector, pero exigiendo toda su atención. Una frase mal interpretada es una fase perdida (aunque pérdidas de uno son experiencias para otros, y las interpretaciones todas valen). Es una obra que deja en el debe del lector la responsabilidad; diferenciar esas partes de realidad que se fusionan con la fantasía propia del protagoniza, o las mismas alucinaciones o fabulas oníricas junto con la locura, que pueden aparecer entremezcladas, fusionadas cual cadena de ADN en según qué variables porcentajes, o mostrarse directamente puras. Y que además se incrementan con el paso del tiempo y los capítulos del viaje iniciático de Low. Sintiendo, descubriendo mundos y emociones a través de sus nuevos compañeros. Le va afectando todo aquello que le rodea, y lo expresa con esa panoplia de vasta riqueza arriba comentada.

La duda que se va abriendo paso es: ¿cuántas voces tiene el narrador? ¿Cuántas personas es y será el narrador? ¿Acaso se mimetiza? De cada parto y párrafo nace un nuevo narrador, evolucionado.

Debemos plantearnos que en esta novela, teniendo más de forma que de fondo en contenido y argumento, se compensan esas formas y fondos con unas virtudes estilísticas excelentes, cuasi virtuosas a nivel narrativo, prosaico, lírico y literario. Armónicas. No me ha terminado de convencer esa indefinición tan definida, ese estilo tan absoluto (y difuso), sus ritmos y pulsos, esa exageración descriptiva. Puede ser terriblemente seductor o denso y confuso, pero requiere de una degustación a fuego lento, muy lento. Tengo un regusto amargo, pues me ha costado cada página, disfrutando muchas de ellas sin continuidad. Pero, con todo, me llevo la historia para repensarla, porque todavía la interiorizo y medito.

En resumen, estamos ante un texto experimental, que ofrece tanto como requiere, pero que debe ser valorado en su justa medida, y enfrentado conocedor de sus prodigios y miserias, porque no vale cualquier lector para cada novela, igual que no todas las novelas encajan con cualquier lector. Valorad, elegid y, sobre todo, y con este tipo de obras (diferentes, especiales) es importante el boca a boca. Comparar el viaje, y contadnos lo que ha supuesto para vosotres.

El Narrador no deja indiferentes.

Pd: repito que, toda crónica y reseña, tiene parte de gustos personales, por imparcial que sea el posicionamiento. Y también depende del tiempo, momento anímico y expectativas. No hemos coincidido por muchos factores. Pero nos tenemos cariño. Y volveremos el uno al otro, para comprobar si, en este primer romance de primavera, no nos habremos equivocado en tan pronta ruptura literaria.

[Estanteriadecho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es un título para leer con calma y disfrutar de cada pasaje que, todo sea dicho, es para lectores a prueba de bombas. No es un libro que os puedo recomendar si lo que buscáis es una lectura rápida o un título sin muchas pretensiones, pero os lo recomiendo encarecidamente si os gusta saborear cada palabra, cada construcción y perderos en este mundo tan maravilloso como diferente. No por esto quiero que penséis que es un libro pedante o de esos que sacan bostezos; simplemente, es un libro fuera de lo normal. Michael Cisco usa recursos lingüísticos que dejará pasmado a más de uno y, lo más importante, nunca he visto semejante creador de mundos. Surrealismo, fantasía y worldbuilding van cogidos de la mano, y toda la información que recibimos es mediante descripciones que nos hacen evocar imágenes en nuestra mente , justo como un lienzo que se va llenando de color según leemos.

Reseña: https://laestanteriadecho.blogspot.co...

[Marc Riera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un llibre força original, se li ha de reconèixer. Dins del gènere "weird". El llibre retrata un exèrcit (des del reclutament fins a la pròpia guerra) en un món fantàstic. És original sobretot en la forma: un narrador que juga entre la 1a i la 3a persona, que no saps si està explicant la realitat o un somni, que no saps com de fiable és... Ni tan sols de si sempre és el mateix narrador. A partir d'aquí, la cosa va a gustos.

En el meu cas, m'ha costat molt connectar-hi. Tot allò que el converteix en original a mi m'ha costat. Massa confús per mi tot plegat.

Pel què fa a l'edició... He trobat molts errors (confusions entre tu/tú, verbs repetits com "en el suelo hay estan"...) i frases complicadíssimes d'entendre. Una pena, tot plegat.

[Caleb Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Equally grotesque, hilarious, beautiful, and frightening, and I don't think there are many novels I can say that about. Cisco is an intensely visual writer, and there are so many vivid images here that reading this (once you get past the adjustment period, required (at least for me) from all of Cisco's books) is something like watching a very old yet brightly-colored foreign movie whose film strip begins to melt, but then you find there's another film strip behind it, congealing from the bits of all the weird dreams you ever had.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a good, bizarre, confusing, weird story this was! I don't know how much of what happened happened, I dont know why what did did, and I'm not sure who, in the end, the narrator really was or how sane he was. The plot, I'm not sure I want to go into it because I'm not sure I'd give a good account or, if in doing so, I'd give too much away. There's war, and there are friendships and other interpersonal relationships, there are foggily defined things and places. Cisco is an author I'll have to check out more.

[Euan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll probably fully review this, but this was a fantastic reading experience for me. Fundamentally, this is a book about war, and stories. This book was very experimental and deliberately convoluted with its narration, a very engaging and complex read. The narration had a lot of facets, from great imagery to comparisons that were evocative and yet wrong feeling to breathless narration that reflects events, to strange structure and dreamlike (dream? hallucinatory? imagined?) sequences awkward transitions. Sometimes things would be close to incomprehensible on a detailed level, or impossible to follow, but the macroscopic whole yet remained cohesive and cogent. These are all elements of stories, and who tells them, but also reflective of war- many of the idiosyncrasies of this book are elements which war and narration share.

This is not a book for everyone; even, I think, this is not a book for most. It is bonkers, it is weird, it is difficult to read. But I loved it.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impossibly different kind of writer, totally in another league. This is a startling foaming Lynchian novel, the horror of war in a creepy mysterious reality like no other I have ever read. Imagine a mashup of Alien and Full Metal Jacket; a truly subversive fantasy with swirling surreal concepts, forceful narrative and grim imagery. A book I could never imagine myself writing, it definitely won't be palatable for every reader. Unique.