William S. Burroughs Nova Express (1964)
This was one of three novels in a collected paperback edition I stumbled across, the other two being Soft Machine and The Wild Boys. I didn't already have a copy of The Wild Boys, and I don't even think I'd read Nova Express, so I picked it up because it seemed to close a gap. First, I re-read The Soft Machine. It doesn't actually seem like it was that long ago that I read it, but according to what I wrote, I wasn't able to get much sense out of it, so it seemed like another attempt couldn't hurt, plus some minor obsessive compulsive impulse nagged at me, suggesting that it would be weird to leave the first third of the compendium unread, regardless of what seemed like a previous and fairly recent reading. Anyway, it didn't make a whole lot of sense this time either.
Nova Express seemed a little more coherent in so much as that Burroughs just about gets away with claiming it's a science-fiction novel describing an invasive Venusian force taking over our planet, but you probably won't be too surprised to learn that at no point did I have to flip to the cover to check I hadn't picked up an Asimov by accident. It's mostly a cut-up novel, and I seem to remember reading that it's pretty much a remix of Naked Lunch, one of several if anyone's counting. So it is what it is, and certain passages work to create a sort of visionary narrative by impressionist means, but it gets very repetitive after a while and its impact is almost certainly less than what it may have been in 1964. The way it is written, or perhaps I mean assembled, is well suited to the conclusion which, according to Burroughs, represents the ascendency of the invasive forces as the breakdown of meaning, and by association, narrative; but frankly, it's not a whole bundle of chuckles. This sort of thing worked better when the pill is sweetened with a few interludes of regular material written in a straight line. Otherwise the experience of reading gets a little headachey and thankless.
This was one of three novels in a collected paperback edition I stumbled across, the other two being Soft Machine and The Wild Boys. I didn't already have a copy of The Wild Boys, and I don't even think I'd read Nova Express, so I picked it up because it seemed to close a gap. First, I re-read The Soft Machine. It doesn't actually seem like it was that long ago that I read it, but according to what I wrote, I wasn't able to get much sense out of it, so it seemed like another attempt couldn't hurt, plus some minor obsessive compulsive impulse nagged at me, suggesting that it would be weird to leave the first third of the compendium unread, regardless of what seemed like a previous and fairly recent reading. Anyway, it didn't make a whole lot of sense this time either.
Nova Express seemed a little more coherent in so much as that Burroughs just about gets away with claiming it's a science-fiction novel describing an invasive Venusian force taking over our planet, but you probably won't be too surprised to learn that at no point did I have to flip to the cover to check I hadn't picked up an Asimov by accident. It's mostly a cut-up novel, and I seem to remember reading that it's pretty much a remix of Naked Lunch, one of several if anyone's counting. So it is what it is, and certain passages work to create a sort of visionary narrative by impressionist means, but it gets very repetitive after a while and its impact is almost certainly less than what it may have been in 1964. The way it is written, or perhaps I mean assembled, is well suited to the conclusion which, according to Burroughs, represents the ascendency of the invasive forces as the breakdown of meaning, and by association, narrative; but frankly, it's not a whole bundle of chuckles. This sort of thing worked better when the pill is sweetened with a few interludes of regular material written in a straight line. Otherwise the experience of reading gets a little headachey and thankless.
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