Mike Moss Moss itibaren 13200 Tokaçlı Köyü/Tatvan/Bitlis, Turquía itibaren 13200 Tokaçlı Köyü/Tatvan/Bitlis, Turquía

Ralph M'Botu Kitaj is this guy who rose to financial prominence in the late twentieth century before a series of otherworldy revelations helped him get in touch with all his wacky inner powers and made him realize that global capitalism is for the birds. He then turned an entire generation onto his ideas, sparked waves of psychic and telekinetic phenomena all over the globe, the establishment cracked down on him, he discorporated before a crowd of ten thousand converts in Venice, his life was mythologized to the point that it's unclear what really happened and what's part of the myth, etc. It sounds like a pretty interesting book! Sadly, it ends up sucking a great deal for most of its duration. The narrator is working in a kind of dry academic vein, not in an interesting way (like House of Leaves for example), but in a tedious way that makes you wish he would keel over in the middle of a sentence and Stephen King would come finish the book for him. There are a lot of little things that Stuart Gordon pulls into the mix, vaguely implying that it's all connected somehow but never really explaining why. Nor is an acceptable explanation given for the narrator's doglike devotion to Kitaj, who for the majority of the book is unlikeable and whose transformation from capitalist sociopath to new messiah is abrupt and triggered solely by a kind of flashy light show, all special effects and no substance. To his credit, Stuart Gordon is pretty decent at coming up with interesting ideas - dozens of them, ideas which could carry a novel on their own strength are tossed out without a second thought. I kind of wish he'd just written a numbered list of ideas. It would have been a third as long as the book he did write, and very little that I cared about would have been lost.