The Dream of Perpetual Motion

There was no post Monday because I was busy rocking an interview and didn't plan ahead . . . next week will be better, I promise.

I was going to continue shamelessly stealing from Sarah's idea of monthly book reviews, but I only read one last month worth talking about - The Dream of Perpetual Motion.


I cannot emphasize how much I loved this book. It's sheer lyrical poetry. I finished it and sat there on the plane, just trying to absorb exactly what it was about the book that spoke to me. This is a book that begs to be read aloud.

Passages like this:

"This is the time of night just before sunrise, that time that no one owns, and if you have found yourself awake and alone during this time, out in the city, outside the safety of the walls you call your own, then you know me, and you have felt what I felt. This is the hour of the night it's best to sleep through, for if it catches you awake then it will force you to face what is true. This is when you look into the half-dead eyes of those who are either wishing for sleep or shaking off its final remnants, and you see the signs of the twilight in which your own mind is suspended.
At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In a monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you've read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest and you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust."

Anyone who has unwillingly been awake at this hour, who walks at night, alone, knows this feeling.

The book is a scrambled steampunk world of imperfect machinery, with a smattering of themes from the Tempest. Everyone and everything is flawed, and the protagonist probably shouldn't even have the term anti-hero applied. This is not a character driven novel, but more a meditation on the world they inhabit and the consequences of unbridled technology existing just because it can.

Here's another of my favorite sentences, largely because I love this description of something I look at daily.

"They are made from materials engineered by Prospero, invented substances with names made of nothing but rootless suffixes and prefixes, that designate long molecules that bite their own tails and wind around each other like the links of a chain."

I've seen some reviews criticizing the book for being 'deeply misogynistic', but I disagree. The sections pointed out in those reviews depict misogynistic ideas taken to complete extremes, and it, to me, serves as a way to lampoon those ideas. Some are made absurd, some horrifying, but I did not come away feeling as though Dexter Palmer wrote this book to hate on women. Prospero's obsession with Miranda feels off from the start and it's very clearly shown to be a negative thing with negative consequences.

A quick perusal of the author bio reveals that his dissertation was on Joyce, Pynchon, and Gaddis. It shows, in the best possible way.

And here's my first photo of the photo a day challenge! Today was "your view today". This is the view from my apartment balcony (okay, this is the view from leaning way out over the balcony and almost falling into the bushes two stories below). The tall building on the left is one of the wings of the hospital I've been rotating in! The one on the right is a casino . . .