Defoe

Whether or not you will "like" this book is really quite irrelevant ... if pick it up, make no sense of it, and put it down in disgust then you have missed the point. This "novel" is an experiment in what literature of the future might look like, how far we can get from narrative and still "mean" something to a reader, and so on.Read this book if you are turned on by surrealist literature (like stuff published by Atlas Press), John Ashbery's poetry, the films of Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, or Derrida's epistolary novel "The Post Card." The Brakhage connection is particularly apt here -- his films are often viewed with incomprehension themselves, but their influence has subtly permeated our culture by impacting the vision of many filmmakers. You can't look at TV for ten minutes these days without seeing Brakhage's influence in a commercial or TV program. I can imagine Scalapino and other writers like her having a similar, subtle effect on writing of the future.