{"id":417,"date":"2010-10-26T17:11:53","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T22:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/?p=417"},"modified":"2010-10-27T09:16:21","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T14:16:21","slug":"review-the-island-of-lost-islands-by-tim-maly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/?p=417","title":{"rendered":"Review: “The Island of Lost Islands” by Tim Maly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Maly’s recent book on the afterlives of utopias<\/a> is in turns interesting, deep, frustrating, indulgent, and in the finest tradition of Borges, nonexistent.<\/p>\n

Maly adopts a wistful tone of analysis, and Borges is again a pretty obvious influence on that language. And while Maly’s insights are pretty amazing, I felt like he cherry picked his examples a bit. Let’s be honest– some of the examples that inform us of the nature of dead utopias have sunk to the bottom of the sea, a fact he glosses over. At points I was left saying “Come on Tim, you can do better than that! Dive a little!” while people wondered who I was talking to.<\/p>\n

But I don’t want to tear this book down, I want you to imagine yourself reading it. Flaws aside, he recreates a mental landscape of lost dreams that bewilders and excites in turns. The narrative winds its way up mountains and plunges down cliffs in a manner that really does evoke actual nausea, but in a good way. These afterlives deserve the physical act of grief, and Maly lives up to that. (For this reason I recommend no more than 15 pages at a time, and not too close to mealtimes. Also, The Island of Lost Islands<\/em> doesn’t mix well with Flagyl or other photosensitive antibiotics, which I found out the hard way. Oops.)<\/p>\n

That it reaches so high is one of the things that frustrates me about Island<\/em>, because you’re left always wanting it to reach a little higher. Yes, there’s echos of Collapse, but more as if you were to imagine it as a LARPing manual than a pop-geo-anthropology text.<\/p>\n

Close your eyes and read Tim Maly’s Island<\/em>, let it flow through you, change you, and possibly cleanse you digestively. It will let you see utopia in a new, beautiful, and heartrending way. But for fuck’s sake, don’t buy it. Not a word is true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Maly’s recent book on the afterlives of utopias is in turns interesting, deep, frustrating, indulgent, and in the finest tradition of Borges, nonexistent. Maly adopts a wistful tone of analysis, and Borges is again a pretty obvious influence on that language. And while Maly’s insights are pretty amazing, I felt like he cherry picked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,52],"tags":[139,7,51],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-writing","tag-forgery","tag-politics","tag-too-strange-to-be-made-up"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":419,"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions\/419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quinnnorton.com\/said\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}