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| (Bloomsbury.) |
“We know that hyperbole is first of all a rhetorical figure of exaggeration but it is more fundamentally a moment of hubris. Hyperbole implies a risk that is in fact fantastic and fictional: that if I push it too far, I will become mad.”
--Marc Richir, 2015
In some very tangible ways, this new book by Samir Sellami, Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon’s and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction. is unavoidably elegiac, and rightly so, given that Robert Bolano was taken from us far too soon by a liver ailment in 2003 at only 50 years of age. But it’s also rather celebratory, since the erstwhile Thomas Pynchon has just released his ninth novel Shadow Ticket, and his first in a decade, at 88 years of age, on October 7 of this year. He thus carries the torch of challenging literature forward in a way that illustrates, as Sellami’s critical study shows so well, how important his labours and those of Bolaño have been down in the mines of innovation fiction. I readily admit that I prefer reading supposedly difficult books by supposedly difficult authors. Of course I concurrently acknowledge the skillful means of such masters as Dickens, Chekhov, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, as well as the rest of the canon of pared-down-to-essentials normalcy. However, I just feel that somehow it’s a better use of my limited time and energy to forgo the dining and laundry lists of quotidian narratives and instead plunge headlong into the intense dreamtime of Joyce, Stein, Faulkner and Burroughs.
