Can a poet’s duel with words predict the fate of the world?
After a technocracy collapse in a near, agrarian future fraught with ennui, a single data cloud stalks the shoulders of a former data analyst, waxing poetic overload….
Her name is Penny, and she is one of the last of her kind. She has survived longer than the other clouds because she was pre-programmed to be the amanuensis of this tale. Her voice is at once orotund, jejune, jaunty, and amorphous. She is a plausible version of artificial intelligence that’s much more impressive—an encyclopedic neophyte who replicates human ingenuity with retronyms, portmanteaus, chiasmus, piquants, and Latin. As Penny puts it, “I arose out of a wireless wiki-wrinkle in the vast fabric of the alpha and the omega.”
Our noumenal cloud tells of how the secretive nine-muse junta obliterated the global networks and sent the netizens of the mezzopolis spinning into a dysthymic, pastoral existence. Yang the gardener is one of these unfortunates, and it’s he that Penny’s narration orbits around.
Yang is in search of the supreme happiness and seeks out an array of specialists, such as the nine-year-old immunological prodigy, the angel of the future, the water doctor, the centenarian, and the listening artist, plying them with mochi cakes or sleeves of dehydrated jackfruit (delicacies in the new gift economy).
Sometimes a book makes you ascend to the material whether you are ready or not. Yang’s quixotic, far-flung interviews with his specialists felt secondary to Karen An-Hwei Lee’s fabulous, dexterous use of language, where tulips are “the color of fire retardant” and the art of listening is, “a nautilus, a gouache cut out of your inner ear, a snail in negative space, a spiral of hunger coiled like a fiddlehead in one soul.”
While moments of beauty and recognition bloom in the language, the characters seem interred by the finality of their altered circumstances, in a reality at once prescient and estranged.Yang cannot see or hear Penny, which is a shame, since her refulgence carried me through this quagmire of a book. Her epistolae hang over my head like traffic signs, and I can only guess what her verdict would be on our current state of affairs. While this book may not plot out the near future, it offers itself as an anarchist’s almanac.
Lee’s Book can be purchased through Asterism Books: https://asterismbooks.com/product/the-maze-of-transparencies-karen-an-hwei-lee. Published by Ellipsis Press.
7 responses to “The Maze of Transparencies, by Karen An-Hwei Lee”
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Hello and thank you so much for reading! How serendipitous that you stumbled upon my very humble (and half-finished) blog. I am happy to report that more is on the way. I work for an antiquarian bookseller and, as a result, often stumble upon lesser-known authors. While Kaffeeklatsch will focus primarily on works in translation, I don’t plan to limit this blog with strict perimeters. I will be reviewing wonderful, gradual reads like Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, numinous page-turners like Reindeer Moon by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and much more.
Hello! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this page to him. Fairly certain he will have a good read. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for your kind words. It means a lot! I am hoping to post a review this coming Friday on William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan. It is an electrifying novel about a marriage marred by decades of financial abuse. Karen An Hwei Lee and Trevelyan are very different writers, but both are exceptional. I hope you stay tuned!
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Thank you so much for your kind words. While the writing is my own, I was influenced by Karen An Hwei Lee’s brilliant wordsmithing. I don’t work for Asterism Books but my workplace shares space with them, and I’ve been blown away by their incredible selection! Next on my list is The Known Southern Land by Gabriel de Foigny, published by Spurl Press. I hope you will revisit my little site in the future for more reviews!