![]() As beautiful as the prose is, This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novel that can feel both exhilarating and exhausting, sometimes simultaneously. That said, those gifts can sometimes double as obstacles. There’s clearly a lot of trust here between the two authors, and the novel is all the better for it. The result is prose that reads like an intricate dance, a dialogic push-and-pull as effortless and compelling as the protagonists' correspondence. Together their language soars as they write of desire, longing, fear, survival and freedom. If you're here, This Is How You Lose the Time War seems to say, you have to be here: attentive, wide-eyed, and alert.Įl-Mohtar and Maxwell, our author duo, are undeniably some of the greatest writers writing today, and in This Is How You Lose the Time War, they are in full command of their narrative gifts. The kind of novel that demands not only you pay attention, but that you actively participate. Rather, it is the kind of novel that delights in confusing, wrong-footing, and maddening its reader. It is not what anyone would describe as a light read by any stretch. This Is How You Lose the Time War is a book of sustained beauty and lyricism that also works as a fractured mosaic of a novel-told in swift, brutal strokes, all wound into vertiginous loops of prose. This novel is, for lack of a better term, a lot-but in a good way. Yet, in the sheer shimmering (im)possibility of every word, they can almost pretend they can get away with it.Īnd we’ll run again, the two of us, upthread and down, firefighter and fire starter, two predators only sated by each other’s words. They had borne witness to too many battles waged against time (and each other), but this time too many forces are ready to make siege weapons of their letters. The two women are more real to each other than reflections in a mirror. ![]() By the third letter, Red feels that they are cutting their own throats by all of this.īlue and Red, our protagonists, are two time traveling spies from rival factions in a time-war-ravaged world, who make contact and find love-and something that frightens them, too-across a void too profound to bridge with anything other than words. Then comes the second letter, which is an abyss daring Red to fall inside despite the sense that she and Blue are all digging themselves deeper than ever before. That the first of its kind is only pretend, an instant of self-indulgence, but that it began a circling of time for Red, the past cutting into the present like a whetted blade. I can tell you that the first strand running through this loosely-braided narrative comes in the form of a letter. ![]() How does one explain the action of the novel without surrendering any spoilers? As soon as you start to put words in, you hit a wall. This Is How You Lose the Time War does not make it easy for any reviewer to describe the experience of reading it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |