Product Description

The new novel from the author of the cult bestseller, House of Leaves

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36759 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-02
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Synopsis
From Mark Z Danielewski, author of the cult bestseller "House of Leaves", comes the astonishing "Only Revolutions", a shoot-from-the-hip American road novel about Sam and Hailey - two wayward and wild kids who magically career across the American mainland and from the Civil Rights Movement to the Iraq War and beyond. Powered by an ever-evolving fleet of cars, these two teenagers never age and never stop. They crash parties in New Orleans, barrel up the Mississippi, and blast through the Badlands, cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself. And where this journey takes them is what sets the pages, even the actual book, turning. Alternating between Hailey and Sam, this kaleidoscopic novel spins the strangest, most gripping and lyrical love story published in more than a generation.

From the Publisher
`Danielewski's formidable literary intelligence . . . has here
composed a startling and versatile pair of voices, and a manner of
storytelling which is at once hallucinatory, vague and slyly punning, and
also possessed finally of an authentically tragic register . . . Once
you're attuned to its extraordinary music, there is no way out except
through the end.'
Guardian

'Dazzling prose . . . a step on from his first book . . . Danielewski's
beautiful, Joycean jabberwocky becomes all the more compelling the further
into each end you delve.'
New Statesman

`Danielewski certainly has a way with words. When he soars, he can be
breathtaking, and there are passages that are positively Joycean.'
Sean O'Hagan, Observer

From the Inside Flap
They were with us before Romeo & Juliet. And long after too. Because they're forever around. Or so both claim, carolling gleefully:

We're allways sixteen

Sam & Hailey, powered by an ever-rotating fleet of cars, from Model T to Lincoln Continental, career from the Civil War to the cold War, barrelling down through the Appalachians, up the Mississippi River, across the Badlands, finally cutting a nation in half as they try to outrace History itself.

By turns beguiling and gripping, finally worldwrecking, Only Revolutions is unlike anything ever published before, a remarkable feat of heart and intellect, moving us with the journey of two kids, perpetually of summer, perpetually sixteen, who give up everything except each other.

Customer Reviews

Clever clever not so clever
I loved House of Leaves. I found its central premise of a house with a vast internal labyrinth of mystery to be dark and fascinating and the inventive style of twisting turning words on the page seemed to fit the dimensions and drive of the story.

And so to Only Revolutions... again the idea is full of promise but the execution is just nonsense. I understand that Danielewski made his name with House of Leaves but I think I am right in saying that those that loved it did not do so because of his departure from standard novel writing style? This story would have been far more interesting in its execution if it did not follow a wacky format just for the sake of it. Unreadable and a bit like the emperors new clothes... dissapointed.

Only revolving
Mark Z. Danielewski stunned readers with his debut, "House of Leaves," a bizarre down-the-rabbit-hole tale of madness, surreality and a house where space is unending.

Now six years later, Danielewski has produced his follow-up -- the equally strange, scintillating road-trip novel "Only Revolutions." The format is mind-bending, the characters equally strange -- and Danielewski hasn't lost his touch for the compelling, poignant, the postmodern, and the post-weird.

Hailey and Sam are a pair of eternal teenagers, apparently untouched by time either physically or psychologically ("We're always sixteen!"). They careen through much of American history -- past and present -- in a changing fleet of cars, touching down in various important places and times.

But though they have no responsibilities, Hailey and Sam are not free of cares. As they run through the US, they seem to be enmeshed in the goings-on of wars, parties, exploration and social revolution (the Civil War). Will they escape the oppressive THEM pursuing them, or lose what is most important to them?

For a cult author, there's always a question about whether they can stay fresh and cutting-edge. Fortunately, Danielewski has outrun that particular concern. "Only Revolutions" is written in the same surreal freestyle as "House of Leaves," but the author never forgets to include the story as well.

And as the Escherian plot unwinds ("unfolds" just doesn't fit), it becomes obvious that this is actually two stories: a love story, and a sort of American allegory. They are rebels and free spirits, running up against bizarre characters -- like the multi-military Creep -- who seem symbolic of the nastier sides of our society. Hailey and Sam are the ones who represent the better side of the country.

Danielewski is still fascinated by places/people where time and space are warped. That includes the entire book -- every page. Each page has a scramble of quotes and text on its sides. There is vivid abstract poetry, blank pages (the future), geometric plotting, shrinking pages, mysterious side-notes submitted by Danielewski's fans...

... and oh yeah, you can flip the book upside down and read the two different "sides" of the story. One is Hailey, one is Sam. They are compared to legendary lovers like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, but that's not too far off. Their love evolves as they do, and by the end they are more endearing if less vibrant than at the start of their story.

"Only Revolutions" is both a work of postmodern art and an endearing novel, and while it's hard work to follow Hailey and Sam to the end of their journey, it's worth the trip. Absolutely brilliant.

A light read?
Readers who braved Danielewski's debut, the ludically labyrinthine House of Leaves, will find the author mapping similarly unfamiliar territory in his second novel. Danielewski has abandoned some of the more heavy-handed authorial games that weighted down his first novel, and this book has none of the dense intertextuality and inky digressiveness that covered so many pages there; but he has retained the spirit of playful inventiveness, and a careful attention to the potential of the printed form. Only Revolutions is an agile performance, a virtuoso display of the author's considerable writerly flair.

And it is the author's agility that impresses most. Constraints liberate, as every poet knows, and Danielewski here imposes on his writing an almost Oulipean set of constraints that generate a proliferation of words: puns, neologisms, rhymes, respond to one another in sing-song exchanges. Each chunk of text is composed of exactly 90 words, and the two opposing sides of the narrative ('Sam' and 'Hailey') sound each other out in a rolling mass of echoes, distortions and blends. Words waltz around one another, flirtatiously, as lovers sing amoebean exchanges, the one modulating to the tune of the other.

The prose skips along lightly, measuring out the numbers and nodding along to scattered rhymes. Sometimes the idiosyncrasies of style can seem enamoured of the sound of their own voice, but never quite to the point of obscurity.

Other aspects of the novel are less successful. The ticker of historical events covering two centuries, from 1863 on the one side (the putative beginning for Sam's narrative) and from 1963 on the other (where Hailey's story might take its starting point), makes up the numbers well enough, but the game is not really integrated into the reading experience.

The dos-a-dos format, with each of the two narratives printed on the flip-side of the other's page, means that the reader is compelled to read the two sides not in parallel lines but in antipodean arcs. The two sides give each other bias, rolling the narrative down the slope of a mountain, its impetus wheeling it along, around, and back up again. There are slight off-settings in the intricate patterns of parallelism, and teasing out their subtleties will often give pause to the attentive reader.

House of Leaves was something of a curate's egg; Only Revolutions is more accomplished, more writerly, and ultimately more satisfying.