Word: terrorization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...titled "Vita Nova," bookending a sequence of 32 inter-locking poems. It is a deeply reinforced whole--one of the last poems likens grief to the dark wood of a lute, referencing and earlier poem, "Lute Song," in which Gluck discusses the construction of the "overwhelmingly beautiful" out of "terror or pain." All of the poems address the problem of a new life, and the more obscure ones benefit from their embedment in the Vita Nova sequence...
...against any accusations po-mo linguistic pretension. By recalling sleep, dreams, unrecoverable history (see "About Troy") and the personalities of dumb material objects (see "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp"), Herbert selects the very topics that demand linguistic self-consciousness, save that topic of genocide and terror which Adorno famously said would make "all lyricafter the holocaust...barbaric...
...machete. When she fell, a soldier put her wrist on a rock and cut off her hand. "They left me there," she told interviewers. "I walked 11 days to Forekonia [on the Guinea border], and I had to bury my own hand." The amputations are a common form of terror. Young rebels blithely ask victims if they want "long sleeves or short sleeves"--amputation at the wrists or elbows...
This is the conspiracy theorist's tempting conceit, the assumption that someone is behind all the awful events in the world. The true terror is, of course, that no one is, and we live in a world of random horror. Still, the premise is intriguing. Unfortunately, it gets spoilt by Ellis' penchant for proper nouns. For a book whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem...
Still, Victor's sense of terror in being unable to distinguish the true from the false is unmistakable. The world of celebrity in Glamorama really is inescapable, not just because Victor is too shallow to comprehend anything beyond it, but because everything--from the public spheres of politics and religion to the private sphere of sex--is part of this world. The plot twists more often than Chubby Checker on speed. Reality alternates with the constructed so often that the constructed becomes real: "everything is altered... everyone will believe this". Even the novel itself borrows Jay McInerney's Alison Poole...