Banoo
10-Feb-2009, 02:44
The Giants is a tirade on consumerism, mega marts, urban progress (or decay), technology, language, and communication. The book surprised the hell out of me. The first few pages left me wondering if I could even get through it; it was preachy, long winded, and repetitive. But Le Cl?zio’s words started to have an effect on me. They started to excite me, drew me in almost hypnotically. I no longer looked at the page numbers or the clock. I had vivid dreams, that were influenced (possibly by the xanax I started taking) by the ideas, images, illusions, that were perfectly captured in words. Words. He trapped me with his words.
But heads are not equipped with an anus, and whatever enters their brain-pan is stuck there for ever.
Le Cl?zio creates a dystopian society in our own backyard. Even something as tranquil as the horizon (a razorblade) seen over the sea becomes oppressive.
There was this sort of thin wire that separated the sky from the sea, a scacely visible line just below the countless tons of weight of the air that pressed down upon the sheet of water: air and water were like two blocks of marble, one on top of the other.
Words, in this society, our society, today, are weapons used by ’the Giants’, unknown masters that tell us to buy Crest and use Mobile Oil and we really would be better humans if we just sprayed a little Chanel No. 5 on our skin.
There are so many sounds competing within a single head that the cranium might well explode like a bomb. Craniums are dangerous. When on sees them balanced on top of bodies, like that, row after row of them, one can feel a kind of tremor pass through them, and one knows that at any moment they might explode.
The plot, threadbare, is inconsequential and there are only three characters; Tranquility, an employee at Hyperpolis, the mega market, Machine, a trolley collector at Hyperpolis, and Dumb Bogo, a mute whose fascinated with the pebble beach near Hyperpolis. But the words are beautifully poetic.
But heads are not equipped with an anus, and whatever enters their brain-pan is stuck there for ever.
Le Cl?zio creates a dystopian society in our own backyard. Even something as tranquil as the horizon (a razorblade) seen over the sea becomes oppressive.
There was this sort of thin wire that separated the sky from the sea, a scacely visible line just below the countless tons of weight of the air that pressed down upon the sheet of water: air and water were like two blocks of marble, one on top of the other.
Words, in this society, our society, today, are weapons used by ’the Giants’, unknown masters that tell us to buy Crest and use Mobile Oil and we really would be better humans if we just sprayed a little Chanel No. 5 on our skin.
There are so many sounds competing within a single head that the cranium might well explode like a bomb. Craniums are dangerous. When on sees them balanced on top of bodies, like that, row after row of them, one can feel a kind of tremor pass through them, and one knows that at any moment they might explode.
The plot, threadbare, is inconsequential and there are only three characters; Tranquility, an employee at Hyperpolis, the mega market, Machine, a trolley collector at Hyperpolis, and Dumb Bogo, a mute whose fascinated with the pebble beach near Hyperpolis. But the words are beautifully poetic.