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Days Between Stations
In a world of cataclysm and unraveled time, a young woman's face, a misbegotten childhood in a Parisian brothel, and the fragment of a lost movie masterpiece are the only clues in a man's search for his past. Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is the stunning, now classic dream-spec of our precarious age -- by turns beautiful and obsessed, haunted and hallucinated, in which lives erotically collide, the past ambushes the future, and forbidden secrets intercut with each other like the frames of a film.
256 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 1985
About the author
Steve Erickson
63 books436 followersSteve Erickson is the author of ten novels: Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d'X, Amnesiascope, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, Zeroville, These Dreams of You and Shadowbahn. He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year and American Nomad. Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian and Japanese. Over the years he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Conjunctions, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. For twelve years he was editor and co-founder of the national literary journal Black Clock, and currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. He has received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for criticism and commentary.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
December 19, 2021
Days Between Stations is a book of strange loves at the onset of the strange times…
The days are strange and they’re full of ominous apocalyptic events… She has lost her first grand love… But she finds her other grand love – engulfing and devastating… And this love oddly echoes the other strange love in the beginning of the century entwined with the fatal history of the weird silent film… The present is always haunted by the ghosts of the past…
Love is a capricious thing – it itself chooses its winners and its losers.
This desire was so lacking in her that she was afraid to reach down inside herself for one passionate connection, because she was sure that passion would be just the thing by which she’d bring everything to a close; she didn’t have even the passion for dying. She spent long hours smoking dope, and by seven at night when the fog came in from the sea she’d get up from the bed to open the window; and lying back on the bed she closed her eyes, perhaps lost consciousness, perhaps not – she didn’t know how long it had been before she opened her eyes and saw, every night, the gray cloud hovering over in the light from the desk lamp, blooming like an ash rose and enfolding her. More marijuana; more fog; more guilt: and the shifting hejira into the longest lost night of all – that was where she was going.
The days are strange and they’re full of ominous apocalyptic events… She has lost her first grand love… But she finds her other grand love – engulfing and devastating… And this love oddly echoes the other strange love in the beginning of the century entwined with the fatal history of the weird silent film… The present is always haunted by the ghosts of the past…
What is the importance of placing a memory? he said. Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence?
Love is a capricious thing – it itself chooses its winners and its losers.
February 24, 2023
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
"-No, nunca hace este frío en Hollywood. -Y añadió-: Pero sí lo hace donde crecí, Kansas.
-¿Qué es Kansas?
-Kansas-dijo ella- El Mago de Oz."
Kansas, Los Ángeles, Amsterdam, Paris y Venecia, son los escenarios por los que se mueve esta fascinante obra del que se ha convertido en mi adorado Steve Erickson. Llegué a este autor gracias a Zeroville, inmensa, y vuelvo a él gracias a esta otra obra también publicada por la editorial Pálido Fuego. Días entre Estaciones fue su primera novela, aunque no lo parece por lo firme y luminosa en su discurrir y durante la lectura tienes la sensación de estar en medio de un sueño, imposible de separar realidad física de la ensoñación, y en este caso tengo que rescatar algo que se decía una y otra vez como en bucle, en la lynchiana Twin Peaks The Return: “Somos como el soñador, que sueña y vive dentro del sueño.”
No sé realmente como describir las sensaciones durante la lectura de esta novela pero es de esas obras que te hacen casi vivir la lectura como una experiencia intuitiva, -entro en la historia y no quiero terminarla, como en un sueño-, asi que tuve que ir dosificándola. Steve Erickson tiene una prosa exquisita, hipnótica, te lleva de la mano por un entorno medio apocaliptico, entre varias lineas temporales y ¿universos paralelos?? pero también muy real: tormentas de arena en Los Angeles, rios helados en Paris, viajes en tren donde el tiempo se detiene o avanza a velocidad de vértigo, una niebla que cubre Venecia en la que a quién se pierde, le resulta imposible encontrar la salida... experiencias que no sabría si calificar como surrealistas u oníricas, porque por una parte me parecían reales y muy físicas.
"Por un instante pensó que quizá él la había visto; la luz se movió y él se quedó a oscuras, y ella se descubrió allí atrapada , a la espera de que la luz le encontrase otra vez. Cuando lo hizo, su rostro semejaba a una neblina, un perfil infinitamente enmarañado (...) hasta que, tras haber sucedido esto tres o cuatro veces, apareció en medio de un fulgor tan puro que ella habría sido capaz de verle...".
La historia comienza con Lauren, en Kansas, para luego bifurcarse hacia Michel/Adrien en Los Angeles, y para luego llevarnos a Paris, donde somos testigos del nacimiento de un genio, y de su creación artística. Imposible contar el argumento porque la gracia está en ir adentrándose pero aquí todos los personajes andan a la búsqueda de algo, o la memoria, o una película perdida, o el amor. Y lo mejor es como te lo estructura, porque Steve Erickson al igual que en Zeroville, juega con la estructura de la historia y la asemeja a una película: desde el juego de luces y sombras del cine mudo pasando por los diferentes estados emocionales en la creación de una pelicula. Muchos reconocerán de donde toma el modelo para la película perdida, obsesivamente buscada de la misma forma que fue obsesivamente creada, pero creo que reconocer las referencias ericksianas no es tan importante como sumergirte en esta experiencia sensorial y adictiva que me ha supuesto la lectura de Dias entre Estaciones, imposible olvidar ya ese abrigo azul o Wyndeaux. Desde ya está entre mis libros de cabecera.
“Compró una entrada, accedió a la sala y se sentó en una fila vacía, a la espera de que las luces se apagaran y la pantalla parpadease ante él, y supo que éste era el momento que había evitado; que si este momento no hubiera significado nada para él, se habría sentido más irremediablemente perdido que nunca, habría sentido una soledad tal que los días anteriores ni siquiera hubieran podido anticipar. Asi que experimentó una euforia salvaje cuando, al dar comienzo la película, sintió una emoción y una pasión enormes”.
"-No, nunca hace este frío en Hollywood. -Y añadió-: Pero sí lo hace donde crecí, Kansas.
-¿Qué es Kansas?
-Kansas-dijo ella- El Mago de Oz."
Kansas, Los Ángeles, Amsterdam, Paris y Venecia, son los escenarios por los que se mueve esta fascinante obra del que se ha convertido en mi adorado Steve Erickson. Llegué a este autor gracias a Zeroville, inmensa, y vuelvo a él gracias a esta otra obra también publicada por la editorial Pálido Fuego. Días entre Estaciones fue su primera novela, aunque no lo parece por lo firme y luminosa en su discurrir y durante la lectura tienes la sensación de estar en medio de un sueño, imposible de separar realidad física de la ensoñación, y en este caso tengo que rescatar algo que se decía una y otra vez como en bucle, en la lynchiana Twin Peaks The Return: “Somos como el soñador, que sueña y vive dentro del sueño.”
No sé realmente como describir las sensaciones durante la lectura de esta novela pero es de esas obras que te hacen casi vivir la lectura como una experiencia intuitiva, -entro en la historia y no quiero terminarla, como en un sueño-, asi que tuve que ir dosificándola. Steve Erickson tiene una prosa exquisita, hipnótica, te lleva de la mano por un entorno medio apocaliptico, entre varias lineas temporales y ¿universos paralelos?? pero también muy real: tormentas de arena en Los Angeles, rios helados en Paris, viajes en tren donde el tiempo se detiene o avanza a velocidad de vértigo, una niebla que cubre Venecia en la que a quién se pierde, le resulta imposible encontrar la salida... experiencias que no sabría si calificar como surrealistas u oníricas, porque por una parte me parecían reales y muy físicas.
"Por un instante pensó que quizá él la había visto; la luz se movió y él se quedó a oscuras, y ella se descubrió allí atrapada , a la espera de que la luz le encontrase otra vez. Cuando lo hizo, su rostro semejaba a una neblina, un perfil infinitamente enmarañado (...) hasta que, tras haber sucedido esto tres o cuatro veces, apareció en medio de un fulgor tan puro que ella habría sido capaz de verle...".
La historia comienza con Lauren, en Kansas, para luego bifurcarse hacia Michel/Adrien en Los Angeles, y para luego llevarnos a Paris, donde somos testigos del nacimiento de un genio, y de su creación artística. Imposible contar el argumento porque la gracia está en ir adentrándose pero aquí todos los personajes andan a la búsqueda de algo, o la memoria, o una película perdida, o el amor. Y lo mejor es como te lo estructura, porque Steve Erickson al igual que en Zeroville, juega con la estructura de la historia y la asemeja a una película: desde el juego de luces y sombras del cine mudo pasando por los diferentes estados emocionales en la creación de una pelicula. Muchos reconocerán de donde toma el modelo para la película perdida, obsesivamente buscada de la misma forma que fue obsesivamente creada, pero creo que reconocer las referencias ericksianas no es tan importante como sumergirte en esta experiencia sensorial y adictiva que me ha supuesto la lectura de Dias entre Estaciones, imposible olvidar ya ese abrigo azul o Wyndeaux. Desde ya está entre mis libros de cabecera.
“Compró una entrada, accedió a la sala y se sentó en una fila vacía, a la espera de que las luces se apagaran y la pantalla parpadease ante él, y supo que éste era el momento que había evitado; que si este momento no hubiera significado nada para él, se habría sentido más irremediablemente perdido que nunca, habría sentido una soledad tal que los días anteriores ni siquiera hubieran podido anticipar. Asi que experimentó una euforia salvaje cuando, al dar comienzo la película, sintió una emoción y una pasión enormes”.
September 22, 2007
Erickson is one of those polarizing authors whom I seem to love while other people are driven away. It's hard to deny the surreal, dreamlike quality of his stories; in fact, the best way for me to describe this book is to say that "it was like reading a dream". The world slowly disintegrates about the main characters. Cities fall inexplicably into ruin. Herds of white buffalo foretell vague portents. Time falls out of joint and a young couple falls apart.
I originally picked up this novel after nosing around Wikipedia for something different in terms of reading material. I hadn't heard of 'slipstream' before but I had read some Auster and Murakami and had enjoyed what I'd read. DBS just amazed me. I'm the kind of reader who can live or die by the emotional content of a book - does it move me or not? - and this book just totally wowed me in that respect.
May not be for all readers. Use as directed.
I originally picked up this novel after nosing around Wikipedia for something different in terms of reading material. I hadn't heard of 'slipstream' before but I had read some Auster and Murakami and had enjoyed what I'd read. DBS just amazed me. I'm the kind of reader who can live or die by the emotional content of a book - does it move me or not? - and this book just totally wowed me in that respect.
May not be for all readers. Use as directed.
January 18, 2012
Erickson's first novel set the stage for the themes, scapes, and styles that would recur throughout his later books, and showed him already firmly in control of his own particularly effective and evocative surreal strokes layered upon a textual canvas. Within a world in which the elements themselves are affected by the emotional turmoil of the principal characters, in which select colour schemes interpose themselves across time and space upon both nature and the products of man's labour, Erickson's protagonists swim against the tide of normal existence, engaged in a vast and reality-bending struggle for their battered souls. At the very heart of this tempestuous trial is love, filtered through the author's jagged prism into a rainbow spray of feverish obsession, fiery sexual passion, an interchanging positioning of dominance and submission, master and slave—one in which roles are ofttimes suddenly, and unexpectedly, exchanged—and which, in its habit of soaking into every fibre of the character's mind, body, and spirit, exerts an overwhelming power to drive all other concerns or distractions or obligations into the background, to make the beloved a quest that cannot be denied, even across death; a potent, immense, and invariably distorted fetish that wreaks its power to heal and harm across generations. That the son (or daughter) will pay for the sins of the father (or mother) is as close to a hard and fast rule as exists when Erickson sets out to chain his roiling creations to the page in ink-black bonds.
Adolphe Sarre—one of a pair of infant twins abandoned in turn-of-the-century France—is taken in as the clandestine house-son of an especially upscale and selective Parisian brothel. Growing up surrounded by sexually provocative and alternatively forceful and yielding women, hidden from the clientele, and knowing as kindred kin only the winsomely beautiful Janine—slightly younger than himself—the only daughter of a dusky and exotic fair-haired Tunisian slave (whom Sarre mistakenly believes to be his blood mother as well), Sarre—confined in his windowless chamber—develops a unique visual understanding of and power over light. He comes to comprehend the world as, in effect, a giant, living flat-screen—a cinema—in which, in Platonic fashion, the brilliant and searing light of the actually existing world projects its images and actions onto this two-dimensional surface; this projection has fooled us, the shadow puppets, into believing the world contains a depth and reality that simply is not there. When he is forced to flee the brothel after a nearly murderous intervention between Janine and her half-brother—Sarre, obsessively in love with Janine, is resigned to the incestuous curse he mistakenly believes his love to be tainted with—the strange-eyed teen eventually winds up utilizing his uncanny comprehension of light—and its various patent and subtle capacities both in our world and when captured by the camera—to become an enigmatic auteur movie director. Whilst filming his masterpiece, The Death of Marat, he casts Janine as Corday. As the filming spreads over years instead of weeks, the studio funding ebbs and flows while Sarre and Janine engage in a torrid and strangled love affair. Eventually, Sarre must make a choice between Marat or Janine—and the decision he makes—and the revelation he is given immediately after making his choice—will set in motion a disturbance in the very structures of reality that will echo and abound across two generations of his descendents—the children born by Janine during their heated tryst. Lovers will be reincarnated, love affairs reignited, by a sequence of dream debts incurred and payments rendered by estranged relations and restrung instruments that reappear on the scene, conducted by the mordant and arrant hand of fate.
Sarre's familial chain, and their impacted destinies, are bound up in the very nature of twins, of a single soul divided between two individuals during the process of birth. A pattern of one of the twins disappearing—and subsequently held to be dead—establishes itself across the generations, as well as a devastatingly melancholy cycle of return, in which this searingly obsessive love, this fixation born of the thrashings and caresses of lust, taints every path and decision and kin sprung from the tortured figure of Sarre. Nature itself is inveigled into mounting a furious attack against this time-and-death defying love—vicious sandstorms devastate a Los Angeles where Sarre's grandson, Adrien-Michel, is set upon a desperate struggle for possession of his fixated desire, the blonde-maned Lauren, wed to the incarnation of male beauty and infidelity; Europe is beset by ferocious winters of increasing length and severity, which freeze waterways and bodies with harsh unconcern; and the oceans themselves withdraw into sullen seclusion, creating vast stretches of new beaches and leaving cities like Venice, with its famous canals, perched in drydock far above bone-dry former seabeds. And everywhere electrical power is stuttering and faltering, blackouts increasing in duration and scope, while roadways and transport networks are abandoned to the new armies of scouring winds.
Erickson has always been an apocalyptic writer, able to find endless means to wring loss and grief out of his character's lives, in amounts large enough to drive them mad. This madness is always reflected in the landscapes, which take the shape and hues of a dream world, and unfold with the surreal and law-defying antics of the realm of sleep. Erickson never fails to deliver with these imaginative settings, and in Days Between Stations he comes through in spades. With the colour blue prominent throughout the pages—never more so than in the bit of sailor's magic that seemingly captures (twin?) souls from the air and imprisons them within a bottle of cognac—there are also brilliant distortions of time and its temporal treadmill, the imbuing of semen with the power to transport old spirits into the immature bodies of the new, to snuff out burgeoning lives and active memories and replace them with a honeycombed amnesia echoing the pained and longing ruptures of those on the verge of expiring. There is a cycle race in Venice, in particular, that is just perfectly, astoundingly constructed. In Erickson's warped and disturbing vision of the world, we are but travelers, often enacting pantomimes, determined to impose our own wills upon a world that laughs at these misguided displays of purpose and cowers us with its trump cards of fate and time. Even the simple act of uttering a solitary word can become an enormous and taxing struggle, the vocalization emblazoned with a deeper explosive potentiality the more it becomes entangled and stuck within the strangled hollows of the throat. We can run, we can race, travel halfway around the world in an effort to outrun our sins or delusional attempts at atonement—yet seemingly always wind up right where we started, forced to confront the mess we have created and be made aware of all the avenues of pain and devastation that have been paved while we were lost in flight. Sarre, in opting for the completion of The Death of Marat, not only abandoned his love, but all chances at completing the film that he wrenched from his lacerated spirit—and though the completion of this film would obsess (or revulse) descendants and strangers, it was doomed from the second he let Janine go. Out of the ruins and ravages of this very-human emotion Erickson always offers up a glimpse of hope—but only after setting in place a multitude of traps and illusionary snares on the road to embracing it.
Adolphe Sarre—one of a pair of infant twins abandoned in turn-of-the-century France—is taken in as the clandestine house-son of an especially upscale and selective Parisian brothel. Growing up surrounded by sexually provocative and alternatively forceful and yielding women, hidden from the clientele, and knowing as kindred kin only the winsomely beautiful Janine—slightly younger than himself—the only daughter of a dusky and exotic fair-haired Tunisian slave (whom Sarre mistakenly believes to be his blood mother as well), Sarre—confined in his windowless chamber—develops a unique visual understanding of and power over light. He comes to comprehend the world as, in effect, a giant, living flat-screen—a cinema—in which, in Platonic fashion, the brilliant and searing light of the actually existing world projects its images and actions onto this two-dimensional surface; this projection has fooled us, the shadow puppets, into believing the world contains a depth and reality that simply is not there. When he is forced to flee the brothel after a nearly murderous intervention between Janine and her half-brother—Sarre, obsessively in love with Janine, is resigned to the incestuous curse he mistakenly believes his love to be tainted with—the strange-eyed teen eventually winds up utilizing his uncanny comprehension of light—and its various patent and subtle capacities both in our world and when captured by the camera—to become an enigmatic auteur movie director. Whilst filming his masterpiece, The Death of Marat, he casts Janine as Corday. As the filming spreads over years instead of weeks, the studio funding ebbs and flows while Sarre and Janine engage in a torrid and strangled love affair. Eventually, Sarre must make a choice between Marat or Janine—and the decision he makes—and the revelation he is given immediately after making his choice—will set in motion a disturbance in the very structures of reality that will echo and abound across two generations of his descendents—the children born by Janine during their heated tryst. Lovers will be reincarnated, love affairs reignited, by a sequence of dream debts incurred and payments rendered by estranged relations and restrung instruments that reappear on the scene, conducted by the mordant and arrant hand of fate.
Sarre's familial chain, and their impacted destinies, are bound up in the very nature of twins, of a single soul divided between two individuals during the process of birth. A pattern of one of the twins disappearing—and subsequently held to be dead—establishes itself across the generations, as well as a devastatingly melancholy cycle of return, in which this searingly obsessive love, this fixation born of the thrashings and caresses of lust, taints every path and decision and kin sprung from the tortured figure of Sarre. Nature itself is inveigled into mounting a furious attack against this time-and-death defying love—vicious sandstorms devastate a Los Angeles where Sarre's grandson, Adrien-Michel, is set upon a desperate struggle for possession of his fixated desire, the blonde-maned Lauren, wed to the incarnation of male beauty and infidelity; Europe is beset by ferocious winters of increasing length and severity, which freeze waterways and bodies with harsh unconcern; and the oceans themselves withdraw into sullen seclusion, creating vast stretches of new beaches and leaving cities like Venice, with its famous canals, perched in drydock far above bone-dry former seabeds. And everywhere electrical power is stuttering and faltering, blackouts increasing in duration and scope, while roadways and transport networks are abandoned to the new armies of scouring winds.
Erickson has always been an apocalyptic writer, able to find endless means to wring loss and grief out of his character's lives, in amounts large enough to drive them mad. This madness is always reflected in the landscapes, which take the shape and hues of a dream world, and unfold with the surreal and law-defying antics of the realm of sleep. Erickson never fails to deliver with these imaginative settings, and in Days Between Stations he comes through in spades. With the colour blue prominent throughout the pages—never more so than in the bit of sailor's magic that seemingly captures (twin?) souls from the air and imprisons them within a bottle of cognac—there are also brilliant distortions of time and its temporal treadmill, the imbuing of semen with the power to transport old spirits into the immature bodies of the new, to snuff out burgeoning lives and active memories and replace them with a honeycombed amnesia echoing the pained and longing ruptures of those on the verge of expiring. There is a cycle race in Venice, in particular, that is just perfectly, astoundingly constructed. In Erickson's warped and disturbing vision of the world, we are but travelers, often enacting pantomimes, determined to impose our own wills upon a world that laughs at these misguided displays of purpose and cowers us with its trump cards of fate and time. Even the simple act of uttering a solitary word can become an enormous and taxing struggle, the vocalization emblazoned with a deeper explosive potentiality the more it becomes entangled and stuck within the strangled hollows of the throat. We can run, we can race, travel halfway around the world in an effort to outrun our sins or delusional attempts at atonement—yet seemingly always wind up right where we started, forced to confront the mess we have created and be made aware of all the avenues of pain and devastation that have been paved while we were lost in flight. Sarre, in opting for the completion of The Death of Marat, not only abandoned his love, but all chances at completing the film that he wrenched from his lacerated spirit—and though the completion of this film would obsess (or revulse) descendants and strangers, it was doomed from the second he let Janine go. Out of the ruins and ravages of this very-human emotion Erickson always offers up a glimpse of hope—but only after setting in place a multitude of traps and illusionary snares on the road to embracing it.
April 13, 2012
He paid his money and bought a ticket, and went into the theater and sat, alone in his row, waiting for the lights to fall and the screen to flicker for him, and he knew that it was this moment he had avoided- that if this moment were to mean nothing to him, he would have felt more utterly lost than ever, he would have felt isolated in a way the preceding days could not even imply. So it was a moment of wild exhilaration for him when, as the film began, he felt great excitement and passion. But something even more remarkable took place. The credits rolled by and he watched them carefully, something turning before his eyes, and the story started, and he remembered it. He remembered all of it.
Michel accepts what he expects to see in the not actual size cinema screen. Empty seats stretching and all of the stars could have been gold dusted to death their ages ago. Love is like when you have a painting or a song or a poem or whatever art larger than life and not actual size in your heart firing up intestinal brain noodles. Does it come out of your hands the way it is in your brain? Do they grow up and walk away and leave home? Adolphe the D.W. Griffiths of France loses his God statue sight to get it back again when he realizes that the dead are dead and defeat is its own end and destruction final and not salvageable for spare parts. Horizon view? Corner of eye view? Blind spot view? He sells his love, his would-be sister, for the sight he thinks will come to be. Lights, camera, glory. He sells out dreams for what would have beens. Everlasting, it's in the bible, it's a star on the ground (boardwalk). What do you expect to see, anyway? Lauren cannot stop hearing the voices of the past, her husband who if wishes were fishes promises, and his lover's who would blow out her birthday candle wishes with their pleading breaths if they could. Adolphe hears a laugh when Janine was raped by her brother in the brothel. Was it desperate? He can't hear because he is looking for what he thinks it meant. Dream music that goes on playing past the alarm clock's cruel whine. The expected to hear fades out will. Their love(s) is the space that what you wanted to say exists between the head and if you've got eyes to see, a mouth that speaks and a heart that whatever. My hands stopped writing before I figured out that last word.
Days Between Stations meant a lot to me because I try to live too long in that space where I expect to see that love or whatever or art or whatever come out. I expect to see things and I think I know a bit about the denial. I had a feeling off of them that it could be contagious, this ocean depths and message in a bottle (Erickson likes this motif as much as I do) giant squid heart puking its inky tentacles of doubt and backing away from new. This was my first Steve Erickson novel. I kind of loved it. I'm not sure how to describe this feeling I got off of him and the way he describes things. It's a bit like a what you expect to happen fate with not being blind and keeping enough of that want to be able to look through walls and see yellow lights, not wallpaper, eyelights and stars that's more than fate 'cause it's a dream which is hope which is maybe more. I think I'll read the rest of the books and see what else I can get. My friend Chris's review is the best and invaluable (as always). Thanks, Chris! I'm not sure I would have thought about the twin souls without it. I was too busy looking at their empty locket heart half... I would look at the movie, like Adolphe. It's always so tempting to try to capture.
Poets stutter and the visionaries are blind.
P.s. I liked reading about the silent films again. What I knew about the silent film era came mostly from a Lillian Gish biography (not good because the author diminished her contributions and had a creepy agenda about doing so that I still don't understand) I read in the early '00s (she's my favorite, along with Buster Keaton. I used to want to be him) and the illuminating (and enjoyable as hell) City of Nets by Otto Friedrich. It's going to be hard not to skip to Zeroville for the film stuff. It was nice to get some of that film excitement back when reading this. I haven't felt that in a long while. Oh yeah, I don't know anything about forgetting to live 'cause you're playing your part... (I used to like silent film actresses as much as I like messages in bottles now.)
Michel accepts what he expects to see in the not actual size cinema screen. Empty seats stretching and all of the stars could have been gold dusted to death their ages ago. Love is like when you have a painting or a song or a poem or whatever art larger than life and not actual size in your heart firing up intestinal brain noodles. Does it come out of your hands the way it is in your brain? Do they grow up and walk away and leave home? Adolphe the D.W. Griffiths of France loses his God statue sight to get it back again when he realizes that the dead are dead and defeat is its own end and destruction final and not salvageable for spare parts. Horizon view? Corner of eye view? Blind spot view? He sells his love, his would-be sister, for the sight he thinks will come to be. Lights, camera, glory. He sells out dreams for what would have beens. Everlasting, it's in the bible, it's a star on the ground (boardwalk). What do you expect to see, anyway? Lauren cannot stop hearing the voices of the past, her husband who if wishes were fishes promises, and his lover's who would blow out her birthday candle wishes with their pleading breaths if they could. Adolphe hears a laugh when Janine was raped by her brother in the brothel. Was it desperate? He can't hear because he is looking for what he thinks it meant. Dream music that goes on playing past the alarm clock's cruel whine. The expected to hear fades out will. Their love(s) is the space that what you wanted to say exists between the head and if you've got eyes to see, a mouth that speaks and a heart that whatever. My hands stopped writing before I figured out that last word.
Days Between Stations meant a lot to me because I try to live too long in that space where I expect to see that love or whatever or art or whatever come out. I expect to see things and I think I know a bit about the denial. I had a feeling off of them that it could be contagious, this ocean depths and message in a bottle (Erickson likes this motif as much as I do) giant squid heart puking its inky tentacles of doubt and backing away from new. This was my first Steve Erickson novel. I kind of loved it. I'm not sure how to describe this feeling I got off of him and the way he describes things. It's a bit like a what you expect to happen fate with not being blind and keeping enough of that want to be able to look through walls and see yellow lights, not wallpaper, eyelights and stars that's more than fate 'cause it's a dream which is hope which is maybe more. I think I'll read the rest of the books and see what else I can get. My friend Chris's review is the best and invaluable (as always). Thanks, Chris! I'm not sure I would have thought about the twin souls without it. I was too busy looking at their empty locket heart half... I would look at the movie, like Adolphe. It's always so tempting to try to capture.
Poets stutter and the visionaries are blind.
P.s. I liked reading about the silent films again. What I knew about the silent film era came mostly from a Lillian Gish biography (not good because the author diminished her contributions and had a creepy agenda about doing so that I still don't understand) I read in the early '00s (she's my favorite, along with Buster Keaton. I used to want to be him) and the illuminating (and enjoyable as hell) City of Nets by Otto Friedrich. It's going to be hard not to skip to Zeroville for the film stuff. It was nice to get some of that film excitement back when reading this. I haven't felt that in a long while. Oh yeah, I don't know anything about forgetting to live 'cause you're playing your part... (I used to like silent film actresses as much as I like messages in bottles now.)
March 26, 2024
Este libro es un tesoro irrepetible. Lo editó Pálido Fuego y lo elogió Pynchon, dos datos que ya configuran un punto de partida más que interesante.
Ahora bien, navegar entre las aguas de la prosa de Erickson es mucho más. Una historia fascinante escrita con un talento apabullante. En "Días entre estaciones" somos partícipes de un juego compuesto de sueños, cine, amor, memoria e identidad, en un contexto de catástrofes climáticas, el cual no parece tener mucho protagonismo durante el libro pero sí enlaza y acompaña magistralmente con los temas y el contenido de las historias.
¡Brillante!
Ahora bien, navegar entre las aguas de la prosa de Erickson es mucho más. Una historia fascinante escrita con un talento apabullante. En "Días entre estaciones" somos partícipes de un juego compuesto de sueños, cine, amor, memoria e identidad, en un contexto de catástrofes climáticas, el cual no parece tener mucho protagonismo durante el libro pero sí enlaza y acompaña magistralmente con los temas y el contenido de las historias.
¡Brillante!
November 3, 2023
Giorni tra le stazioni
“Momenti perduti” è il romanzo d’esordio di Steve Erickson e già vi si riconoscono il suo stile e le sue ricorrenti ossessioni: il cinema e Hollywood, la sessualità e le travolgenti passioni d’amore, la sensazione di disastro incombente e il degrado inarrestabile dell’ambiente, l’intreccio temporale con vicende che saltano da un’epoca e da una generazione all’altra rimescolando e confondendo ripetutamente le carte.
Non è un libro facile: si potrebbe pensare che l’autore non sia ancora padrone dei troppi temi che mette giù apparentemente alla rinfusa, in un racconto che più volte durante il suo svolgimento sembra ripartire da zero costringendo il lettore a vertiginose e frammentarie ricostruzioni, ma non è così. Si tratta proprio della tecnica che Erickson è solito adottare, trascinando una trama concreta in una scia surreale di situazioni che prese singolarmente coinvolgono e si concretizzano, ma il cui assemblaggio è contraddittorio e sfuggente.
Al centro, o in uno dei centri, della narrazione si colloca “il più grande film di tutti i tempi” che un regista ossessionato dalla perfezione non è mai riuscito a completare e di cui cinefili altrettanto ossessionati sono da decenni alla ricerca febbrile della scena o del fotogramma mancante. Dall’altra parte dello specchio c’è una storia d’amore, triangolare ma tutt’altro che convenzionale, finché si produce uno scambio fra la pellicola con la scena del film e la ripresa amatoriale di una sequenza che racchiude il passato dell’amnesico Adrien/Michel (neanche i nomi hanno un valore univoco in questa storia!) e il mistero della sua infanzia.
E poi ci sono tanti viaggi, in treno ma non solo, poiché il titolo originale del romanzo (sacrificato nella traduzione italiana) è “Days Between Stations”, fra la California e Parigi, fra il villaggio immaginario di Wyndeaux sulla costa atlantica francese e Venezia, attraverso una geografia improbabile sia perché ricostruita in modo allucinato, sia perché il territorio sta progressivamente subendo una mutazione.
Benché la stesura del libro risalga agli anni ’80, un elemento che pervade l’atmosfera del racconto è l’incombente collasso del pianeta che i personaggi del romanzo vivono con rassegnato fatalismo, attraverso ripetuti e prolungati black-out, tempeste di sabbia, maree che si ritirano a perdita d’occhio lasciando paesaggi irreali, metropolitane ferme da mesi fra quel che resta di fatiscenti agglomerati urbani.
Il tema che spicca maggiormente in “Momenti perduti”, e in generale nella bibliografia dell’autore a partire da “Zeroville” il suo romanzo più noto e più riuscito, rimane la cinefilia nel mito di Hollywood ma anche del cinema francese di inizio ‘900, una fabbrica di sogni che per il visionario Erickson rappresenta la metafora della leggenda contemporanea che continua a generare allucinati mitomani, come buona parte dei personaggi di questo libro fra i quali certo non sfigurerebbe Vikar, l’ineffabile protagonista di Zeroville, l’uomo che porta tatuati sul cranio rasato Liz Taylor e Monty Clift in un’immagine di ”A Place in the Sun”.
“Momenti perduti” è il romanzo d’esordio di Steve Erickson e già vi si riconoscono il suo stile e le sue ricorrenti ossessioni: il cinema e Hollywood, la sessualità e le travolgenti passioni d’amore, la sensazione di disastro incombente e il degrado inarrestabile dell’ambiente, l’intreccio temporale con vicende che saltano da un’epoca e da una generazione all’altra rimescolando e confondendo ripetutamente le carte.
Non è un libro facile: si potrebbe pensare che l’autore non sia ancora padrone dei troppi temi che mette giù apparentemente alla rinfusa, in un racconto che più volte durante il suo svolgimento sembra ripartire da zero costringendo il lettore a vertiginose e frammentarie ricostruzioni, ma non è così. Si tratta proprio della tecnica che Erickson è solito adottare, trascinando una trama concreta in una scia surreale di situazioni che prese singolarmente coinvolgono e si concretizzano, ma il cui assemblaggio è contraddittorio e sfuggente.
Al centro, o in uno dei centri, della narrazione si colloca “il più grande film di tutti i tempi” che un regista ossessionato dalla perfezione non è mai riuscito a completare e di cui cinefili altrettanto ossessionati sono da decenni alla ricerca febbrile della scena o del fotogramma mancante. Dall’altra parte dello specchio c’è una storia d’amore, triangolare ma tutt’altro che convenzionale, finché si produce uno scambio fra la pellicola con la scena del film e la ripresa amatoriale di una sequenza che racchiude il passato dell’amnesico Adrien/Michel (neanche i nomi hanno un valore univoco in questa storia!) e il mistero della sua infanzia.
E poi ci sono tanti viaggi, in treno ma non solo, poiché il titolo originale del romanzo (sacrificato nella traduzione italiana) è “Days Between Stations”, fra la California e Parigi, fra il villaggio immaginario di Wyndeaux sulla costa atlantica francese e Venezia, attraverso una geografia improbabile sia perché ricostruita in modo allucinato, sia perché il territorio sta progressivamente subendo una mutazione.
Benché la stesura del libro risalga agli anni ’80, un elemento che pervade l’atmosfera del racconto è l’incombente collasso del pianeta che i personaggi del romanzo vivono con rassegnato fatalismo, attraverso ripetuti e prolungati black-out, tempeste di sabbia, maree che si ritirano a perdita d’occhio lasciando paesaggi irreali, metropolitane ferme da mesi fra quel che resta di fatiscenti agglomerati urbani.
Il tema che spicca maggiormente in “Momenti perduti”, e in generale nella bibliografia dell’autore a partire da “Zeroville” il suo romanzo più noto e più riuscito, rimane la cinefilia nel mito di Hollywood ma anche del cinema francese di inizio ‘900, una fabbrica di sogni che per il visionario Erickson rappresenta la metafora della leggenda contemporanea che continua a generare allucinati mitomani, come buona parte dei personaggi di questo libro fra i quali certo non sfigurerebbe Vikar, l’ineffabile protagonista di Zeroville, l’uomo che porta tatuati sul cranio rasato Liz Taylor e Monty Clift in un’immagine di ”A Place in the Sun”.
October 25, 2007
"You got Pynchon in my sci fi!"
"You got sci fi in my Pynchon!"
"I hate Pynchon!"
"Go to hell! This is delicious!"
"I don't know, pretty bland and incoherent to me."
"Well, do you want the rest of my big ol' bucket o' Pynchon? I gots some rainbow gravity, some Mason-Dixon..."
"NO FOOKIN THANKS!"
"OK then just give our accident two stars."
"Yeah that's what I just did, Steve-O."
"You got sci fi in my Pynchon!"
"I hate Pynchon!"
"Go to hell! This is delicious!"
"I don't know, pretty bland and incoherent to me."
"Well, do you want the rest of my big ol' bucket o' Pynchon? I gots some rainbow gravity, some Mason-Dixon..."
"NO FOOKIN THANKS!"
"OK then just give our accident two stars."
"Yeah that's what I just did, Steve-O."
December 17, 2014
The Believer says that Erickson's a master of defamiliarizing us from our worlds; how this differs from say, science fiction or fantasy is that Erickson purposefully creates a fully realistic world like our own, just slightly askew. This is a risk inasmuch as it was for the Latin American Magic Realists (who I could never get into): what is your dividing line between reality and fantasy? If your characters exist in a world recognizable to any reader, then any diversion from this will reassert the novel's existence as artifice. This is all well and good (and can be very good, as in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas), but what it sacrificed is pathos for the characters.
And so while I admired Days Between Stations for its novel take on film history and the limits/commonalities between film and memory, I found several of the book's elements highly problematic. His characters were all self-possessed in an almost narcissistic way, which would've been less noticeable if Erickson hadn't exercised capital-P (& F) Pathetic Fallacy in every scene. There is a high level of purposeful vagueness throughout, as if this world contained only descriptions, never answers.
It's fitting that Thomas Pynchon has a blurb on the cover; Stations is a direct descendent of V. Both books hop the globe and dwell on people searching for something they cannot quite name or discern, and both make room for the influence of art on our lives and our ability to live them. However, Pynchon's stylistic fireworks are exchanged for an intense look at the protagonists' emotional terrain. This is unfortunate, as long passages of the book come off as almost purple prose, and the many sex scenes as romance-novel fodder (coupling on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, anyone? Did I mention the fog?).
This, much like Tom McCarthy's Remainder, gets to the very heart of my literary taste. I can recognize the immense talents of the author and even feel that his conceit is near-genius. But the execution is deeply, deeply irritating—I think with every page, "Fuck, if only I had thought of this first, I would have done it this way and it would've been great!" ...Then again, Adorno says we should have just such an unpleasant reaction to the art which truly challenges us, which might be a very large backhanded compliment. I dunno. I should probably reread this in ten years.
And so while I admired Days Between Stations for its novel take on film history and the limits/commonalities between film and memory, I found several of the book's elements highly problematic. His characters were all self-possessed in an almost narcissistic way, which would've been less noticeable if Erickson hadn't exercised capital-P (& F) Pathetic Fallacy in every scene. There is a high level of purposeful vagueness throughout, as if this world contained only descriptions, never answers.
It's fitting that Thomas Pynchon has a blurb on the cover; Stations is a direct descendent of V. Both books hop the globe and dwell on people searching for something they cannot quite name or discern, and both make room for the influence of art on our lives and our ability to live them. However, Pynchon's stylistic fireworks are exchanged for an intense look at the protagonists' emotional terrain. This is unfortunate, as long passages of the book come off as almost purple prose, and the many sex scenes as romance-novel fodder (coupling on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, anyone? Did I mention the fog?).
This, much like Tom McCarthy's Remainder, gets to the very heart of my literary taste. I can recognize the immense talents of the author and even feel that his conceit is near-genius. But the execution is deeply, deeply irritating—I think with every page, "Fuck, if only I had thought of this first, I would have done it this way and it would've been great!" ...Then again, Adorno says we should have just such an unpleasant reaction to the art which truly challenges us, which might be a very large backhanded compliment. I dunno. I should probably reread this in ten years.
July 4, 2010
For this review, I had to lift my self-imposed ban on amazing. Neither a dictionary nor a thesaurus yielded any other word with just the right nuances to describe this novel. So, here it is: Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is amazing.
He invents strange and wonderful characters. He plots with ingenuity and originality. He writes phrases in vivid, provocative, dreamlike, even hallucinatory prose. His juxtaposes words and sentences in unexpected ways.
What is truly amazing is his presentation of characters and places as if they belong to a world that is actually a film. Reality is composed of light, movement, swatches of color, which are rendered in two dimensions, but perceived as being in three. Rivers and oceans disappear. Strange fogs create a miasmic vision. The Seine freezes solid. Visions are portrayed as actuality in ways that only a movie--or a dream--allows. His is a world of illusion and allusion. It makes you doubt reality.
He invents strange and wonderful characters. He plots with ingenuity and originality. He writes phrases in vivid, provocative, dreamlike, even hallucinatory prose. His juxtaposes words and sentences in unexpected ways.
What is truly amazing is his presentation of characters and places as if they belong to a world that is actually a film. Reality is composed of light, movement, swatches of color, which are rendered in two dimensions, but perceived as being in three. Rivers and oceans disappear. Strange fogs create a miasmic vision. The Seine freezes solid. Visions are portrayed as actuality in ways that only a movie--or a dream--allows. His is a world of illusion and allusion. It makes you doubt reality.
September 30, 2022
What is the importance of placing a memory? Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence?
August 4, 2021
Mindblown by this weird and beautiful dream. Can't wait to read more from this author.
March 25, 2021
What an unusual and bazaar little book 😏 and yet compelling. You have to pay attention to follow the story😊
December 16, 2008
Discovering Steve Erickson's writing has been one of the great surprises of this year. I first read "Zeroville" which is his most recent work and what may be positioning him for a larger audience... Probably his most accessible. This is his first... strikingly similar in many ways. Different in many others. Reading both one gets the sense that Erickson feels the larger body of his work is all interconnected. Characters and scenes drift from novel to novel just as they do across centuries and oceans within a single. As I suspected, a browse through the most recent book reveals, Michel Sarre, one of the central figures in DBS indeed appears in Zeroville. Each universe is the alternate of the previous. Hauntingly beautiful, at times both surreal and lucid, characters seek lost love, memories, lives and cling to each other with tragic perfection. His lovers are erotic, violent, compulsive, addicted. Characters seek to create, or re-create, or to tame their passions and visions; to find the lost pieces of themselves that have been scattered throughout time and space, page to page. Another reviewer mentions the term (genre?) "slipstream" to describe his writings, and other similar authors like Murakami, William Gibson. In my mind I see a correlation to filmmakers like David Lynch (especially his recent films.) As in dreams, action moves from reality to fantasy seamlessly. Characters seem to split and fracture, while at other times, the same person seems to inexplicably be in two places at once, indeed one person can simply become another. Ultimately though, the stylish devices are merely that, and Erickson's real strength comes in his characters and storytelling - epic yet always intimate, poignant and heartbreakingly sad.
July 3, 2007
My ex-boyfriend recommended this to me and apparently I'm still taking his book recommendations. I love literary novels that take place in off-kilter worlds--here, strange climatic events such as sandstorms and shrinking seas provide the background--but I don't love when the characters themselves stop acting/reacting like real people. On almost every page a thought or image made me go, "Umm, sorry, but I don't buy that he/she's thinking that at all right now." Yes, these thoughts and images were poetic, maybe even poetically true, and maybe I've been brainwashed the past two years, but, yo, from a point-of-view perspective, this book did not work for me. It did have its moments, though, and obviously, my criticisms unfairly attack it for not being something it never purports to be, a realistic novel.
March 7, 2015
Thomas Pynchon isn't exactly a heavy blurber, so when I saw his rapturous blurb for this 1986 book, I decided to give it a look, even though I'd never heard of the author. Holy cow, how could I never have heard of this author? I have since learned he's been championed by Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, and Richard Powers. This, his first book, is just about perfect - a melancholy meditation on identity, romance, apocalypse, and silent film. The main plot hinges on a a mysterious film that's been in production for 70 years but has never been screened - I have to think DFW was influenced by this when he came to write "Infinite Jest."
Erickson is still writing - in fact, he's just published his ninth novel. I am in the happy position of having a lot of good reading to look forward to.
Erickson is still writing - in fact, he's just published his ninth novel. I am in the happy position of having a lot of good reading to look forward to.
November 5, 2016
Uneven. That's my ultimate word on this book.
The comparisons to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nabokov are almost laughable, and I can see why those guys come to mind in terms of tone and themes, but the prose doesn't even approach them. This novel had a grand idea and Erickson developed an intricate riddle for the reader to solve as she reads it, which I always appreciate, but the language is so flowery and dreamlike that it overshadowed any real gut emotion that was trying to surface. I've read his The Sea Came in at Midnight that he wrote 15 years later, so I understand that this debut novel was really just several tests to see what works and what might need to be hacked. I don't think I enjoyed this, overall, but I can see it for what it is and respect that.
Oh yeah, the sex scenes were really cringey - does Erickson think doggy style is the only way to fuck?
The comparisons to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nabokov are almost laughable, and I can see why those guys come to mind in terms of tone and themes, but the prose doesn't even approach them. This novel had a grand idea and Erickson developed an intricate riddle for the reader to solve as she reads it, which I always appreciate, but the language is so flowery and dreamlike that it overshadowed any real gut emotion that was trying to surface. I've read his The Sea Came in at Midnight that he wrote 15 years later, so I understand that this debut novel was really just several tests to see what works and what might need to be hacked. I don't think I enjoyed this, overall, but I can see it for what it is and respect that.
Oh yeah, the sex scenes were really cringey - does Erickson think doggy style is the only way to fuck?
March 21, 2018
I come to DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS, Steve Erickson's debut novel, hot on the heels of having read SHADOWBAHN, his most recent (and rumored to be last). Though thirty-two years separate the publication of the two books and though they are formally quite distinct from one another, one can find in DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS a fully developed sensibility that would remain evidenced in Erickson's later fictions. While the two later Ericksons I have read present themselves as a kind of staccato series of propulsive fragments, DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS is comprised of much longer sections characterized by efficient, smooth, dreamy prose. While the two approaches are superficially very different, w/ both approaches Erickson managed to create an uncommon amount of forward momentum. The invocation of dream points to a commonality w/ the imperatives of traditional surrealism (which do certainly inform Erickson's writing to one extent or another), but also speaks to what one might call the somnambulant nature of his characters and their trajectories. Destiny operates in Erickson at the level both of the macro and the micro. In the broadest sense his novels are about history itself as a kind of intractable process of collapse informed by increasing entropy and planetary (physical, spiritual) blight. Likewise, his characters are uniformly passengers along terminal vectors, half-asleep and unable to substantively alter their inevitable course, though often delivered unto powerful (often cosmic) revelations. The novel's title unavoidably speaks to this. DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS is liberally garlanded w/ mystical aberrations, and an affinity I have sensed in his later work for Gabriel García Márquez is even more pronounced here. Erickson writes a kind of magical realism w/ a tinge of the psychedelic. The novel's structure is uncommonly sophisticated for a debut, connecting various characters and storylines that traverse much of the twentieth century in a calculated but fluid manner. One must marvel at the level of control on display here, while at the same time noting a kind of pervading sense of innocent awe in the face of malevolent forces perhaps too huge to adequately comprehend. Erickson would seem to counterpoint dire prognostications for civilization (and earth itself) w/ a genuine investment in the possibility of localized individual transcendence (of the kind perhaps best typified by great art itself).
January 15, 2017
La historia del rodaje de Napoleon, la película maldita de Abel Gance, está relacionada con la novela de Erickson y el rodaje en esta de La muerte de Marat. En la película de Gance, Marat fue interpretado por el escritor Antonin Artaud. En la novela de Erickson, por un poeta irlandés de nombre Terry Tonay transformado en Thierry Touraine. AA vs TT. El espejo distorsionador de la narrativa.
Días entre estaciones
Los lectores somos ojos flotando dentro de la niebla en el interior de una botella.
Días entre estaciones
Los lectores somos ojos flotando dentro de la niebla en el interior de una botella.
February 17, 2008
Ryan wrote: "There is a high level of purposeful vagueness throughout, as if this world contained only descriptions, never answers." Exactly. It was very frustrating, as I flew through the first 100 pages, only to realize this book was going nowhere. Which would be fine if it was at least entertaining, but it wasn't even this; just terribly contrived and horribly conceived.
May 21, 2024
Este libro provocó lo que pocos libros me provocan: que sienta pena por sus personajes, construída desde el apego. Hay mucho de inevitable, mucho de destino que se encuentra sin querer, y ese destino implica una vida sórdida vivida al extremo con remansos de pasión incontrolable y una duda por quién es quién. Eso le pasa a un par de personajes y nos pasa a nosotros como lectores, que nos perdemos en historias que develan el rostro tarde (en un giro muy bien llevado, como en el cuento "María la rubia", de Dalmiro Sáenz) para provocarnos casi una alegría en la sorpresa de reconocer al personaje perdido.
El manejo de los tiempos está buenísimo, y el relato queda pegoteado en un ambiente medio onírico. Es como uno de esos sueños en los que uno trata de alcanzar la puerta y la puerta se aleja, donde estás en tu casa pero en realidad no es tu casa, y donde reconocemos a nuestros amigos y amores sin que las caras que vemos coincidan con las que recordamos. Librazo.
El manejo de los tiempos está buenísimo, y el relato queda pegoteado en un ambiente medio onírico. Es como uno de esos sueños en los que uno trata de alcanzar la puerta y la puerta se aleja, donde estás en tu casa pero en realidad no es tu casa, y donde reconocemos a nuestros amigos y amores sin que las caras que vemos coincidan con las que recordamos. Librazo.
December 16, 2018
Periodically I revisit authors I first read long ago and that I've never returned to. I read all of Erickson's works many years ago, and have, over those years, recommended him and touted him to countless acquaintances as a woefully overlooked (by the mainstream) author of many gifts. There is something unsatisfying and wilting in reviewing the fervor of youth, when literature catapulted you off your ass and maybe even drove you to write yourself. Maybe it's best to just let them lie in your memory as they are. Is it wilting because we are afraid to say we might have been not very discerning when we were younger? Is it simply the bite of anything new and different, his fang marks go deeper the younger you are? Or do we just hate having the valuelessness of our past logic pointed out to us?
Whatever it is, I came away from my re-read-after-decades of Erickson's first novel profoundly dissatisfied. Don't misunderstand, Erickson is an epic stylist: he has fine finger for tone and if his imagery and poetry come across as kind of hokey or purposefully abstruse in that icky post-modern way that we've thankfully almost left behind, it is forgivable. This, after all, is his first novel.
The story is okay. Readers coming to Erickson for the first time will find it striking and unfamiliar and likely to have the book fare better in their estimations. Erickson's trope of constant, unyielding apocalyptic backdrops has always stayed with me, and here it is no exception.
It's the characters that I take offense to. Other reviewers here have criticized the mechanical, thoughtless sex and the doll-like tossabout female characters who seem to be little more than repositories for the male characters' violations. Maybe that's part of the theme of film and cinema and performance, who knows? But their machinations are unclear and thus the point and purpose of the story. The end came from me when the guy who knocked up his sister sells her to her other brother who wants to rape the crap out of her so the first brother can finish making a movie that comes across as a 10th grade English class project...
Let me make clear, I'm no prude. If it advances the plot, pretty much anything goes, but I found myself shrinking away from the novel because things like seem to serve no discernible purpose save to make you gasp in disbelief. I call it the "Burning Girl" syndrome, which originated in that episode of Game of Thrones when the little girl gets burned alive for no other reason than to simply burn a child alive onscreen. Those guys should have their heads examined. Erickson, not. I'll give him another chance and move on to "Rubicon Beach".
Whatever it is, I came away from my re-read-after-decades of Erickson's first novel profoundly dissatisfied. Don't misunderstand, Erickson is an epic stylist: he has fine finger for tone and if his imagery and poetry come across as kind of hokey or purposefully abstruse in that icky post-modern way that we've thankfully almost left behind, it is forgivable. This, after all, is his first novel.
The story is okay. Readers coming to Erickson for the first time will find it striking and unfamiliar and likely to have the book fare better in their estimations. Erickson's trope of constant, unyielding apocalyptic backdrops has always stayed with me, and here it is no exception.
It's the characters that I take offense to. Other reviewers here have criticized the mechanical, thoughtless sex and the doll-like tossabout female characters who seem to be little more than repositories for the male characters' violations. Maybe that's part of the theme of film and cinema and performance, who knows? But their machinations are unclear and thus the point and purpose of the story. The end came from me when the guy who knocked up his sister sells her to her other brother who wants to rape the crap out of her so the first brother can finish making a movie that comes across as a 10th grade English class project...
Let me make clear, I'm no prude. If it advances the plot, pretty much anything goes, but I found myself shrinking away from the novel because things like seem to serve no discernible purpose save to make you gasp in disbelief. I call it the "Burning Girl" syndrome, which originated in that episode of Game of Thrones when the little girl gets burned alive for no other reason than to simply burn a child alive onscreen. Those guys should have their heads examined. Erickson, not. I'll give him another chance and move on to "Rubicon Beach".
May 12, 2014
Having only ever read The Sea Came In At Midnight and detect a fluid, yet discursive narrative style that I’m eager to see whether it casts across his writing in general. The books were written fourteen years apart (published, rather, 1985 vs. 1999) and the narrative digressions are breezier with the earlier book. There’s an amazing concatenation of character strands that fascinated me in The Sea Came In At Midnight (as much as it didn’t quite satisfy as a whole) that suggests a more mature writer.
Days Between Stations was his first novel, and I don’t mean to say the digressions are leaden. Not at all, but it is certainly moored, another way to say made heavier, by a silent-film centered around the death of Marat. The book centers around this, in multiple eras, and joins Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions in a kind of sub-industry of novels dealing with faded, near, alternative, shadow stars from the early days of cinema. (And both are pleasing in the same way.)
So, I came in expecting one thing, something along the lines of to the well-travelled, skimming brevity of lonely yet vibrant lives and ideas of the later novel, and got something more dreamlike and strange. This isn’t Erickson’s fault, although the title suggests road trips, discovering America, buttes and deserts.
The oneiric portions roll off me, however, and it feels he’s straining for affect. The portions in the Paris brothel early on feel too cooked-up to be impactful, the digression with the Montreal youth and his father (and the flintlock!) too narratively frothy to sink in, and the Adrien/Michel, eyepatching, love triangle stuff too ungrounded to really sing to me. (I remain a guy who hates to hear about other people's dreams.)
This feels like apprentice-work, but unlike most novels of the kind, it's far too assured and unique to be dismissed out of hand. He remains a writer I find very intriguing and I look forward to reading more.
Days Between Stations was his first novel, and I don’t mean to say the digressions are leaden. Not at all, but it is certainly moored, another way to say made heavier, by a silent-film centered around the death of Marat. The book centers around this, in multiple eras, and joins Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions in a kind of sub-industry of novels dealing with faded, near, alternative, shadow stars from the early days of cinema. (And both are pleasing in the same way.)
So, I came in expecting one thing, something along the lines of to the well-travelled, skimming brevity of lonely yet vibrant lives and ideas of the later novel, and got something more dreamlike and strange. This isn’t Erickson’s fault, although the title suggests road trips, discovering America, buttes and deserts.
The oneiric portions roll off me, however, and it feels he’s straining for affect. The portions in the Paris brothel early on feel too cooked-up to be impactful, the digression with the Montreal youth and his father (and the flintlock!) too narratively frothy to sink in, and the Adrien/Michel, eyepatching, love triangle stuff too ungrounded to really sing to me. (I remain a guy who hates to hear about other people's dreams.)
This feels like apprentice-work, but unlike most novels of the kind, it's far too assured and unique to be dismissed out of hand. He remains a writer I find very intriguing and I look forward to reading more.
December 7, 2018
En esta primera novela se entrecruzan varias búsquedas: los orígenes de unos personajes desarraigados/desmemoriados entrelazados con otros de dos generaciones antes en la Francia de principios del siglo XX; su devenir en un contexto que amenaza con descarrilar en una catástrofe natural; y, para mi el más atractivo, el rodaje y el destino de una película llamada a cambiar el lenguaje cinematográfico. Como historias dentro de algo más grande Erickson es tremendamente sugerente, en espacial en la construcción de imágenes. En Días entre estaciones hay fragmentos de una poética vigorosa, caso de los capítulos que desarrollan una violenta tormenta de arena en Los Ángeles; un París asolado por una ola de frío glacial, con cortes de electricidad y la gente tirando de todo tipo de combustibles para conseguir calentarse mínimamente; o un viaje en barco por un Mediterráneo menguante.
La carencia de una estructura nítida que enhebre los diversos relatos, sin embargo, desencadena un curso errático, salvado durante dos tercios de novela por lo poderoso de las imágenes, sentimientos, hechos. Erickson se zambulle de lleno en una narración claramente surrealista que prescinde de certezas e insinúa, elude y sugiere mientras se pasa por el forro cualquier limitación genérica. Lo que no le evita entrar en pérdida en las últimas 70 páginas, de las cuales apenas rescataría alguna respuesta más o menos clara.
La carencia de una estructura nítida que enhebre los diversos relatos, sin embargo, desencadena un curso errático, salvado durante dos tercios de novela por lo poderoso de las imágenes, sentimientos, hechos. Erickson se zambulle de lleno en una narración claramente surrealista que prescinde de certezas e insinúa, elude y sugiere mientras se pasa por el forro cualquier limitación genérica. Lo que no le evita entrar en pérdida en las últimas 70 páginas, de las cuales apenas rescataría alguna respuesta más o menos clara.
June 27, 2017
This could have been a really good book but it wasn't. Instead it was just a confusing read. People seem to describe it "sensual" and "erotic"...nah. More like devoid of any real emotion or substance, coupled with odd male fantasies of playing with insentient dolls. The badly written sex scenes ruined it for me, they were so ridiculous and stupid to the point of not being even funny or entertaining. "He pulled her to him and it was only about ten minutes later, so fixed was she on the blue and the shutters and the sea, that she realized he was inside of her" ...yeah right. The characters were unconvincing and one-dimensional, I didn't like the style and frankly it was just stupid. There's also a ludicrous, somewhat disturbing rape-y scene that takes place outdoors during a sandstorm, which I think is supposed to come off as erotic and exciting, but it just sounds like an awful second rate rape fantasy. Stuff like this makes me too conscious of the writer and his motives and distracts from the plot. As a disclaimer, I like weird things but this was just rapey and felt unnecessarily stupid. I really would've liked to enjoy this book because all the other elements were there, so this was disappointing.
October 3, 2008
The segments about film are fascinating for anyone interested in cinema, but a better source of Erickson's movie thoughts is his recent novel Zeroville. I do kinda like what Erickson does here with the dystopian background, which is that he keeps it in the background. Kinda like in Children of Men, how the camera is constantly moving and showing us glimpses of frightening destruction, but it's never really the point of the foreground action. But frankly most of this book stinks, especially the romantic scenes which are laughable romance-novel stuff infused with pomo pretensions. At the end, I didn't even care that so many of the needlessly labyrinthine plot's loose ends were left untied, because I had nothing invested in the characters or the story. So yeah, stick with Zeroville.
September 10, 2018
Sepand of the duo Days Between Stations recommend this book and gifted me a copy in 2007. Here is from an email I sent including my thoughts on the book:
Hi Sepand
...
I agree with you about DBS coming in and out of focus. I prefer now to think of it as vignettes that can be taken in isolation, even though I know them to be related. That is, I am drinking my pleasure from each chapter as if it were an isolated dish, though the theme and presentation of the buffet may elude me on this reading. Some research shows me many songs, albums, etc. have referred to this work - so I really appreciate you turning me on to it!
...
Tom
March 16, 2015
super weird but beautifully written. It almost had a Haruki Murakami feel too, meaning a blend of normal situations with very surreal and almost magical occurrences that don't seen very out of place. There was a fair amount that went over my head especially the ending. It felt like a lot of the concepts held a lot of depth, but maybe a little too deep to be clear to someone like me. I will say I'm very glad I read it and will definitely read more of Erickson.
January 19, 2020
Poetic, surreal backdrop that was enjoyable world building. However, the characters fell flat. The poetry that built the world at the beginning felt lazy at the end, as though it was being dictated to me rather than unraveling before me.
April 20, 2024
Realmente me encantó la cualidad surreal, onírica, de este libro. Las personas aparecen y desaparecen y se manifiestan, viven fuera del lugar y del tiempo, son varios y ninguno a la vez. Lo enmarcaría sin problemas en el realismo mágico (la naturalidad de lo sobrenatural, la alienación de la sociedad humana y el incesto como manifestación de aquelll, el énfasis en los lugares y sus historias, la obsesión, todas cosas que me recuerdan a clásicos del género) pero curiosamente lejos de la latinoamericanidad.
Me pareció fascinante la forma del sexo en esta novela. Es algo inevitable, no necesariamente deseado pero no por eso sufrido, una aceptación de lo inaceptable que a la vez naturaliza la violencia. Lo estoy diciendo como el orto pero de verdad me pareció fascinante, la exploración de lo humano como animal. Creo que sería un error condenarlo en esos aspectos; la perspectiva femenina es comprensiva y compasiva. Si esperás encontrar una deshumanización en esa igualación frecuente del sexo y la violación, en mi opinión no la hay. Las decisiones y las emociones de Lauren son casi las únicas que conducen el relato.
Se pueden decir mil cosas. No es para todo el mundo, de más está decir. A mí me transportó, en ese universo de destrucción en donde lo único que importa en última instancia son las personas. Me va a dar vueltas en la cabeza por un buen tiempo. Aunque el final un poco precipitado, diré.
Me pareció fascinante la forma del sexo en esta novela. Es algo inevitable, no necesariamente deseado pero no por eso sufrido, una aceptación de lo inaceptable que a la vez naturaliza la violencia. Lo estoy diciendo como el orto pero de verdad me pareció fascinante, la exploración de lo humano como animal. Creo que sería un error condenarlo en esos aspectos; la perspectiva femenina es comprensiva y compasiva. Si esperás encontrar una deshumanización en esa igualación frecuente del sexo y la violación, en mi opinión no la hay. Las decisiones y las emociones de Lauren son casi las únicas que conducen el relato.
Se pueden decir mil cosas. No es para todo el mundo, de más está decir. A mí me transportó, en ese universo de destrucción en donde lo único que importa en última instancia son las personas. Me va a dar vueltas en la cabeza por un buen tiempo. Aunque el final un poco precipitado, diré.
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