Below her are the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide. The Bay is a negative space around them, its leaden ripples picked out in the moonlight. There is, Irina realizes, a pattern in the flawed latticework of lights, something deeper than the incidental geometry of buildings and streetlight, to which the city has, unwitting, conformed itself, and, with this revelation, what she had taken for single lights expand into constellations, and each of their lights is a constellation in itself, luminescent forms in an endless descent, and the city is like a nebula, radiant with meaning, and this is how she finally knows she’s dreaming.

- Void Star, by Zachary Mason

If there are rules which dictate what, of the written word, will capture my interest, I’ve yet to find them. As a teenager, I slogged through the scant first ~hundred pages of Heart of Darkness in complete boredom, before being swept away by the last scene. I read it over and over again, captivated by Joseph Conrad’s imagery. However, my appreciation for his style did not generalize, and I declared bankruptcy on Lord Jim after several failed attempts to enjoy it.

Despite my ambivalence for coming-of-age stories, Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe landed as one of my favorite novels. The sardonic tone, mixing child-like humor into a dark, violent, but also heartwarming world, leapt from the page, delighting some uninterrogable part of my brain. I adore the magic realism genre1, so Dalton’s follow up, All Our Shimmering Skies, appeared to be written specifically for me. Imagine my surprise when I struggled to stay awake the entire time I read it.2

The quote above, from the opening paragraph of Zachary Mason’s Void Star, contains nearly more commas than words. I had to read it several times when I first encountered the passage3. I suspect that, over the half the time, such a wordy introduction would leave me shouting “Get to the point!”4 And yet, it hooked me, with Void Star becoming perhaps my favorite of all the books I have ever read. Its plot and narrative structure borrow heavily from William Gibson, whose style of short, frenetically paced sentences (filled with made-up words) could not be more different from Mason’s. I enjoy them both.

I find it difficult, at times, to select new books. One single line — “The horror! The horror!” — can redeem an otherwise wasted read. How could I ever predict that by looking at the cover art? And who could possibly pick through the incoherence of the previous three paragraphs and make me a confident recommendation? Rather than causing me frustration, the elusive nature of this enjoyment sweetens the moment when I happen to strike gold. Not everything I read connects to my fickle taste, but the continued search for truly satisfying bits of prose makes for a bold adventure.

  1. Though I am ashamed to admit that, when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude many years ago, I only realized that it told a non-literal story halfway through the book, when a character ascends to heaven. ↩

  2. Don’t let this scare you off. I believe it to be a great novel as well, and I remain confused by my reaction. My working theory is that I simply picked it up at the wrong moment. ↩

  3. Coincidentally while, like the protagonist, I sat on an airplane myself. ↩

  4. Tactically, the last sentence earns its commas, as its structure demonstrates the half-dream state that Irina floats through. But that’s not why I like it. I just find it beautiful for reasons I cannot explain. ↩