The Logos
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Unemployed, lonesome, abandoned by his lover, an obscure artist on the verge of despair begins to question the worth of his craft-until, without warning, he lands the opportunity of a lifetime. Courted by a wealthy patron with enigmatic motives, he yields his talents to corporate interests. In theory, his brief is to sell his soul-to mastermind a publicity campaign for a line of products designed to enhance human perception. In practice, though, he exerts sway over the souls of others. Given freedom to treat the campaign as an artistic endeavour in its own right, he comes to use the public sphere as a forum for shaping aesthetic sensibilities on a scale that others could only dream of. But how far can he extend his ambitions before they break him?
In his bold, uncompromising follow-up to the acclaimed Square Wave, Mark de Silva probes the extremes of human vision. Troubling the relationships between spectatorship and intimacy, beauty and decadence, creativity and exploitation, The Logos challenges the habits with which we look at the world around us-and the ways our selective sight distorts the meaning of our days.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this provocative epic of ideas from de Silva (Square Wave), a contemplative painter struggles to fashion a new career. After the unnamed narrator's girlfriend and muse leaves him, he flounders. Then, upon being spun into the orbit of eccentric tech mogul James Garrett, the artist agrees to tackle a publicity campaign for Garrett's perception-altering products. His brief is to visually capture the essence of two emerging celebrities: Black football player Duke Briar and white actor Daphne Simmel, both of whom intrigue Garrett because they're "nobody just yet" but are "becoming" stars. The narrator painstakingly explores how psychological, physical, and spatial aspects of perception inform one another, eventually admitting in his narration that he's exploiting Duke and Daphne's images: "The gap between desire and reality had been steadily collapsing for me... so that there was a new ease to my passage through the city and the world." Throughout, there's tremendous pleasure in the narrator's insights about "the inner geometry of imagination," and in the elaborate set pieces about the intricacies of football and theater. The result is an original, formidable portrayal of American commerce, where everything—including one's vision—can be bought and sold.
