The Troika
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Beneath the glare of three purple suns, three travelers - an old Mexican woman, an automated jeep, and a brontosaurus - have trudged across a desert for hundreds of years. They do not know if the desert has an end, and if it does, what they might find there. Sometimes they come across perfectly-preserved cities, but without a single inhabitant, and never a drop of rain. Worse still, they have no memory of their lives before the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities.
But night also brings the madness of the sandstorms, which jolt them out of one body and into another in a game of metaphysical musical chairs. In their disorientation and dysfunction, they have killed each other dozens of times, but they cannot die. Where are they? How can they escape?
This ebook edition has been revised by Chapman and can be considered the definitive version of his Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A jeep, a brontosaur and an old Mexican woman tramp across a desert under three blazing suns. Above them, unseen, quarrelsome angels are trying to cure them of their delusions. The travelers speak, think and dream to one another. They are father, mother and daughter, but who inhabits which body is, like everything else in this very odd book, subject to change. Chapman's first novel (chapters of which have appeared in The Chicago Review, Zyzzyva and other publications) abounds with savage imagery reminiscent of William S. Burroughs, and, sentence for sentence, the writing is brilliant, lucid and poetic. Any small part, read by itself, is as startling and satisfying as a painting by Dali, Magritte or Klee, whose compositions it resembles. Taken together, however, the parts form an ill-conceived, self-indulgent assemblage. Image piles on image, fabulation on fabulation, endless limbs with no discernible body. There are interesting postmodern devices--violations of conventional narrative form; fluid rather than fixed identities; blurred boundaries between truth and falsity, reality and dream, text and referent. But Chapman fails to establish a ground solid enough to explode, offering a plethora of symbols but little meaning. The themes are clear: the main characters are self-destructive, trading flesh for machinery; they are riddled with self-doubt and a horrible feeling of alienation; their life as a family is pathologically, sometimes homicidally, dysfunctional. All this might make a great cult movie, like Eraserhead; as a novel, it simply does not work.