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Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

av Stephen Marche

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
1084250,505 (4.13)13
A virtuoso performance from a literary talent who crafts a vividly drawn history of an imaginary country. In this stylistic tour de force, Stephen Marche creates the entire culture of a place called Sanjania--its national symbols, political movements, folk heroes, a group of writers dubbed "fictioneers," a national airline called Sanjair, and a rich literary history.   This richly detailed story takes you to an island nation whose English-speaking citizens draw upon the English, American, Australian, and Canadian literary traditions. Marche has compiled this brilliant anthology, guiding the reader from the rough-and-tumble pamphlets of 1870s Sanjania to the extraordinary longing of the writings of the Sanjanian Diaspora. These works develop into a Rashomon-like story, introducing us to illustrious Sanjanian figures such as the repentant prostitute Pigeon Blackhat and the magically talented couple Caesar and Endurance. The result is a vibrant evocation of a country--from the birth pangs of its first settlers and their hardy vernacular to its revolutionary years and all the way to the present.… (mer)
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Visar 4 av 4
Unrepeatably perfect. I'm a sucker for elaborate lies, but Marche succeeds on the order of Carey's Kelly Gang without even the folklore backgrounding. The man wrote a beautiful, wideranging anthology of an imaginary culture, complete with criticism. Tlon? Funeary Violin? The only way this could have been done better, is if the book didn't weren't listed as "Experimental Fiction" in the Library of Congress. Astonishing. I am astonished. ( )
  Eoin | Jun 3, 2019 |
Marche has concocted a fictive anthology of the imagined national literature of a pretend island in the North Atlantic, Sanjania, a purported former British colony: a fiction from first to last page, from Foreward and Preface to Biographical Notes and Acknowledgements. At first I was skeptical of the conceit but Marche pulls it off, I think with grace, wit and an impressive ability to shift style and voice to create not just distinctive characters but distinctive authors. This is a book, however, that could only have been written by someone who has passed through or is ensconced within literary academia, with its isms and theories and periods. In the past, I haven’t been impressed with other authors attempts to write, for example, 19th century novel sound-alikes (in this case, it would have been faux post-colonial lit), but Marche’s hand here is light and deft, which is why I believe he succeeds in what might have been only an imitative tour de force. Instead, this book reads as an original. ( )
  Paulagraph | May 25, 2014 |
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

There is of course a long and proud tradition here in the West of elaborate histories concerning made-up places; take JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series, as perhaps the most famous example of all. But now imagine that the made-up land in question is designed deliberately to mix with our real world, geography and history -- for example, that your particular made-up land is supposed to be a part of the British Commonwealth, just a part that doesn't actually exist in the real world, originally part of the British Empire in the same way that Bermuda, Jamaica and New Zealand became members of the Empire and then Commonwealth too. Imagine an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, one that became crucial in the 1600s for British sailors making their way from the Continent to America, and has been part of British history ever since; a place where the citizens themselves are the same bronze natives like you find in the British Caribbean, but who have cultivated a culture at their island almost exactly like Ireland's craggy fishing coast, complete with Victorian lighthouses and big burly wool sweaters.

Picture that, ladies and gentlemen, and you're starting to correctly picture the latest mindblowing novel by the multi-talented writer Stephen Marche, the made-up literary anthology Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, which purportedly is both a folk history and a survey of arts concerning the exact kind of fictional North Atlantic British colony and later independent nation just mentioned. Known as "Sanjan Island" during its colonial period and "Sanjania" after independence, it is a place that shares many traits of other former UK colonies but that combines these traits in odd and unique ways; a remote island known mostly as a trading and military port for far-flung sailors, but more like Iceland or Greenland in makeup than the British ports of the South Seas, although with still as glorious and complex a history concerning their British overlords as any equatorial paradise.

In fact, turns out that there's a unique detail to Sanjania's history as well, one that makes it stand out among all of the Commonwealth nations; that for some strange reason that's still being debated by sociology professors to this day, back in the 1800s so-called "penny dreadful" publications shipped in from England became a much bigger hit among Sanjanians than among other British colonists, making Sanjania itself easily the most literate and intelligent of all the former Imperial lands. Chalk part of this up, Marche argues in the fake historical introduction (crucial for understanding exactly what the hell is going on in this initially confusing book) to the nature of this fictional island itself -- that since the interior of Sanjania supposedly consists of a series of rocky mountains, what has instead developed on the island is a 360-degree ring of small, isolated coastal villages. In effect, the terrain kept the majority of Sanjania's citizens cut off from each other (everyone except their coastal next-door neighbors, that is) for the first two centuries of British occupation there; these newfound publications of the Victorian Age, though, including not only the aforementioned dreadfuls but also what we now know as newspapers and magazines, were the first time the island's entire set of inhabitants were able to start thinking of themselves as a unified group of people.

According to Marche's fake introduction, in fact, it is quite easy to track Sanjania's history as a people through its popular writing over the decades; from their lurid ripoffs of Sherlock Holmes and other melodramatic Victorian tales in the late 1800s, to the introduction of Modernism in the early 1900s and a consolidation of all the various village dialects, to the codified language of revolution and self-rule in the 1920s and '30s, to the optimistic poetry of independence in the 1950s, to the crushing reality of a fascist coup and takeover in the '60s and '70s, leading to an entire literary community of exiles by the 1980s (also known as a diaspora), scattered across every corner of the Commonwealth now except for the place they all call home.

And indeed, this is precisely what the contents of this book are; it is Marche writing fake stories from each and every freaking period of Sanjania's fake history, at least one story for each and every one of the literary styles just mentioned, along with such fake supporting documents as the aforementioned historical introduction, as well as a section of fake literary criticism at the end too. Wow! No, wait, let me say that again -- wow, wow, wow! Shining at the Bottom of the Sea turns out to be one of the most inventive books I've read this entire year, in fact, in a year filled with inventive books; there were times when I simply wanted to stand up in public and loudly cheer Marche on, for creating a fictional project that is so endlessly fascinating and smart and layered like it is. Because when you stop and think about it, you realize just how many subjects a person like Marche needs to have a mastery over in order to so convincingly pull off a book like this -- not only a detailed understanding of British Empire/Commonwealth history, but also of third-world islands, the literary arts, the Victorian, Edwardian, and Modern ages, and a lot more. It's one of those fictional projects you can only get from academic lifers with overactive imaginations (much like Tolkien was too, unsurprisingly enough), the kind of book that actively rewards you for being smart and well-read yourself, that actively punishes you for not.

Because really, that's probably the smartest and most interesting thing about this book of all, is something subtle and that you need to know your world history to fully appreciate; that as mentioned, Marche has ultimately combined two cliches from the British Empire/Commonwealth that have never been combined in the real world, of the isolated villagers of color found in the South Atlantic with the whalers, fishermen, and coastal lifestyles of the North Atlantic. Sanjania is a place filled with Caribbean-style superstitions and religious rituals, to cite just one example, but in this case centered around the plankboards and polished brass of a New England or Canadian seafaring town; a place where old-timers make up aborigine-style descriptive terms for everyday objects, but that are centered around the same touchstones of a typical Herman Melville novel ("Godspeak," "hogfilth," "spoonthumb," and a lot more). It is brilliant of Marche to do this, because of the untold amount of inventive literary tricks that can be created from such a pairing of cultures; but unless one already understands both of the cultures being combined, and also understands that such a combined culture cannot actually be found anywhere currently on the real planet, the entire point of loving this book is going to be missed.

In fact, this very subject leads us as well to my biggest criticism of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea; that it is a smartypants book for smartypants readers, something inarguably on the high end of high culture, and that your enjoyment of it will be directly related to your enjoyment of such other dry high-art projects as Russian manifestos, '50s tone-poems and the like. Just take the fact, for example, that the structure of the book itself is modeled after a literary anthology from a PhD-holding academic lifer, and everything that implies -- fake footnotes, a fake bibliography, even fake controversies over fake competing academic theories concerning various obtuse details of this fake island's fake history. Whew! A big part of enjoying Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is in enjoying all the delicate little details on every page -- from watching the slow morphing over a century of the island's traditional sign of politeness (spilling a few drops from a drink you've been offered by a host) to the fake academic analysis of the use of symbolism as contrasted between Sanjanian writers of the pre- and post-war periods. And let's face it, unless you're an intellectual with an academic background, the chances are slim that you're going to find such things entertaining.

But I am an intellectual with an academic background, so I of course loved Shining at the Bottom of the Sea to death; I consider it at this point in fact to be one of the top-ten novels I've now read in 2007, an assessment I'm not expecting to change by the time 2008 rolls around, six weeks from when I'm writing this review. As I too rarely get to say here, a book like this is the entire reason I started CCLaP in the first place; in the hopes of championing ultra-smart, ultra-complex material out there that needs a little more attention paid to it than is currently being done, stuff that very finely treads the line between academic pretension and mass entertainment, between challenging experiment and artsy mess. As with everything else recommended here, the book is not for everyone; if you like the other things I recommend here at the CCLaP site, however, the chances are likely that you will be as blown away by this as I was too.

Out of 10:
Story: 10
Characters: 9.7
Style: 10
Overall: 9.9 ( )
3 rösta jasonpettus | Nov 15, 2007 |
Every author, in some respect, creates unique worlds in their novels. Whether it be a wholly fictitious planet, a slanted version of our own reality, or merely the kindly neighbours next door, the sphere of existence on display within the pages only subsists as an artificial construct, subject to the whims of its creator.

It’s a fair bet, however, that not many authors have gone to the lengths Stephen Marche has in idiosyncratic world-building.

The Canadian author’s second novel, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, documents the Island of Sanjania, “an invisible dot in the middle of the North Atlantic.” Sanjanians, in the words of one of its leading writers, “are perhaps the most literary people on earth…bookstalls are as common as fruit stands…on Sanjair flights the stewards push small carts of books down the aisle after the beverages and pretzels.”

Yet rather than simply set a story in this fictional country, Marche sets himself the challenge of anthologizing the many varied works of fiction in Sanjania’s history, exploring the country’s past through its pamphlets, short stories, and novels. Marche, in his role as editor, is perplexed that Sanjanian writing is essentially ignored in the world, especially as authors such as George Orwell praise Sanjanian pamphlets as “[reminding] me of a childhood I never had.”

In lesser hands, such a notion could easily lead to cheekiness, a nudge-nudge ‘aren’t I clever’ showiness that showcases the author’s vanity in his own talents rather than serve the central conceit of such an endeavour. Even the slightest wink at the absurdity of the scenario could destroy its fragile nature.

Luckily, as fans of his first novel Raymond and Hannah are aware, Marche is a spectacularly precise writer, with nary a word wasted or phrase unexamined. His meticulousness of language and rhythm carry his voices easily throughout the stories, from the distinct local patois of the early pamphleteers, through to the later “clean school” of writing ostensibly introduced by Blessed Shirley.

Indeed, such is Marche’s accomplishment that it becomes well nigh impossible to critique Shining at the Bottom of the Sea as anything less than a factual anthology. From Cato Dekkerman’s charming “A Wedding in Restitution” to Caesar Hill’s wonderful “Flotsam and Jetsam,” it becomes an exercise in futility to distinguish Marche the Canadian author from Marche the fictional compiler of material.

Marche’s disparities of tone and style, his inclusion of footnotes and author biographies, his traversing of the Sanjanian cultural landscape though fictional heroes such as fallen woman Pigeon Blackhat and aged crimesolver Professor Saintfrancis; all combine into such a complete literary deconstruction of a land and its people that a reader not in on the joke would be forgiven for looking into making travel arrangements to Sanjania.

In a sense, by skirting the usual narrative trappings of the novel, Marche, in revealing “a secret compartment of the sea,” has summarily reinvented them. Impossible to categorize, impressive in execution, always enthralling, Shining at the Bottom of Sea is a joy, and a celebration of all that is possible in literature. ( )
3 rösta ShelfMonkey | Sep 5, 2007 |
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A virtuoso performance from a literary talent who crafts a vividly drawn history of an imaginary country. In this stylistic tour de force, Stephen Marche creates the entire culture of a place called Sanjania--its national symbols, political movements, folk heroes, a group of writers dubbed "fictioneers," a national airline called Sanjair, and a rich literary history.   This richly detailed story takes you to an island nation whose English-speaking citizens draw upon the English, American, Australian, and Canadian literary traditions. Marche has compiled this brilliant anthology, guiding the reader from the rough-and-tumble pamphlets of 1870s Sanjania to the extraordinary longing of the writings of the Sanjanian Diaspora. These works develop into a Rashomon-like story, introducing us to illustrious Sanjanian figures such as the repentant prostitute Pigeon Blackhat and the magically talented couple Caesar and Endurance. The result is a vibrant evocation of a country--from the birth pangs of its first settlers and their hardy vernacular to its revolutionary years and all the way to the present.

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