Akiva Reads

by Catie Disabato

The experimental/meta in this book worked great for me - likening it to Inception is pretty accurate. I don't feel compelled by the Situationists' actual goals, unfortunately! Some of the philosophy, totally - random walks, exploring the built-in borders and questioning whether they make sense. But covering the earth with construction and cities because it's fun and playful can't sit well with me when I find nonhuman approaches to space, life, and movement even more varied and fascinating, and it's hard to suspend my personal disbelief when the entire structure of the story is about breaking down that suspension, yanno?

More complaints about [New] Situationists: there's a vast and echoing void at the heart of this book where workers, work, and material and monetary resources should be. For the story to operate, vast amounts of money just has to appear from the usual obscure sources (a pop star's career, a random trust fund partyboy) and the people who actually do the work (installing and building weird and intense architecture, constantly fixing up and repainting NB's sex-apartment) are entirely taken for granted and beneath notice. I feel like it would be interesting to know what the people building the NS lair thought of the plans! At the very very end someone says they now actually physically do construction work instead of outsourcing, but it's tell-not-show and seems more like a plothole filler.

I'm undecided whether I count that all against Disabato, because what she's trying to do here is not necessarily pro- or anti-Situationist, just playing in their jungle gym. The story itself is well constructed and interesting, if you like that kind of thing (I very much do), so!