It’s satisfying when I pick up a book I’ve been meaning to read for years and end up feeling like I appreciate it more now than I would have if I’d read it when I first heard of it, thanks to other things I’ve read now that I hadn’t read yet then. This book made me fondly remember reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke in 2020, and also made me think of this passage from the most recent thing I read (LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin): “ponder Nietzsche’s thoughts of eternal recurrence. Imagine this life you live now, you have lived before. Life is a loop that repeats infinitely and exactly. Every pain and pleasure shall return to you. Do you want to be a coward immortal?”
I liked this book a whole lot—the fugitive narrator, the island and its strange vegetation, the image of the sky with two suns, two moons. Abandoned buildings, halls of mirrors, echoes, tides and floods, a room where the floor is an aquarium, mysterious machines in a mysterious basement.
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