Customer Reviews

Alnilam

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm aware that "Alnilam" didn't fare well on the popular market, and that three previous ..... reviewers have given this Dickey novel low ratings. But this novel engrossed me, and it has stayed with me for fourteen years now.
An English professor of mine used the metaphor of a pebble in a pond to illustrate how interpreting the "meaning" of a fine literary work is essentially a subjective matter. The author drops a pebble into the center of a pond, as it were, and the ripples which it produces, which radiate out to the edges of the pond, are the meanings which we readers ascribe to his creation. (This was some years before Barthes' "The Death of the Author.")
Thus with "Alnilam," I believe. Dickey's powerful prose and deep symbolisms allow a vast range of responses and interpretations. Mine include a lot of religious themes, although I'm aware that Dickey was a bomber pilot in WWII and thus the aviation references, not only explicit but implicit, may be more concretely referential than I've chosen to interpret them. I'm not particularly religious, but I don't know whether the spiritual metaphors I find in "Alnilam" are my own particular "ripple in the pond" or anything Dickey intended when he dropped his "pebble."
At any rate, this reader found "Alnilam" not only brilliantly written but profoundly moving. I'd give it five stars but for the fact that I can't claim to fully understand this novel on an intellectual or objective level, despite enjoying it and being deeply moved by it. But is intellectual grasp a necessary criterion of good literature? Particularly of the work of a brilliant poet? Being uncertain, I give it four stars.

As a James Dickey fan, I was looking forward to immersing myself in Alnilam. The start was slow but optimistically I looked forward to something satisfying - I slogged through this disappointment until the bitter end. The one star I gave it (my first inclination was no stars for the pitiful plot and tedious narrative but that was not an option...) was only for some of the character development which was interesting at times. What a waste of a tree (well, with 768 pages, many trees).

This was probably the worst book I have ever read. I thought something would "happen", but other than philosophical meanderings of the war and the meaning of life, it was a complete waste of time and energy.