Customer Reviews

Atomik Aztex

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

 

 

Foster speaks pretty good Spanish (he has explained that he grew up in a Chicano barrio in East LA) and is an accomplished author of several now classic books of poetry (and prose poetry). Today his new novel ATOMIK AZTEX shows that he is capable of great wit and a Celine-like vision of human nature at its most scabrous and horrifying. No, not Celine Dion, but Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the French novelist whose book VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE NIGHT I thought of more than once as I explored this tale of a modern -day Aztec in a postmodern predicament. Picture the European invasion of Mexico as having gone exactly the other way around; routed, the Spanish find themselves slaughtered, tortured, their country a pawn in the game of world Aztek domination. As the ancient peoples used to pull the hearts out of living victims, so do their present day counterparts, and our hero is in charge of eviscerating white natives of several European nations, all of which he treats with a Celinean wit that glories in brutality and (literal) heartlessness.

And yet Foster is all heart, and for proof you have only to turn to the other side of the story, a Dreiser-like tale of poor people just trying to earn a living at "Farmer John's" a slaughterhouse in the City of Vernon. You can't stand the smell, but then you get used to it, just like all working class people have to get used to the worst humiliations. Poor guy is pulling back to back shifts, owes his former in-laws two grand, and he's losing his son to the gangster life. His boss, Max, is one of those kind of guys who seems alert and cheerful in public, but when you're alone with him you realize, he wants to destroy your very soul. Zenzo's got some good buddies on the killing floor, but it's plain that the work is killing him, and how good is it really for planet Earth? Sesshu Foster asks us to consider, if one of these two cases is an alternate universe, which is the less humane?

In every paragraph there's a poem, and sometimes there's a literal poem, inspired by Aztec lyric tradition, at the base of which there's something of the prophetic, giving the sense of a language on the underside of thought, born when the stars gashed their way through the blanket of the night sky. He is a born novelist and this book, brand new today, will be feeling brand news to our descendants in a hundred years time. By the same token, it will be a hard sell, because lazy readers may not feel like trying to distinguish between a hipster attitude and a brain made of solid steel. But give it it a chance and let its Aztec enchantment sneak up on you.

Sesshu Foster's ATOMIK AZTEX is a trip like no other. Foster himself acknowledges Ishmael Reed's MUMBO JUMBO and William Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH as models for his wild satire, as well as Kerouac -- VISIONS OF CODY in particular, I would say, especially its chronic use of lists. Foster warns the reader: "Persons attempting to find a plot in this book should read Huck Finn." This is a fair warning, and the non-linear cyklikal conception makes the book hard to describe. But it grabbed me right away, and it's a great read if you like the out-there novels of Reed, Burroughs and Kerouac. Foster is a long-time poet of LA's east side, and the strength of ATOMIK AZTEX is his poetic riffing, like jazz improvisation. The weakness is the structure, or lack thereof, which of course is covered by the introductory caveat. So realize that what makes this a great read is the frenetic improv -- it's Ornette, or Cecil, or Trane, not Beethoven.

In a couple of interviews I've read, Foster describes the book as a satire, a social critique of America. I can't say that it succeeds on that level, it's too out-there to draw blood. The protagonist, an Aztek warrior, is presented as a heroic hipster, and this is clearly too over-the-top to be taken seriously -- the Aztek Socialist Imperium is based on human sacrifice on a planetary scale! So there would seem to be a parallel between the U.S.A. and the A.S.I., but Foster never drives it home. The protagonist also lives in another dimension where he works in a slaughterhouse in East L.A. and participates in a CIO union drive organized by the CPUSA. The Aztek warrior is assigned to lead an elite unit against the Nazis at Stalingrad. Not linear, this only makes sense in the cyklikal omniverse, but there is another parallel suggested between the Aztec Socialist Imperium and the now defunct Soviet Union. Socialism has an ambiguous status in the book, both held up as a positive alternative to materialistik, captitalistik Amerika, and subtly undermined through its association with the A.S.I. and the U.S.S.R., neither of which is any sort of ethical ideal.

But despite the structural and ethical problems, ATOMIK AZTEX is full of energy and imagination, and will jolt you into a higher level of consciousness! Here's a quote to close the review:

"The Europeans figured they'd wipe us out, Plan A, enslave our peoples..." "Could we let that happen? Of course not. Did we care if they had a Plan B? Hell, no. Cuz in no way does that fit our aesthetic conception of how the universe is supposed to run. It's just plain ugly. To think that they want to foist that vision of Reality on the rest of us. That's the insult. Barbarik, cheap aesthetik based on flimsy Mechanistik notions of the omniverse as a Swiss watch set to ticking by some sort of Trinity." (p. 2)

"Persons attempting to find a plot in this book should read Huck Finn" Sesshu Foster recommends in the opening of his premier novel Atomic Aztek. So I did. Read Huck Finn, I mean. I found in the introduction of Huck Finn the advice that if readers want a plot, they should be shot.

The literary transformation of consciousness created by reading this text had (at least) three parts for me:

1) I laughed my ass off. Because of the allegorical spin and elliptical critique of the American historical paradigm. If you are as weary as I am of searing political, cultural and historical distortion, and need a good laugh, read this book.

2) I was engaged. With the energy and literary brilliance of the language. If you are as burnt out as I am of fiction that shouts in clich narrative, ordinary time, flat characters born from dry imagination, no sound, no ear, no rhythm, if you need a drug-like interface with words that bounce through your mind with crazy magic, read this book.

3) I was relieved and rejuvenated. Because I realized again why I read, why I write, why this creative life of engaging text is my life-long choice. For the sheer pleasure of infusion with profound literary and political aesthetic of expression. If you seek connection through text with imaginations as wild, intelligent and brave as your own, I would say, take a chance and read this book.

Sesshu Foster's backhanded homage to that foggy old fascist W.B.Yeats in Atomik Aztex is worth the price of this book all by itself: "Stalingrad 1942" rips up the pompous pretension of WBY's revered "Easter 1916" in a manner both hilarious and touching. Like Atomic Aztek's itself, this is parody taken to the highest level. Sesshu Foster is a dark, lightning-struck genius--bursts of Joyce, Warren Zevon, Burroughs, Jose Torres Tama and Vonnegut. This is the "movie" that Apocalypto should have been--eat your heart out, Mel!

It would be a mistake to lump Sesshu Foster's 'Atomik Aztex' with other alternate history titles - although the divergent present is the 'setting', Mr. Foster has higher ambitions for his novel than as a standard genre-driven story. First off, there are some technical variations on the alternate history theme. In 'Atomik Aztex', as opposed to other AH titles I'm familiar with, the divergent historical event is far in the past (the defeat and subsequent colonization of the Spanish by the Aztecs) - 'Aztex' takes place 400 years later, in the projected time of this new world's 1942. Here, the Aztec nation, with its Anarko-Syndikalist Russian allies, are engaged in a war against the fascist forces of Germany at a place called Stalingrad.

The other atypical element in 'Aztex' is that the main character, Zenzontli, suffers from visions of a world parallel to his own - for all intents and purposes, our world of 1942 - where he is condemned to menial work in a slaughterhouse. Thus, the narrative skips back and forth between the imagined world where the Aztec - who are supernaturally empowered by the rituals of human sacrifice - reign over the Americas and their Spanish colonies, and the world of Los Angeles in the 1940's. In this way, and pretty much only this way, 'Atomik Aztex' is somewhat reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick's award-winning 'Man in the High Castle'.

'Atomik Aztex' is a challenging read. Mr. Foster declines to contextualize many of the references he chooses to pepper his narrative with, and I suspect they will be unfamiliar to many readers (I would be very suprised if more than a handful of people recognize the significance of Isaac Babel when he shows up for a few pages near the end of the book). The author's writing style is also difficult - transitions between alternate states were herky-jerky, and there were also large gaps left unexplained between leaving off and returning to a particular consciousness. Yet I think it would be a mistake to look at these stylistic quirks and conclude that the narrative is out of control - it's possible, but Mr. Foster handles the rest of the details quite well. In a slang-driven, informal address from Zenzon directly to the reader, the author gets to put across his concepts in a unique and non-traditional manner, one which, unfortunately, does not work as well as Mr. Foster may have hoped.

'Aztex' is satire, it is wish-fulfillment through the written word, it is comedy, it is violent and unsettling, a paean to a culture that at its height (according to their own records) sacrificed thousands of prisoners over the course of a few days for the reconsecration of a temple and probably practiced cannibalism, and, in the end, an examination of disenfranchisement and emasculation through the improbable comparison of cultures. Does it work? Not often enough. Instead, it is sometimes interesting but rarely cohesive, culminating in a monologue on what it means to be a man that may fail to answer the question satifactorily, but is an magnificent ending nonetheless. By virtue of what comes before, Sesshu Foster has written one of the most apt and dryly hilarious ending sentence I've read in a contemporary novel. (Coincidentally, 'Aztex' is dedicated to the the author Rick Harsch, who wrote one of the most astonishing first sentences I've ever read to open 'The Driftless Zone'.) This ending almost tips the book from three stars to four, but not quite. Three-and-a-half, and I'll certainly take a good look at Mr. Foster's next offering.

No plot - OK; satire - OK; replace all hard C's with K - OK; posit Aztec civilization lives on to present day - OK; screwed-up Aztec warrior working in pig slaughterhouse - less OK; also a union organizer - ?; nothing really happens - less than OK.

To those who loved this book, good for you. To those who compare this with Joyce, Burroughs, and Vonnegut, I really, really don't think so. His imitation of them does not mean he is of their caliber.

If you like literary gimmicks with some humor and a far-out premise, this is an interesting read. If you want a read that has a plot and eventually makes some sense, pass on this one.

Atomic Aztek-Great title; great premise-Azteks defeat Spanish conquistidors and go on to defeat Nazis with other Socialist allies.
Plus a parallel story of an Aztek hero in a Farmer John meatpacking plant. While the odd spellings was at first fun, it grew tiresome. Likewise, the switching of plots and places never went anywhere. Much promise, but overall very disappointing.