Beastmarks [Hardcover]

A. A. Attanasio (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: Mark V Ziesing; First Edition edition (December 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0961297026
• ISBN-13: 978-0961297022
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,748,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I love fantasy fiction. I love the courage of the human spirit to invest with real emotion experiences we know are entirely imaginary. And I love all of what 'fantasy' means to poetic thinkers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If I were you..., April 10, 2002

By 

Jean-Francois Virey (59500 DOUAI France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beastmarks (Hardcover)

Most of A. A. Attanasio's writings belong to vast ensembles, like his Radix Tetrad, his Irth trilogy or his Arthurian (or rather Arthorian) tetralogy. Even a shorter work like *The Moon's Wife* is filled with echoes of earlier novels, like the pierced stone from *Hunting the Ghost Dancer*, the fascination with the Earth's magnetic field or the charged creatures that inhabit the ionosphere.

It is therefore an uncommon experience for the Attanasio devotee to dip into these seven much briefer pieces, the shortest of which is no more than two and a half pages long, making up a total of 120 pages.

All the stories are described by the author as «stories of trespass» dealing with «a consciousness that is in a place where it doesn't belong.» As in the rest of his fiction, where he has striven to explore all the varieties of consciousness, from subhuman to human to superhuman and all that's in between, Attanasio seems to be driven by an urge to experience the world from the vintage point of other subjectivities, the more alien the more attractive. His main preoccupation as a writer is to understand what it is like for someone else - or something else - to be present to the world, from the «bear dreaming of a salmon-wild river» in «Nuclear Tan» to the «7th-dimensional consciousness» snatched out of its «antibaryon universe» by a frenzied hypertube and brought into contact with Earth dolphins in «Over the Rainbow».

This urge to lift himself out of his mental patterns he seems to have inherited from Keats, whom he himself quotes in «The Answerer of Dreams» : «Through his imagination [Keats] felt he could `enter into the identities of other beings' and find the `essential beauty' in the *anima mundi*, the soul of all things.» What matters to Attanasio is not to reach an abstract, conceptual cognition of others, but empathically to feel their inner being. «It's not understanding you must seek,» says one of his characters, «but receptivity [...] flexible, open awareness.»

Often, the author follows characters who are themselves forced to experience the world through the medium of a foreign form of awareness. In «The Last Dragon Master», set in China in the Period of the Warring States, Yu Ching undergoes a kind of illumination even taoist monks do not want to be poisoned with. In «Sherlock Holmes and Basho», Conan Doyle's thinking machine is confronted to the intuitive outlook of the eremitic Japanese aesthete, some of whose haiku you may have heard in Takahata's *My Neighbour the Yamadas*. While in «Monkey Puzzle», explicitly fictional psychic beings are trapped into human bodies and minds by some curious gravity they cannot fathom.

But my favorite two pieces are the longest and last of this collection. «Matter Mutter Mother» is a futuristic tale reminiscent of the Radix universe, with its lynks, psybots and other technological wonders. Once more, it deals with an alienated consciousness: a woman trapped in a man's body; a «shortsighted man living in a mechanical and dangerous life» who has made the mistake of experiencing enlightenment and is lost. Written backwards, in a series of vignettes moving from effect to cause, the story might seem to have a very contrived and deliberately confusing structure, like most of the modernist fiction that seeks to do away with linearity. But the device actually makes for very moving reading and is not so counter-intuitive. For after all, do we not often experience sequences of events this way, the past making the present clear with a delay ?

As for «The Answerer of Dreams», it is a transhumanistic love story filled with more staples of Attanasio's futuristic visions- olfacts, pleroma music and yet more psybots. It illustrates how, despite the revolution technology is wreaking in men's bodies and minds, their souls retain the same basic longings. «The world endlessly reinvents itself, yet the language of love remains trite.» Here the author intersperses the narrative with his own reflections in the midst of the creative process, a literary device that might a priori appear to be an annoyance but which, rather than detracting from the enjoyment of the fictional world, actually enhances it.

Many readers might be turned off by the versatility of Attanasio's imagination, his penchant for the weird, the other-wordly, the cryptic, the insane and the impalpable. As for me, *Beastmarks* only whetted my appetite for more of his short stories - and I know there are at least thirteen others out there waiting to be collected, another number that does not divide evenly into a circle.