Customer Reviews

Echo Detained

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

 

 

Joshua Cochran can write. It may seem a pointless statement, but considering the dreck that is usually published, it's gratifying that we have access to a writer of Cochran's ability.

Echo Detained is The Stranger for post 9/11 America, with a protagonist devoid of any legal semblance of guilt. The tenuous grasp held on safety, freedom and normalcy is wrested from our hero as easily as seats disappear on the subway, and we're reminded how easily we can be divested of our rights.

Cochran perfectly captures that complacency is a vehicle of survival; without it, persisting through the hell of torture and digital anal rape -- and coping with frustration born of the inability to communicate with those who cannot see any perspective besides their own -- would be impossible. He also conveys that the best tools in the war against the individual are a peon's blind obedience and absence of introspection.

The one factor that limited my review to 4 stars instead of 5 is that, while interesting, the extensive footnotes on Delasco can cause a reader to lose the narrative thread. If one choses to follow the footnote to its end, then backtrack to the point where they left the narrative, the experience could be jarring; it was for me.

However, this is a substantial work that I would recommend to anyone literate. His prose is magnificent. If you want to read something where the composition is as much a delight to take in as the story itself, this is your book.

As a fan of Kafka, at first I thought that Mr. Cochran merely channeled the old boy. But while reminiscent of Kafka (and Nabokov and others as the publisher's review suggests), this is new ground we're on here, and an entirely new writer.

I'm certain, however, that the beginning will push some readers away. Echo Detained starts out with such realism that it's easy to identify with the (supposedly) innocent protagonist. If you're a bubblegum reader (I only read what makes me feel good!), then you might not make it past part one. You might actually use your brain. If you're a dark cynic like myself, it's ice cream.

The loss of the bubblegum audience is unfortunate, but acceptable. Because part two and three and so subtlety humorous, and often laugh-out-loud funny, you'll feel a little guilty. Yes, you're laughing at a man as he is mentally and physically tortured.

The delicate balancing act of satire is pulled off here. And I'm thankful that this book was written. Besides the misleading beginning and a few parts where I felt as insane and confused as Echo himself, the slim novel ends on a note of hopefulness and ambiguity, the likes of which I haven't enjoyed for a while. You'll read the last 20 pages more than once.

Brutus

Although I am admittedly biased (Cochran is a close personal friend-way to go Joshua!), I think everyone aught to read this book. What with the messed up sensibilities that currently seem rampant in our society, and the all-to-common tendency for Americans to shrug off many of the atrocities perpetrated by the government in our name.

Cochran has created a dark and disturbing window into the world of secret renditions (laced with humor-only made possible by his exceptional writing skills). Is it non-fiction? Certainly not. Does it allow one to experience the disorientation and madness that can be created through subtle (and not so subtle) forms of "Enhanced Interrogation?" Most definitely. I was entranced, amused, sickened, frightened, perplexed, maddened, and entertained from cover to cover. Besides it only costs $9. What a bargain!

Mr. Cochran weaves a compelling story in this book. This is a story that touches so many aspects of our culture and humanity. I found the book to be completely thought provoking, broad in perspective and a deep look into the philosophies and perspectives of captor and captive.

Cochran has submerged his narrative in cloudy paranoia and numbing dread.

Yet, like all good writing, the intended tenor of the novel is always skating on a thick sheet of ambiguity. Echo Detained illustrates the culture of fear and alienation that has trickled down to even those with believed fixed roles in society. Many today try to write about the post-9/11 world. Cochran is truly writing within it - way, way in it.

A little-known corollary of Delasco's work, obscure even to those would-be-ascendent scholars who have labored through years of that Promethean-Limbo status known as AbD, is the Echo-Implosive-Singularity Corollary: In many ways more properly treated as a conjecture than a corollary as its only known putative quasi-reliable claim to existence is an indecipherable scrawl on the margins of an aborted and abandoned dissertation tentatively titled 'Delasco's Lament, or: The Echo Shift Within Doppler-Doppelgängers As Contemplated Over Danish At the Hungarian Pastry Shop' in which the conjectural claim is put forth, if only as a tentative hypothetical, that due to a kink in the chronosynclastic infundibulum, there will one day manifest a work titled 'Echo Detained' which will present one Joshua Daniel Cochran as the authorial doppelgänger of Ambrose Delasco, PhD.

Considerable (if muted) controversy has ensued within the frenetic academic virtual enclaves most devoted to teasing out Delasco's more subtle meanings from the yarn-like weavings of his thoughts as to whether this work ought be considered the work of Cochran, Delasco, or the virtual-bastard-virtual-soul-child of their shared electrons.

This debate, as most academic affairs, is expected to be long-winded, postural, and essentially pointless.

Echo Detained, fortunately, is out there, pointed, in every sense.

What if, though, Schrödinger's Cat were to blink?

~ Teufelsdrockh !!!