The Revisionist [Paperback]

Miranda Mellis (Author), Derek White (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 30, 2007

The title character of Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist conducts covert surveillance on a Saunders-esque city whose inhabitants are subject to uncanny transformations as a result of catastrophic weather, political corruption, invasive technologies and environmental degradation. Hired to spin, or 'revise,' the facts, the revisionist's perceptions in turn become detached and distorted--inevitably unreliable yet all the same, revealing. This civil scientist of a narrator sardonically observes a distressed landscape inhabited by mutant children, a seeing-eye dog, a centenarian with iguanas and constellations beneath her dress, brooding frigate birds, insurance love clones, a terrorist curator, a private investigator, and a little girl who's discovered the world's largest conch.

Editorial Reviews

Review

There's an uncanny lightness about Miranda Mellis's gliding techno-novella. It's slow and glimmery like steam punk and wise about gender too. She's right up there (for me) with Bob Dylan, folk art, anime and all the kind and great animals and plants of the world. I love this book so much. --Eileen Myles

Caught somewhere in that nexus of living, observing and manipulating from which our current American malaise most convincingly reveals itself, the conflicted narrator of Miranda Mellis taut story telescopulates to capture and possess a variety of lives from a distance. The Revisionist is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale. Though its motion seems at first Brownian, it manages almost because of this to get to where few books ever manage to go. --Brian Evenson

In her novella The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis plunges her readers into a looming, apocalyptic existence where the natural world resembles an ominous machine, and the local convenience store has become known as the new natural jungle. Complemented by the mechanical yet strangely beautiful artwork of Derek White, whose images seem to be almost motorized, Mellis story of a nuclear age weatherman paints a world without sensation, or truth, or reaction. Yet, despite the empty void felt between her characters, Mellis manages to transcend the predictable feelings of hopelessness, and subtly, tastefully adds an afterglow of promise to her story. A short 82 pages, The Revisionist vividly observes the world through the eyes of its narrator, a weather surveillance reporter who documents his--or her, Mellis never tells us--findings from an abandoned lighthouse, seven miles outside the city. Ironically, Mellis emphasizes the heightened sensation that can be felt through the use of the narrator s telescope--to hear another s heartbeat, or to read another s mind--and juxtaposes this advanced machinery with both a narrator who has significantly distanced himself from the subjects of his observations and a human population that fails to feel anything at all anymore. The rest of the review is here: http://versemag.blogspot.com/2007/03/new-review-of-miranda-mellis.html --Caitlin Brown, Verse

Product Details

• Paperback: 82 pages
• Publisher: Calamari Press; First Edition edition (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977072371
• ISBN-13: 978-0977072378
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,197,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Review by Blake Butler in Bookslut, May 11, 2007

By 

Derek White (Rome, Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Revisionist (Paperback)

"The first time I finished reading Miranda Mellis's The Revisionist, I started to turn the book back to the beginning and read immediately again. The book is only 82 pages, many of which only house a paragraph or depict ornate black and white collagist imagery, and the overall effect, as I felt it, is to feel in want of more. The nugget at the heart of this bizarre and wicked fever-dream of a book is a depiction of a world both on the verge of collapse and in midst of mutation -- some absurd realm where men explode as car-crashes and the threat of apocalypse hinges on one lazy girl's duty to seal envelopes. But I stopped myself from rereading The Revisionist immediately. Instead I lay back on the bed and let it jar around in my mind. I found myself still thinking about it hours later, and beyond that, days, unable to shake the bizarre dreamlike imagery that'd so quickly been uploaded...

[...]

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I read this on the bus this morning, August 12, 2008

By 

E. Minsker "watchthatman" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Revisionist (Paperback)

I went into The Revisionist with no prior information about the book or the author. I just picked it up at the library. Here's what I got from reading it:

A bunch of stoners sit around. One says, "I wonder what the apocalypse will be like." The other says, "I think (the book) will happen." The first one says, "That sounds awesome. I'll make some illustrations based on those very descriptions."

And scene. There's the book. A lot of overwrought, weird, pretentious Zappa/existentialist images tied together by a half-story. I think beneath the oddball surface, it's supposed to be a commentary on the government eating up any half-truths they're fed.

If you want an actual story, don't look here. For some interesting art and some mind blowing mental images, go to the library and pick this up. You'll read it in about an hour and a half and then say, "Huh." That's about it. It's not worth pondering for years, but perhaps one morning of confusion.