Customer Reviews

The Revisionist

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"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...

[...]

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.