THE OTHER PLANET
By
From the authors of the experimental The Menaced Assassin (1982): a new novel that's so busy experimenting with altered states, meta-realities and dreamlike coincidences that it forgets to be about anything much at all. The publisher's blurb mentions the word ""satire,"" and it's, urn, futuristic. Sort of Readers attempting to penetrate the thicket are advised to hold firmly on to their heads, lest they emerge wearing someone else's. Somewhere within, then, research-scientist Valeria Florescu quits her job and heads out into the unknown in search of--fulfillment? stimulation? transcendence? Soon she's drifting unsinkably on a sea of probability-bubbles, enjoying improbable meetings with mesmerizing nonentities, each of whom is eager to regale her with descriptions of highly significant dream/adventures or engage in conversations of grandiloquent meaninglessness--or possibly there is no distinction between any of these. Numerous women enjoy various tingling orgasms; elsewhere the prose forms a glutinous mass. Only the future is real, it seems, because it hasn't happened yet. A metafictional tour de force, a deconstructionist's Baedeker, or a wearisome catalog of other people's weird fugues? You pay your money, you take your choice.