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Clarence St. Claire is a programmer who cherishes an orderly life. His motto: 'work is important; people, not so much'. His determination to be The Most Serious Person on the Planet is threatened when he becomes haunted by a mysterious manuscript from his past: 300 pages of possibly random bird tracks. Risking his career and self-possession, St. Claire dares to pursue the manuscript against the opposition of hackers, the NSA, the ghosts of famous writers and doubts of his own sanity. Lost in a maze of bird-prints and their possible meanings, St. Claire determines to summon the late writer Jorge Louis Borges to help with the translation. He will dream Borges into existence, exactly as Borges wrote of doing. But this act stirs the opposition of a secret order of past writers, who may, possibly, have their own agenda. The duel between St. Claire's reality and theirs leads to a final encounter in The Dark Library, before the dread conclave known as The Tribunal of Dreams. 'Origins' is a book about books, about magic realism and artificial intelligence, virtual reality and languages, and how sensible people wind up in strange situations by strangely sensible steps. It is built of the words books whisper to each other alone after the library has closed. It ends as it must: with the hero tossed into a pit by Edgar Alan Poe. Kidding. I mean, that last does happen but the final ending is the hero finding the answer and getting the girl, as well as his sanity back. Mostly back.From the book: I sat on the bed in the dark, my back to the wall. I began a new web page. Time to tell the world the truth, I thought, and felt a surge of pride. This would upset the Secret Powers of the world. But hey they had cost me my $400 security deposit. It was payback time. I would tell the world. But tell what? I typed out the flat truth to see how it looked. There is a secret society of dead writers who live in the wall spaces between realities, in the silence of empty rooms, in the Schrödinger-uncertainty of unopened books. They call themselves the Tribunal of Dreams. Often they appear as birds. They peek out of mirrors and walk the shadows of libraries. They are old and sly and are not retired. They have vast plans. They have me barricaded in my bedroom and they painted my windows black. They are listening at the door now. Send help.I read it over several times. It expressed all the facts nicely, yet it lacked something. Specifically, it lacked the power to convince the world of anything except that I was insane.… (más)
Deep in the relegated and much-maligned channels of self-publishing, Raymond St Elmo's The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing proved a rare find. In terms of content, style, originality and literary quality, it beats out just about anything that passes for contemporary mainstream 'literature'. On his own, the self-publishing St Elmo makes the big boys look small.
It is refreshing that a book like this has been written – an idiosyncratic adventure of code-breaking, artificial intelligence and abstract secret societies, in which a government analyst is given a peculiar manuscript written in bird tracks, which he successfully translates and which draws him deeper into madness. The influence of the likes of Borges, Calvino and Poe is clear, and St Elmo is more than happy to acknowledge them. Part of the book's refreshing nature is that it was clearly written out of a love of writing, and with integrity. There's not even the glance of one eye towards the 'market' or to a particular demographic. There's no sign of a marketing department being consulted on the text; if there was, they were rightly ignored. There's no ego on display, no desperate looking for the false cachet of being an author, or even seeking praise. Maybe St Elmo would dispute that – all writers want to be read and acknowledged, after all – but what I mean is that he wasn't prepared to compromise the story he wanted to write in order to place on the podium. The Origin of Birds reads like a pure novel, delivered how the writer wanted it. That's all but unheard of nowadays, and perhaps why it was self-published: a novel this good wouldn't pass the shallow filters that greenlight a book in the mainstream publishing industry.
It's hard to know whether to call The Origin of Birds 'great', because great writing is so rare nowadays that it feels odd to read a book written in the last few years and be placed in such a mood that you could call it great. Certainly, it's a lot of fun, particularly in the first two thirds of the book. It is written to entertain, but also to stimulate on an intellectual level, and as the book progresses readers who thirst for that dual experience of real intelligence and quality entertainment in their novels will feel the rare sensation of having their thirst slaked. The writing style is also impressive: rich and readable, with the Borges-like interludes where St Elmo delivers a passage from the manuscript (often a laconic interpretation of a myth) being of particularly high calibre.
This is not to say the book is without flaws. There were more typos than I expected, particularly when everything else – from the story to the writing to the cover art – reaches a high bar. Even leaving aside this quibble, I felt the secondary characters could have been developed more (Kay is interesting, but a background figure) and the final third of the story pales compared to what came before. The story becomes increasingly outlandish and by the end the bottom falls out; it's gone so far out there, the only way St Elmo can bring it back is to yank harshly on the reins. It's a less-than-elegant end, particularly as the conspiracy, the search for meaning and the decoding of the manuscript – all of which excite the reader from the start – lack answers. St Elmo instead favours a rather cliché resolution that the journey is more important than the destination (pg. 317) and it's best to let things be. It's a fine answer, I suppose, and in keeping with the book's developing idea that seeking meaning in the tracks of birds is no more valid than seeking them in any other random patterns or events. But it still felt underwhelming that we get no closure on what the physical bird-track manuscript really is. We hear that starting gun on page one – questions of what, who and, more importantly, why – but end up on a race to nowhere.
That said, The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing was some of the most creative, high-quality fun I've had from a novel in years, and though I feel frustrated that original writing like this doesn't get the mainstream backing it deserves, I'm delighted that there's a real writer out there doing his thing. There's a whole bunch of other novels St Elmo has written, and certainly I'll be exploring them in short order. If the industry gave a book like this just an ounce of the backing that's given to formulaic trash and celebrity cookbooks, you'd watch it soar. ( )
Clarence St. Claire is a programmer who cherishes an orderly life. His motto: 'work is important; people, not so much'. His determination to be The Most Serious Person on the Planet is threatened when he becomes haunted by a mysterious manuscript from his past: 300 pages of possibly random bird tracks. Risking his career and self-possession, St. Claire dares to pursue the manuscript against the opposition of hackers, the NSA, the ghosts of famous writers and doubts of his own sanity. Lost in a maze of bird-prints and their possible meanings, St. Claire determines to summon the late writer Jorge Louis Borges to help with the translation. He will dream Borges into existence, exactly as Borges wrote of doing. But this act stirs the opposition of a secret order of past writers, who may, possibly, have their own agenda. The duel between St. Claire's reality and theirs leads to a final encounter in The Dark Library, before the dread conclave known as The Tribunal of Dreams. 'Origins' is a book about books, about magic realism and artificial intelligence, virtual reality and languages, and how sensible people wind up in strange situations by strangely sensible steps. It is built of the words books whisper to each other alone after the library has closed. It ends as it must: with the hero tossed into a pit by Edgar Alan Poe. Kidding. I mean, that last does happen but the final ending is the hero finding the answer and getting the girl, as well as his sanity back. Mostly back.From the book: I sat on the bed in the dark, my back to the wall. I began a new web page. Time to tell the world the truth, I thought, and felt a surge of pride. This would upset the Secret Powers of the world. But hey they had cost me my $400 security deposit. It was payback time. I would tell the world. But tell what? I typed out the flat truth to see how it looked. There is a secret society of dead writers who live in the wall spaces between realities, in the silence of empty rooms, in the Schrödinger-uncertainty of unopened books. They call themselves the Tribunal of Dreams. Often they appear as birds. They peek out of mirrors and walk the shadows of libraries. They are old and sly and are not retired. They have vast plans. They have me barricaded in my bedroom and they painted my windows black. They are listening at the door now. Send help.I read it over several times. It expressed all the facts nicely, yet it lacked something. Specifically, it lacked the power to convince the world of anything except that I was insane.
Google Books — Cargando...
(5)
1
It is refreshing that a book like this has been written – an idiosyncratic adventure of code-breaking, artificial intelligence and abstract secret societies, in which a government analyst is given a peculiar manuscript written in bird tracks, which he successfully translates and which draws him deeper into madness. The influence of the likes of Borges, Calvino and Poe is clear, and St Elmo is more than happy to acknowledge them. Part of the book's refreshing nature is that it was clearly written out of a love of writing, and with integrity. There's not even the glance of one eye towards the 'market' or to a particular demographic. There's no sign of a marketing department being consulted on the text; if there was, they were rightly ignored. There's no ego on display, no desperate looking for the false cachet of being an author, or even seeking praise. Maybe St Elmo would dispute that – all writers want to be read and acknowledged, after all – but what I mean is that he wasn't prepared to compromise the story he wanted to write in order to place on the podium. The Origin of Birds reads like a pure novel, delivered how the writer wanted it. That's all but unheard of nowadays, and perhaps why it was self-published: a novel this good wouldn't pass the shallow filters that greenlight a book in the mainstream publishing industry.
It's hard to know whether to call The Origin of Birds 'great', because great writing is so rare nowadays that it feels odd to read a book written in the last few years and be placed in such a mood that you could call it great. Certainly, it's a lot of fun, particularly in the first two thirds of the book. It is written to entertain, but also to stimulate on an intellectual level, and as the book progresses readers who thirst for that dual experience of real intelligence and quality entertainment in their novels will feel the rare sensation of having their thirst slaked. The writing style is also impressive: rich and readable, with the Borges-like interludes where St Elmo delivers a passage from the manuscript (often a laconic interpretation of a myth) being of particularly high calibre.
This is not to say the book is without flaws. There were more typos than I expected, particularly when everything else – from the story to the writing to the cover art – reaches a high bar. Even leaving aside this quibble, I felt the secondary characters could have been developed more (Kay is interesting, but a background figure) and the final third of the story pales compared to what came before. The story becomes increasingly outlandish and by the end the bottom falls out; it's gone so far out there, the only way St Elmo can bring it back is to yank harshly on the reins. It's a less-than-elegant end, particularly as the conspiracy, the search for meaning and the decoding of the manuscript – all of which excite the reader from the start – lack answers. St Elmo instead favours a rather cliché resolution that the journey is more important than the destination (pg. 317) and it's best to let things be. It's a fine answer, I suppose, and in keeping with the book's developing idea that seeking meaning in the tracks of birds is no more valid than seeking them in any other random patterns or events. But it still felt underwhelming that we get no closure on what the physical bird-track manuscript really is. We hear that starting gun on page one – questions of what, who and, more importantly, why – but end up on a race to nowhere.
That said, The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing was some of the most creative, high-quality fun I've had from a novel in years, and though I feel frustrated that original writing like this doesn't get the mainstream backing it deserves, I'm delighted that there's a real writer out there doing his thing. There's a whole bunch of other novels St Elmo has written, and certainly I'll be exploring them in short order. If the industry gave a book like this just an ounce of the backing that's given to formulaic trash and celebrity cookbooks, you'd watch it soar. (