The Marbled Swarm

I've been thinking about The Marbled Swarm a lot since I finished reading it. Trying to put my thoughts in order. I've got a ton of feelings about the book, but trying to sort them out and put them into words is proving to be a herculean endeavor, titanically difficult. More than anything, a sisyphean task... and other Greek idioms.. Which makes perfect sense, because this book is a winding labyrinth with a minotaur at the center. The Marbled Swarm is less a novel, and more a transgressive literary experiment. It's fun. I promise.

Maybe labyrinthian isn't exactly right though. Synecdochal? That sort've works.. The titular “Marbled Swarm” refers to the twisted winding prose of the narrator, itself a bastardization of the flowery manipulative French his father (a billionaire Svengali-type with a penchant for perversion) speaks, which is then twisted and confused again through the translation to English. But it also refers to the narrator's crimes, ALSO a bastardization, mistranslation and failed copy of his father's. So it's a synecdoche right? The Marbled Swarm is both a microcosm and a macrocosm of its constituent parts. The title, the prose, the plot.

No. That doesn't feel right either though. Recursive? I guess, but also not as specific as I want.. Maybe fractal is closer to how I feel? Would I feel pretentious as fuck saying, “The Marbled Swarm” is the novelization of fractal geometry? Definitely. Lets go with it.

You know how when you zoom in on a fractal you get recursive structure? As you zoom into the center of this book you get recursive structure. Every character has a doppelganger, every estate has a copy (and mazelike secret tunnels), every transgression has a doubling. Every action is nested within itself.

For example, there's a scene near the exact center of this book where the main character is being told a story by his lawyer about a woman being told a story by her son about a surreal Kafkaesque play he performed in (written by a doppelganger of the main character's father) spanning the course of days which is a near perfect recursion of the plot of the entire novel.

Then at the same time I think it's a statement on modern transgressive fiction? A transgressive author transgressing transgressive fiction by parodying it and himself? TOO MANY LAYERS I CAN'T KEEP UP. SEND HELP.

On a side note, what's with me and fiction involving cannibalism lately? It feels like every other book I've read this year trades heavily in cannibalism as symbolism. There's something about the allegory that I just find.. tasty (pun nintendo). It probably has something to do with the last 5 years in the world and the gross hyper-capitalistic dystopia we live in that treats humans as consumable and disposable? Something for me to chew on I guess.

Aaaaaannnyyyway. 4/5. A Baudelairean nightmare, a Sadeian fever-dream. I recommend this book to no one.

As much as I wanted to love this book, the narrator is just too much of a monster. In the end, I found him convincing, but too terrifying to relate to. There are no soft edges to grab, and so every encounter with the book made me both disgusted and nauseated. I love the work of Dennis Cooper but I found nothing redemptive, and in the end, the book is both empty of meaning and heart. I'd give the book 3.5 stars if I could, but only because of the incredibly high quality of Cooper's prose. I could only recommend this book to Cooper completists.