I wanted to read Ultravioleta by Laura Moriarty because the review I read of it in Rain Taxi some months ago made it sound really good and really different. I like to branch out from time to time and try different. I didn’t know just how different the book was until I bought a copy and started reading it. At first I thought it was rather Gertrude-Stein like but now that I have finished it I change that assessment.
Moriarty is generally a poet. Ultravioleta is science fiction that reads like very abstract poetry. The book was commissioned by Atelos as number 24 in a project of 50 books that each in some way cross traditional genre boundaries and not just poetry and prose. They also include theory and practice, essay, drama, visual, verbal, literary, non-literary, etc. I guess this is what you might call experimental fiction. Maybe I just don’t read this kind of book often enough to “get it,” because I didn’t get it. I felt lost most of the time, grasping for sentences that made sense to me and trying to find a story in something that didn’t seem to have a story.
The premise of the book, thought travel, in which people can gather at a library orbiting the moon Europa, is pretty cool. No one is fixed anywhere in time or space, everyone is always thinking themselves someplace else and somewhen else. At one point two characters even think themselves into the center of Europa and discover a vast sentient lake. Where the actual bodies of any of these people are, but not all are people, some are clones, others are aliens, and at least one is a robot, where their physical bodies are, I had no idea. I think it wasn’t supposed to matter. But I kept wondering how the bodies ate and did the normal business of bodies while the thinking person was elsewhere. I think the book is supposed to be about narrative and creating through narrative, but didn’t come up with that until after I had finished reading and was trying to figure out what I had just read.
The language itself is often beautiful and sometimes a phrase or sentence would fairly hum. But overall, I just don’t understand how to read a book like this. I can’t even say if I liked it or not. I found this review of the book and while I read it I thought, wow, that sounds like a really good book, one I’d like to read. But the book I read didn’t match up to the book in the review. Normally if reviews and my experience don’t match up and the book is by someone like Margaret Atwood I’d just think Maggie was off her game a bit (or more often the reviewer was nutso), and get on with things. But in this case I am left feeling deficient in my abilities to understand as well as not likely to try another book like this one any time soon.
So there you go. Take all that as you will. If you have read this book or read this book and find it brilliant, please talk to me about it and tell me how you managed to understand it. I really would like to know.
Oh, dear, that doesn’t sound like a fun experience — I rather doubt the problem lies in your reading abilities — perhaps it’s more a matter of taste, where some people don’t mind being a bit at sea while others do?
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Not Maggie, it is Peggy.
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You’re so sweet Dorothy. Maybe it’s a matter of taste and experience. I think the more a person reads of these kinds of books, the easier it is. I think.
Rod, what was I thinking? 🙂
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I love science fiction, and have read alot of it, but that doesn’t sound like something I would ‘get’ either. In fact it doesn’t sound like something I’d even want to try to ‘get’. Don’t feel bad about it.
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I love the title but gotta say that book doesn’t sound very appealing to me.
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It sounds as if she was writing outside of her genre. Some people might like the experimental approach, but it doesn’t work for everyone. I think you have to be a really brilliant writer to carry it off convincingly.
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Ah, thanks Carl!
I liked the title too Iliana. It refers to the ultimate thought travel ship that was built in the story, made out of love letters. The ship start its voyage successfully but doesn’t end it very well.
Litlove, I am not familiar with Moriarty’s work to know if she was writing outside her usual or not. Maybe her poetry is like this book–I would hope not though!
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Hi Stefani,
This is Laura Moriarty. I just encountered your review. Thanks for reading the book & considering it! You may not have liked UV but it seems to me you definitely got it. I am intrigued by your response. You are right that I am mostly a poet (have published 12 or so books of poetry and my selected poems is coming out in the fall). You are accurate to think of Gertrude Stein. A few contemporary poets who are friends and whose writng would be considered like mine are Norma Cole, Susan Howe or Lyn Hejinian. My poetry & theirs would be considered “experimental.” The writing I do tends to suggest various meanings but doesn’t necessarily insist on only one. Actually, you seem to have gotten the story perfectly. Of course you are right in questioning how could the characters eat etc. The book is quite highhanded about such things. It is more of a fantasy or allegory than realistic science fiction. Existence in the world I have proposed may be contradictory but I have tried to make it consistent within its own givens – particularly within its own language. That’s the thing — a poet tends to want to drill down into each word but then the story becomes, well, complex. If anyone wants to read an even wilder book in the same genre Clark Coolidge’s Alien Tatters, a long poem about alien abduction, is great.
I hate to tell you this, but I am writing a sequel. As a sort of lab for working on the characters I have a blog called Ultravioleta docs: http://www.ultravioletadocs.blogspot.com/. The British poet Alan Halsey who made the original postcard on which the entire novel is based (it’s the cover & frontispiece) has made some new images for the blog and, along with other visuals I find on-line, I have posted a series of letters and other material generated by the characters in UV. The current post consists of entries in a book catalog by Dayv. For more about my poetry see also A Tonalist Notes — a group blog I run about poetics.
Thanks again for your interesting response!
Laura Moriarty
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Laura, thank you so much for your comment! I don’t have much experience reading books like UV and have an admitted bias for concrete, definable stories (and poetry), but I like to try new and different. Your comment is encouraging, maybe Ultravioleta wasn’t as hard as I thought it was. Don’t apologize for an upcoming sequel. I’ll be on the lookout for it to give it a try! Thanks for the link and the book and poetry recommendations. I am in the process of looking into them. Oh, and of all the characters in UV, I found Dayv to be one of the most interesting. I can’t say why, maybe because he is the hybrid of Stella and Wyatt’s thoughts. Took me awhile to get that because I was thinking of him quite literally at first but after your comments and thinking about it more, it’s a pretty cool idea.
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