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The Dog Stars by Peter Heller is the best postapocalyptic novels I've read since The Children's Hospital, in both form and content.
A few standouts:
The narration is excellently done: sparse and beautiful at the same time, like a dead tree. Barely any punctuation, bits of haiku mixed in with musings on trout and the narrator's dead wife. You get a sense of the character in full, even as he consciously struggles with his own erratic memory and syntax, which is not quite itself full anymore after his survival of a mostly-deadly plague.
The landscape is part of the plot, in the best and worst ways. It is used for tactics, and it is used for beauty, and it is used for a narrative of personal and worldwide loss; you get the idea that all of these things are, on a fractal level, the same, embodied in the ravaged land.
The book layout -- I got the deckle-edged hardcover from my library -- is fantastic and full of little jokes about stars and dogs: designer Kelly Blair is taking a page from McSweeney's design department in the best possible way. The front of the book's dust jacket features the constellation Sirius, obviously, but the smaller jokes are better. On the back of the dust jacket, the accent constellation mapped below the title is a 'new' constellation called 'the little dog,' which I would not have recognized had I not happened to read a book about star maps on the previous day. This book is published under the Borzoi imprint of Knopf, and on the back dust jacket flap the running Borzoi imprint logo is actually recreated as a constellation of a running dog. I plan on buying this book in hardcover for the jacket design.
The font is also spare and elegant.
There are only really five main characters in this book, each of whom could easily fall into the worst post-apocalyptic cliche, but none of whom do. Such a rich, full novel with such a sparse cast in such a sparse world is a fantastic achievement for a writer and is a delight for a reader.
The apocalpyse itself fits the book's narration and tone, in the way the best postapocalptic literature does: a creeping global warming, then creeping diseases; death as the mass failure of human understanding and technology at the limits of human understanding in the 21st century. But despite that, we see signs that humanity, in general, has not stopped wanting to understand.
This is a profoundly hopeful book. It is a profoundly sad book. It is about death, and being willing to kill for poetry, and powered flight, and dogs, and fly fishing. It is excellent.
Please read it.
A few standouts:
The narration is excellently done: sparse and beautiful at the same time, like a dead tree. Barely any punctuation, bits of haiku mixed in with musings on trout and the narrator's dead wife. You get a sense of the character in full, even as he consciously struggles with his own erratic memory and syntax, which is not quite itself full anymore after his survival of a mostly-deadly plague.
The landscape is part of the plot, in the best and worst ways. It is used for tactics, and it is used for beauty, and it is used for a narrative of personal and worldwide loss; you get the idea that all of these things are, on a fractal level, the same, embodied in the ravaged land.
The book layout -- I got the deckle-edged hardcover from my library -- is fantastic and full of little jokes about stars and dogs: designer Kelly Blair is taking a page from McSweeney's design department in the best possible way. The front of the book's dust jacket features the constellation Sirius, obviously, but the smaller jokes are better. On the back of the dust jacket, the accent constellation mapped below the title is a 'new' constellation called 'the little dog,' which I would not have recognized had I not happened to read a book about star maps on the previous day. This book is published under the Borzoi imprint of Knopf, and on the back dust jacket flap the running Borzoi imprint logo is actually recreated as a constellation of a running dog. I plan on buying this book in hardcover for the jacket design.
The font is also spare and elegant.
There are only really five main characters in this book, each of whom could easily fall into the worst post-apocalyptic cliche, but none of whom do. Such a rich, full novel with such a sparse cast in such a sparse world is a fantastic achievement for a writer and is a delight for a reader.
The apocalpyse itself fits the book's narration and tone, in the way the best postapocalptic literature does: a creeping global warming, then creeping diseases; death as the mass failure of human understanding and technology at the limits of human understanding in the 21st century. But despite that, we see signs that humanity, in general, has not stopped wanting to understand.
This is a profoundly hopeful book. It is a profoundly sad book. It is about death, and being willing to kill for poetry, and powered flight, and dogs, and fly fishing. It is excellent.
Please read it.
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