#trace italian

[fearlessandthoreau-blog]

I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

[theonlysentencethatmatters]

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die

Wolf in White Van:  A Novel by John Darnielle

[anziesprevioustankrelatedfantasy]

“You hungry?” Finn asked. He'd been raised a good Irish lad, you had to be hospitable, even to fucking Trace wankers with fuckoff giant swords

[writer-itd]

WOLF IN WHITE VAN by John Darnielle (Review)

WOLF IN WHITE VAN by John Darnielle (Review)

207 Pages

This is another one of those reads that’s been on my TBR for awhile, so while in NYC, I managed to pick it up at The Strand and read it almost entirely between train rides!

Here we go.

Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to explore. As the creator of “Trace Italian”-a text-based role-playing game that’s played…

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[lifeimitatesblart]

I havent posted this yet here, but I’m really proud of it. Enjoy it, friends.

[worldcylinder]

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

[worldcylinder]

trace italienne - "star fort"

[dudeinpublishing-blog]

THE DUDE READS #4: WOLF IN WHITE VAN

John Darnielle can’t shut up, and that’s a good thing.

I listened to one Mountain Goats album closely, which is “All Hail West Texas” - for those who haven’t had the pleasure, it’s one of his press-record-on-a-boombox albums where he wraps short stories into verse/chorus over solo acoustic guitar - the last one he recorded on his boombox, in fact, and I’d wager that it’s a piece of equipment that for LD/MGs fans has the legend and weight of Van Halen’s Frankenstrat, or Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. “All Hail West Texas” was suggested to me by someone who gladly wasted a couple years on me, as did I her; the album has not stuck nearly as much as the others she pressed on me, but I’m always reminded of the commute into my shitty retail job, taking the bus to the subway, listening to songs where even the tape hiss sounded plaintive.

But here’s the thing about this book; clearly you don’t have to like JD’s music or even know it exists to enjoy it, or to recognize the skill in its construction, pacing, and full-on weirdness. If this was “debut novelist John Darnielle” (which some reviews claim is true, and then someone’s all “uhhh he wrote a 33 1/3 book which was basically a novella” and to that I say anyone who gets the chance to write a 33 and 1/3 book and comes back with fiction can deal with being called a debut novelist a few years later), this would be just as menacing, uneasy, and fluid of a novel. Its surface is smooth as glass but it curves in so many strange directions like an avant-garde opera hall facade - finely tuned and fussed-over prose, a character whose regular plunges down the memory hole and laps run through his own thoughts are perfectly contextualized (he’s a scarred recluse who spends his day writing letters and turning emotions over in the rock polisher of his skull) and an effectively rendered portrait of childhood unhappiness and instability that may not mirror JD’s but certainly carries the same gear. It’s hard not to read this as a young JD, lying alone in his room, sweating and uneasy, finding fixed points in sword & sorcery and in-skull adventures.

Sean, in the meanwhile, is a bit of a cypher - which is a functional device because Sean has had a life of interiors; actions playing out through barriers, distance, and remove, despite any claims that Sean makes to a life of inner vividness. And vivid it is - the analog MMORPG that Sean uses as both a source of income and a reason for continued existence, a social network with plenty of safe distance between him and others in which the goal is the journey, not the (unreachable) destination. The game, Trace Italian, is played through the mail - players are given context and options, and they then make “moves”, which they send to Sean, who responds with more context and directions, etc - and this pursuit, no matter how implausible, is so finely described and so compassionately constructed that the question becomes: does Sean run Trace Italian because he’s a recluse, or is he a recluse so he can write Trace Italian? And why is he all scarred?

To go to into detail about this book’s plot would not be hard, because in truth only a few things actually Happen to Sean, the narrator. This book concerns itself more with the why, not the how, and the jumble of memories and flashbacks and significances takes on a horrifying dream logic as we further understand why Sean’s disfigured, and why he dealt with the aftermath as he did. So my view is that as a self-contained, ornately crafted box of a book, WIWV unquestionably succeeds. It is not large, or overly ambitious, or concerned with much beyond Sean’s unique brand of solipsism - but it doesn’t need to be, as JD has never been someone to do The Expected Thing, or even The Trademark Thing. Ss an extension of JD’s refusal to sacrifice nuance for effect, the book handles itself as admirably as any of his many, many hyperliterate song lyrics. I would warn anyone looking for a satisfying narrative to not approach this book as such. It’s a literary automat of constant low-band loneliness, eerie resignation, truncated sadness and ennui that ends on a textual knife-twist. Do not expect to walk out of this book with a full and balanced heart.