Journal Entry 1 by anathema-device from Graz, Steiermark Austria on Tuesday, June 29, 2010

From the blurb:

The lives of self-styled gnostic magician Yaxley and a trio of Cambridge students become irrevocably altered by an occult ritual which shatters the barrier between reality and a fables sensuous realm known as "the Pleroma". Years later the participants, now disillusioned, middle-aged intellectuals, find themselves incapable of remembering what, exactly, transpired on that fateful midsummer night. All are troubled by strange hallucinations: epileptic Pam Stuyvesant is menaced by visions of a copulating pair of apparitions, a dwarfish creature torments her estranged husband Lucas Medlar, Yaxley becomes increasingly obsessed with a terrifying transcendent reality, and the novel's enigmatic narrator, seemingly the least affected member of the group, is haunted by the smell of roses.

Consuming personal mythology, sexuality, and fear collide with hallucinogenic intensity in M. John Harrison's dense, savoured prose and intoxicating, complex storytelling.

TBR!! 

Journal Entry 2 by anathema-device at Graz, Steiermark Austria on Friday, July 23, 2010

This JE is so hard to write...
Nothing could have prepared me for this book. It was such a disturbing read. I can't really put it into words...

Judging from the blurb I would have thought this was going to be a bit like Solaris by Stanislaw Lem.
Well, no, not at all.
It's a dreamlike story about a bunch of very lonely people who don't seem to really communicate. Something has happened, a long time ago, but that's not really what this book is about. It's a mysterious, kind of metaphysical story, and reading it felt almost delirious, even when it was about small, everyday things. The things that were left out, alluded to, or searched for by the main characters reminded me a bit of VALIS by Philip K. Dick, and the things that were told after all reminded me a bit of the secondary world of „Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“ by Jorge Luis Borges. But in the end it turned out to be something very different, very hard to grasp, and still utterly compelling. Something Weird. I liked this book a lot, but all I can say is that reading it was kind of painful, and my feelings about it are even harder to describe or explain. I think it won't let me go that easily.

**** Permanent Collection ****
If Sandwood wants to read it, she can borrow it anytime. 

Journal Entry 3 by anathema-device at Innsbruck, Tirol Austria on Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Released 1 yr ago (9/1/2010 UTC) at Innsbruck, Tirol Austria

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

This book will spend some time with Sandwood now, whom I will hopefully meet for a couple of beers while I'm visiting my relatives in Innsbruck. I hope you will find it as fascinating as I did, even though it is really disturbing at times. 

Journal Entry 4 by Sandwood at Innsbruck, Tirol Austria on Thursday, September 02, 2010

Yay for friends and beer and books! <3

I'm really looking forward to reading this novel, both the description on the book's back cover and anathema-device's journal entry make it sound very intriguing. It'll probably be a while till I'll be able to actually tackle it, though. Judging from the other M. John Harrison book I read last year it probably won't be a quick or easy read, so I'm saving it for later when I'll have more spare time.

Right now, after re-reading the previous journal entries, a few (rather free) associations spring to mind. One of them is the author Gene Wolfe's take on first-person perspective: "Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators."
It'll be interesting to see whether the novel is anything even remotely similar to the ideas, quotes and other books my mind keeps coming up with right now.