![]() ![]() Not because it is not good enough, but rather because it is too good. ![]() It’s amazing.How this book got published is a complete mystery to me. A remarkable novelmagical, sweeping, epic, and monstrous. It’s more like Howl translated into Latin and then back again. This is not The Da Vinci Code for intellectuals. ![]() It doesn’t even supply the answers to most of its own questions. Ten, nine, eight pages from the end, one still hopes, but this book does not contain any of the answers offered by The Secret History of the World. Its main lesson, that 'the reader, not the poet, is the alchemist,' is a hard one to apply. What does one find in the depths? Nothing? Everything? A bit of both? The book - in the end long, frustrating and slow - becomes a mirror, perhaps inscribed, as are several mirrors in this text, with the words 'this is the face of god you see.' But what that actually means is anyone’s guess. It’s a book about reading, specifically depth reading, to a point of inexplicable transcendence. The Mirror Thief is, it turns out, essentially a book about hermeneutics and disappointment. ![]()
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