The Dream Master

This has sat on my shelf for awhile, because although I'm a huge Zelazny fan, I didn't much like the short story that this novel is based on ("He Who Shapes"). It's not that it isn't an interesting premise (it is), or that the prose is pedestrian (it isn't, although I wouldn't say that this is one of Zelazny's better written works), it's mostly that the characters are forceful people without being that interesting. Render, the protagonist, is a condescending asshole, and Eileen Shallot, the other major character, isn't all that sketched out; she's blind, she's strong-willed, she's a doctor.

The premise of the novel is at least interesting -- Render is a neuroparticipant therapist, one who can guide a patient's dreams using a specialized device (called the egg, and descriptions of it echo a return to the womb). Eileen Shallot is training as a psychiatrist, and would like to be a neuroparticipant as well, but due to her blindness, she'd need to become acclimated to sight. She seeks out Render, a leader in the field, in order to become acclimated. After some reluctance (and despite the warnings of his colleagues), he accepts. (It doesn't hurt that she's apparently quite attractive). Everything progresses apace, until we get a confrontation that forces the ending sequence -- which is the most interesting rendering in the novel, even if it feels forced and inconsistent.

Unfortunately, we don't get too many sessions where Render is shaping dreams -- there's a sequence in the beginning, to introduce the technique, and one where Render is recalling a past experience. The sessions with Eileen consist of him accustoming her to colors, landscapes, textures, their surroundings, et cetera. The ending sequence is certainly something, however, and arguably pays the whole technique off.

I suppose my biggest issue with The Dream Master is that Zelazny is trying to write something with echoes of the Greek -- here's a great man brought down by a tragic flaw. But Render doesn't approach greatness (brilliance, yes, but not greatness), and barely manages to rise to likeable. So while his tragic flaw may be arrogance, he's not lacking others, and that's just one reason this is unsatisfying.

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is like nothing I'd ever read before, and probably like nothing I'll ever read again. Pessoa was a flaneur (the short way to define this is "street walker", but that's not feasible, for obvious reasons. It means a cultured observer, who strolls throughout a city) in Lisbon during the first 30someodd years of the 20th century, but this book isn't quite what would be expected. Rather than a record of the various characters one encounters while walking, the bustle of the markets, the crowds in squares, public transport, the views and buildings, this is a diary of an inner life, slightly informed by these scenes.

Pessoa's dreamy, expansive work is divided into nearly 500 fragments, and nearly fifty short essays. A few are so short as to be aphorisms, but none stretch more than a few pages. This makes the book easy to swallow, but difficult to digest. It took me at least a month and a half to finish this, and I doubt I fully absorbed it all. Due to its structure, this isn't a book to read straight through a second time, and perhaps not even the first. Perhaps I'll build a randomizer to pick a passage.

Pessoa spends a lot of time dwelling on tedium and withdrawal from life, on how to experience reality, on how the weather, or the scenery, or a chance encounter makes him feel. Or not so much feel, as how these stimuli set his thoughts in a certain direction. It's a different way to think, that I think we'd all do well to delve into.