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Title	:	La Medusa
Author	:	Vanessa Place
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 488 pages
Published	:	August 10th 2008 by Fiction Collective 2
Categories	:	Fiction. Novels. Literature

La Medusa

Vanessa Place

Paperback | Pages: 488 pages

Rating: 4.03 | 86 Users | 20 Reviews

Description Toward Books La Medusa

La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a brain—a modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions.

Vanessa Place’s characters—a trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others—are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.


"Is the brain all these little movies, one synapsing into the next? Or I mean is culture that? Who are all those people on the freeway next to me, or dying in the blink of an eye when I forget about them. Vanessa Place's La Medusa is a novel of a million (I am sure there is a more precise count) brilliant suggestions about the mind and time and us. What seems impossible is that she is pulling "it" off in this impressive tome that moves like traffic when you have gotten it impossibly incredibly light. No wrong moves here. We get home fast." —Eileen Myles


"Dazzling and daze-inducing, Vanessa Place dares to ask the dangerous question: What happened to Modernism? Why did what was ambitious, difficult, serious and experimental in Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Beckett give way to a glittering string of infinite jests - high-wire acts, virtuosity, transcendental Camp? La Medusa returns to James Joyce's Ulysees to find the inspiration for an investigation into the nature of experience. Los Angeles takes the role of Dublin. The brain and its double cortex generate the stylistic intricacies that the organs and senses do in Joyce. And this is above all a Female Epic in which the swirling city-universe is explored and shaped by the petrifying eye and intellect of the wily Medusa, her coiling locks extending everywhere. "
—Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW Public Radio


"La Medusa, Vanessa Place's monumental polyvalent, polyglot epic novel of Los Angeles in which the postmodern morphs into random-access postcontemporary, in which the device of the narrative text in film script form has replaced that of the epistolary novel, is like a shocking rock slide of polished stones of the first water, cut by master jeweler, faceted into ten thousand-and-one sides — and the whole spill run in relative slow motion with no drag, no yawns, all be-bop, hip-hop Now. And sardonic: it zaps, out Fante-ing Fante and out-Rechy-ing Rechy. Looked at metaphorically in terms of motion pictures, Medusa is an epic silent, as long as Von Stroheim's Greed and every bit as cumulatively powerful. But one thing is certain: no matter how good the picture may turn out to be, the book will definitely have been better." —James McCourt

Point Books In Pursuance Of La Medusa

Original Title:	La Medusa
ISBN:	1573661457 (ISBN13: 9781573661454)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Out Of Books La Medusa

Ratings: 4.03 From 86 Users | 20 Reviews

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Thanks to friend Jonathan for the recommendation of this fantastic book. Hes got some image examples in his review of some of the structural experimentation at work in the text. But, as he notes, there is a great deal of the book that is more typographically conservative. Thankfully the book itself is not content to only be an exercise in textual weirdness, and is, instead, amazing for a whole host of different reasons.Mythology and MythificationIf youre going to write about myth both ancient,

Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press/Random House. Information As Material

"Damn, Girl, What's Up with Those Snakes?" One sure way to get me to read a novel is to divide it into chunks named after parts of the brain. This wild assortment of multivocal narratives is sectioned into brainy bits and cranial curves, each named after a portion of the nervous system's HQ and attendant psycho-biological offices, with the exception of the final chapter, dubbed Noumenon, which, unlike the others, does not show itself in an MRI, resists mapping, is more of a thing in itself, and

oh my oh dear, Vanessa Place. James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy birthed a child and raised her in LA (split custody, half in the sewers and half in Beverly Hills, though she could never tell which was which), where she was nursed on Dresden Dolls and T.S. Eliot. LA has no center or maybe it does and the book is the same. But if forced to say an uncenter I'd say: All is War and still there's beauty, and no one's saying whether that makes it better or worse. I'd get lost in the stories -- are they

A bit sad to let this one go, but there are so many other books I'd rather be reading. Still not quite sure what exactly failed to click. Might write some thoughts down later.

Radical, beautiful interconnectivity and obscure correlation.This mega-novel of de-centralized consciousness, the collective consciousness and polyphony of voices of a city without borders, is a monolithic construction, but not a seamless or impenetrable one. Instead, it's a kind of open structure bleeding out in every simultaneous direction, each bit an access point, if possibly a mysterious one. The bindings barely contain it, as I said with Infinite Jest, it seems to be continue infinitely

I gave up on this book, and I'm really sad about it. It's 488 pages long (I know Goodreads says it has over 600, but I double-checked), I'm halfway through, and I still have no sense of plot or direction, so all I keep thinking about are all the other books that I want to read. The writing is BEAUTIFUL, but the alternating characters tend to be static in their actions. Dr. Bowles will come back repeatedly, always in his car, thinking. Myles P and Stella have stopped in Needles, CA, and for