Empty Your Heart Of Its Mortal Dream

Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

Jeff VanderMeer recently recommended Cyclonopedia, who had it brought to his attention by China Mieville and having read it I have to admit it is an incredibly unique and quite brilliant effort. It is difficult to know where to even begin with Reza Negarestani’s novel, even the word novel seems somehow incorrect, it resembles more a fictional treatise on the Middle East, addressing everything from archaeology, history and philosophy to linguistics, numerology, the war on terror and the occult. Discovered in a hotel room by a woman who had travelled to Istanbul to meet a contact who never showed, the manuscript purports to have been written by Negarestani and centres on the radical theories of missing Iranian architect Dr. Hamid Parsani. Parsani, leprous and lovesick, is either a genius or quite insane, the smart money being on that he is probably both, and as Negarestani extrapolates his theories, we see that their logical conclusions lead to something horrific.

I can’t even begin to describe those theories here, there are far too many of them and they are far too complex. I’m not even sure I understood half of what Parsani was arguing, and the half that I did understand needs to be unpacked and meditated upon before I can reach any conclusions myself. The language is academic and dense and the author at times seems purposely ambiguous, contributing to a growing sense of inauthenticity about the whole thing. Despite this, Negarestani’s ideas are compelling as they are so far out there. The Middle East as a sentient being, petropolitics as oil both drives and fuels the Techno-Capitalist war machine, oil as a blob like sentient deity, the idea of desert being the ultimate levelled environment, war between the Earth’s Chthonic core and the sun and putrefaction as a mode of creation; these are just some of the theories put forward by Parsani and unpacked and expanded on by the fictional Negarestani. The end result of all this, via ()hole theory, is openness which allows the Outside to get in, equated to the Lovecraftian Elder Gods. The terrifying thing about this kind of openness, butchering from within, is the more one tries to ward it off, the more open one becomes.   

As a book, Cyclonopedia is impossible to pin down. It reads like Aristotle by way of Heidegger, Lovecraft, Crowley, and Chomsky to name a few. It encompasses numerous disciplines from the esoteric in numerology, demonology and Kabbalah to the more concrete in history, archaeology, physics and economics. He discusses Koontz’s Phantoms, The Thing, and quotes McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The first read feels like a surface read, a mild skirmish to scout out the battlefield before hand, next time (and there will be a next time) it will be read slower with notes and secondary research. The countless multiple layers and the numerous idea threads make this a book perfect for rereading as it seems every new read will reveal something you missed before. Some people will hate this novel as it has no characters or plot in the traditional sense and the language is complex and somewhat dry at times, but those interested in epistemology will find something to love here. Without a doubt one of the more unique and interesting novels of the last decade, there simply is nothing like Cyclonopedia. What is it ultimately about? Love I suppose, but for that to make sense, you’ll have to find out yourself. Infectious, it’ll bore into your skull and leave nothing behind but the holes and naphtha. Read it at your peril.