A stringy clingy shadow follows you into this reading (audiobook narration is fab). It was a weird, surreal experience, but the allegory was poignant; this is what it is to grow up feeling unloved by a world where your face and presence is hated, envied, suspected, mistrusted— and you can’t change the perspective of the fools and the uninformed, yet you still need to test everything to see where you might find that depth of feeling you crave. Of course, such depth can only be found in true love and freedom—but where is such stuff available? 

 

Ah, well, here it possibly is—at least, is promised to exist: tucked among us in a hidden alternate reality that zings with power you’d love to wield in the real world. If only. But this University lies somewhere between the physical states of that so-called united America, with students fighting the same proverbial fight they’ve been battling for (we can say) centuries (now)—and in this alternate American reality, it’s ugly, bloody, stark (which sounds a lot like the real world), but on the page, the  academics rise victorious. Somewhat. 

 

And there comes a distant whispered echo of shimmering gratification at the end of this phantasmagorical narrative. 

 

This took a lot to get into, and the three-fifths chunk in the middle was middling, sometimes confused, verging on not-so-poetically repetitive, but then the last fifth of the narrative is a fast-paced spiral to the finish (best part of the book, but you can’t just skip to the end or you’d miss the tar-thick content that develops context for the slippery road to the finish).