Mumbo Jumbo.

Oh God. That's all I can say at this point. I finished the first nine chapters, a short, but tightly packed section, of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo today. I could tell from the beginning that this book was going to be a trip.

It is basically the definition of postmodernist. Anything that you could list as being something postmodernist is in this book. It is a literary collage. Instead of writing out numbers like "one," reed puts the actual number. Even when it's not in reference to a numeric value. Even the pronoun "one" is abbreviated as "1". There are random pictures and illustrations throughout the chapters, and the first chapter comes before the title page. As far as novel-writing conventions go, this book follows almost none of them.

However, I kind of like this. It's not the conscious decision to disregard conventions that I like, it's the result of that disregard. The text reminds me of prose poetry in the way that it has a strong flow and isn't necessarily grammatically correct. The way that the words sound is more important than keeping to a form, and it ends up sounding, at least to me, like a stream of consciousness.

I really like reading this style, and I especially like writing in it. I like how you can randomly add short sentences to mimic the style of your thoughts, and just write for the emotion and the meaning, not necessarily for comprehension, or grammar. This is a little surprising, even to myself, that I would like this kind of writing, because I'm usually a stickler for grammar and actually really love grammar, but somehow the prose poetry / stream of consciousness style really works for me. 

So, I think I'm going to really like this book. Really. Because it's neat. Cool. Crazy and confusing but that's okay because it evokes the emotion that it wants to and doesn't care if you understand what's going on. It's going to pack an ocean-load of information into one paragraph and if you get it cool if you don't then you just have to catch up. Catch up to the scene that's crashing down around itself in descriptions of the characters and the chaos of the world I'm not entirely sure is our own. But it's okay. At least it still goes from left to right across the page.