I finished Jerusalem almost three years after I started reading it back in November of 2016, when it was originally published. Let me just state from the start that the reason for this is because I now live a complex, multi-tasking life balancing my full-time job at the U Hospital + my family responsibilities as a husband to my beautiful and accommodating wife and father of our rapidly growing six year old boy. This leaves precious few windows of opportunity to sit and lose myself in any book, much less the massive, sprawling magnum opus from the Warlock of Northampton. Another reason it took me so long is because I am not a speed-reader, and I certainly don't skim when I'm absorbed in a good novel. In fact, sometimes I find myself having to necessarily re-read certain paragraphs and portions of any challenging text, and this novel was no exception. To say I lost myself within the over twelve-hundred page wordscape would be both an understatement and a glossing over the fact that I also re-discovered a part of myself, which is to say I allowed the characteristic mycelium of Alan's language to delve its molecular chain of networked associations--that is to say, its individual tendrils--into my consciousness without tensing up in the least, the way I do when receiving a flu vaccination, in total relaxation so as not to feel any pain. Thus inoculated I now sit back and marvel over the breadth and depth of just what the book managed to transfer into me.
The majority of the three year period in which it took me to absorb the contents of this magnificent evocative literary work were spent with it tossed aside, waiting for me to pick it back up so I could move the bookmark forward an x-amount of pages. I did, at one time, take the opportunity to read aloud portions of it to my wife. In particular, I did so with chapter 25--Around the Bend--the infamous Lucia Joyce chapter written in Alan's own invented, surrealist language. I must say that in so doing, to hear these passages articulated out loud served to better clarify and bring to the surface a lot of their intended meaning, and to my satisfied astonishment proved to rank among some of the most hilarious black comedy I've ever had the pleasure to absorb. But for the majority of the book, I read it to myself in silence as the tessellated text unfolded in beautiful mosaic imagery before my more often than not astonished eyes. Of course the novel itself remains a microcosm of not just Northampton in all its disheveled and pristine glory, but serves as a holographic jigsaw puzzle piece, which is to say a fractal of the whole of not just our world but of the enigmatic and eternal universe of which we're all just microscopic parts caught up in its grand scheme of continuous evolution.
(to be cont.-(?))--*
