Delirium: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Intricate and fascinating
Review: DELIRIUM is an engrossing, cerebral exploration of the artistic urge to shape a world of order and intricacy. Douglas Cooper juxtaposes a crystalline purity of ideals with archetypal baseness--lust, greed, and murderous desires--in ways that seem both inventive and authentic.

The structure of the novel is beautiful and complex; through meticulous craft Cooper lures and ensnares readers in the story's web with elegance and confidence.

DELIRIUM is a fascinating book. Its plot and structure offer a challenge to intelligent readers who enjoy losing themselves in a highly symbolic, beautifully terrifying world of ideas.

Rating:
Summary: A Major Accomplishment
Review: Having read Cooper's first novel, I find he quickly ensnares us in his dream-like world. While the telling of at least four sub-plots at once is interesting, it is also slightly tiring to follow, and not all the stories are equally engrossing. He always manages to tie up the pieces at the end and it is like a balancing act to try to guess how it will happen. I like his style immensely but wish he would stick to one story with more focus. Both AMNESIA and DELIRIUM are deeply, and uniquely felt and one feels like the reading of them is like submerging into a highly intelligent, if somewhat depressed state of mind. Looking forward to the next in the series.

Rating:
Summary: DELIRIUM is a fine febrile follow-up to AMNESIA.
Review: I find Cooper's second novel impressive on several levels. AMNESIA enthralled me with its inventive atmosphere of foreboding, its relentlessly strange signifiers, its peculiar mix of street wisdom and arcane erudition. I got distracted toward the end, some of the changes didn't feel right, although the final sprint recovers the momentum. DELIRIUM kept me going all the way through. Playing Prospero, Cooper controls the dazzling word play and the multitude of parallel tales, as his characters struggle toward identity in a contemporary yet gothic, decimated landscape. Since this is an installment in a series it might be too early to call major themes, but this book raises the questions about dynamic levels of prostitution and just what requires redemption. What could possibly be more pertinent to our time? The primary joke here is that a sort of universal evil emanates from a Philip Johnson/van der Rohe-like architect, the consummate whore, strewing his pernicious monoliths across the globe. On the simplest plane there's a chase going on, leading to a classic comeuppance, but Cooper makes it mean much more - he takes his time and he cares about the ghosts which are haunting him here. I like this odd book a lot and look forward its successors.

Rating:
Summary: A Major Accomplishment
Review: Many of us were concerned that Douglas Cooper would never complete a second novel, that the critical success of Amnesia would terrify him into silence. Certainly it took a long time for this book to appear. Thankfully, it in no way suggests a diminishment in craft: while perhaps a touch more difficult than Amnesia, and less rigorously structured, I think it represents a leap in technique and emotional nuance. The prose is, if anything, even more finely tuned. Cooper has a poet's ear, and it is continuing to develop.

I suspect that anyone who reads this book with care, and I stress _with care_, will find Cooper as rewarding as any novelist working today on this side of the Atlantic. Literary fiction here is a dying pursuit, and cleverness tends to be valued over depth, so it is not surprising that Douglas Cooper appeals mostly to a cult of devoted readers. The devotion, however, is fierce, and it frankly causes me pain to see remarks like those of the two "critics" below.

One of them cannot spell "Delirium," and nevertheless feels competent to judge this complex book on the basis of the first 77 pages; the other, while slightly more intelligent, has the author confused with Dennis Cooper -- an interesting writer, by the way, but the two could not be less alike. This second reader has somehow concluded that "Delirium... is about trendy lauding of architecture." Has she even _read_ this book? Delirium is nothing if not a thorough condemnation of recent architectural trends -- a critique that is, in fact, the major theme of the novel. Enough of this, however; clearly the other readers (including, apparently, a girl not yet out of high school) are capable of giving this ambitious work the attention that it deserves.

Douglas Cooper is a stylist and thinker -- a metaphysical novelist -- and his work is the latest link in a great chain stretching from Kafka and Borges down to Calvino and Danilo Kis. Will everyone enjoy this book? Clearly not. Nevertheless, I predict that Cooper's writing will gather a growing audience as the ordinary reader learns to read in new ways. For now it is enough that his books are kept alive by architects, critics and professors, and the occasional high school student wise beyond her years.