Wednesday, August 21, 2013

AZTECHS by LUCIUS SHEPARD SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

AZTECHS by Lucius Shepard

SUMMARY
The main character of this book is named Eddie Poe, and he is 24.  His father used to campaign for Mexican labor rights, but was shut down by corporate thugs who vowed to kill him if he spoke out, so Eddie's father continued working at the Sony plant where he was employed until he became too ill to continue, at which point he retired.  Eddie's mother is dead.  At the time of the story, his father sits around the house, speaking to her ghost, and doing drugs.  Eddie gives his father some blue pills to shut him up and goes out to a meeting for the security business Eddie owns himself.
Eddie's favorite place to hang out is at a futuristic bar on the border of Mexico, where the electric fence that bisects the bar is deactivated through a government loophole for a short window at various intervals.  The crime rates and culture are identical on either side of the bar.  While drinking at the bar, Eddie receives a call on his futuristic iPad-like device, and receives a resume from a man addressing him through video chat.  After being assured that the applicant is a cold killer, Eddie hangs up.  His security company has been assigned to deliver a man safely to the 'Aztechs' sculpture deep in the desert, so that he can negotiate with a crime family called the Carbonells.
Later on, Eddie picks up the man he is supposed to protect, Zee, in a bulletproof truck, with his new partner, Childers, and a reporter, Lupe.  They drive out into the desert.  Zee is the spokesman for a company called 'Aztechs' that has a building out in the desert of a face that is identical to Zee, with TV screens for eyes.  When they reach the sculpture, Zee poses by his statue building, and Lupe photographs, and interviews him for the camera.  Then, they go to the Carbonell family's militarized compound.  The group is allowed access, and they enter a banquet hall where the Carbonells are prepared to meet Zee.  Zee proposes the formation of a border state which will give the Carbonells monopoly on the drug trade with America.  Insulted by the offer, the Carbonells become upset and Eddie decides to pack up his group and move out.  Just then, a team of gunmen kick down the door and begin shooting, and Eddie and his group jump back into their armored car, and speed away into the desert with Childers at the wheel.  Childers begins smashing through houses in his way, and detonates a bomb in the Carbonells' courtyard, killing everyone inside of the compound.  Shocked, Eddie tells him to stop, and draws his gun on Childers.  Childers takes his gun away and keeps driving.
Eventually, they stop the car, and Childers gets out.  Zee professes his faith in God, and collapses, and Dennard and Childers carry him on a stretcher across the desert.  They stop again to rest, and Childers informs Eddie that it's his turn to carry the stretcher.  Eddie says he can't make it, and Childers gives him drugs, and Lupe, the reporter, tells Eddie that she loves him.  After a few more stops, they enter a native Mexican village where the Indians wear white robes.  There, Eddie and Lupe are greeted hospitably and have sex in the dirt path at night while being watched.  Childers says that everyone is like an ant and his boss is just stirring up the ant hill, which is needed.  The next day they come to a pyramid and Eddie tries to escape, but is beaten badly by Childers, who is about to kill him when a mysterious machine that has been following them through the desert kills Childers, sending shocks rippling through his body.
The machine takes Eddie and Lupe into the pyramid, where they embrace their newfound relationship.  A strobe light shuts Eddie's mind off, and back on in front of the armored car, where the rest of his crew is waiting.  They drive back into town and have a party.

ANALYSIS
This novel has many dystopian elements.  First off, Eddie says there is no difference between the towns on either side of the border, and that the gate is mainly ceremonial.  He thinks that the hallucinogenic drugs running rampant in the desert have everyone too stoned to rebel against the corrupt authorities responsible for putting up the false divisions, and that they are distracting the people from the destruction of their culture and the replacement of Mexico with another state of America.  This could symbolize the way mass media and corporations use arbitrary lines to oppress Mexican people, by paying illegal immigrants less, and keeping all the good-paying jobs in America.
Ironically, another arbitrary line, which divides white Hispanic from other white people in American culture, clouds the true history of Mexico.  Before the Spanish colonized Mexico, all of the people living there were Native Americans.  Now, many people living in Mexico are mixed-race, and whiter people are associated with the colonists who corrupted Mexican culture.  The main character is one of these whiter people.  This explains his separation from Mexican culture, and the life-changing experience of being switched off, and then switched on again, seeing the world anew.  He realizes that his father's activism, which he once thought stupid, was in attempt to save Mexico from becoming a zombie-like supplier of drugs and cheap goods to the United States.  As the people in Aztechs are highly advanced with regards to technology and business practice, the elements holding back the evolution of Mexican culture are crime and racism imparted through the mass media.


  • man who runs a security company gets a new contract
  • he and a partner go to a militarized compound with the employers and they are attacked
  • his partner goes rogue as they escape
  • they take the employer to an indian village with a magical pyramid
  • a machine that has been following the party kills the rogue operative, and transports the rest of the people into the pyramid
  • the main character awakens at the end of a successful mission

Shepard, Lucius. Aztechs. Burton, MI: Subterranean, 2003. Print.
Book about appreciating one's father and the forces working against Mexico.
NOTE
Understand that this may not be a perfect analysis.  I'm not Mexican, so my lack of personal investment and knowledge in the subject may detract from my ability to give a good analysis.  Quit bitching, I'm doing this for free.  Read it or don't read it, care or don't care.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

THE KANGAROO NOTEBOOK by KOBO ABE SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

THE KANGAROO NOTEBOOK by KOBO ABE

SUMMARY
Kangaroo notebook starts out with a man, living in Japan, presumably, who develops an interesting infection of radish sprouts growing on his body.  He's like a slow-developing werewolf, essentially, so he heads over to the clinic, where they tell him to wait in line, and stop exaggerating his condition, because they don't believe it.  In the waiting room are many children who are having their innocence ruined by a crude nurse.
Anyway, once the main character gets in to see the doctor, the doctor flips his shit and orders a bunch of test, but in the meanwhile tells the guy to get in the hospital bed.  He is prescribed treatment in Hell Springs valley.  At this juncture in the novel, the hospital bed begins moving on its own free will, and he wakes up, being questioned by a rude guard.  The guard tells him he's addressed like a package, and that he should be going to Hell Springs valley.  Off the bed flies down the street, as he veers off into the night.  A river passageway blocking his path reveals a kangaroo that rises out of the water.
Eventually, he arrives at the valley, where he sees demon children singing that they want to be helped by the friendly staff.  He, too, wants to be helped, so he joins in.  While he is there, he finds the image of one demon girl particularly haunting.
The bed whisks him about, and he ends up at the house of an adult woman, who rescues him from a hospital where he won't find any good treatment.  She instructs him to sit on a kangaroo fur by the door, so that he doesn't get any of his sickness in her house.  He eats with her and her husband, observing their life, and realizes that she is unhappy.  The mail service is bad, and she doesn't want to be a part of the vampire society any more.  In the society where all of this is occurring, many euthanasia possibilities are available to elderly people, including the karate service run by the nurse's husband that doubles as a euthanasia clinic.
After leaving the nurse, he ends up at an old folk's home.  There is a native Japanese man there, a man in a wheelchair, and a man with a neck brace.  Students come to the old folks' home, smuggling in extra food and drugs while they wait there to die.  While there, the main character witnesses a young boy euthanize an old man with a drugged cloth, and stays with the haunted child as the boy comes to grips with what he has done.  The man does not want to wait around.  He asks the boy to sneak him out of the old folks' home, and they leave through an unheated vent, where the narrator ends up in a whirlwind on the beach.
He goes over the pornographic picture he keeps with him, and realizes that the girl in the photo, the vampire nurse, and the demon child, are all the same person.  Suddenly, the bed transports him to be with the girl in the photo as she puts on makeup, trying to lure a kidnapper into her home to take her away from her misery.  She explains that the kidnappers lost interest in children, so children now pursue kidnappers.  Finally, the old man dies.

ANALYSIS
Kobo Abe asks the question in the book, 'what is the meaning of life?'  Apparently, he doesn't know, which means that he's humble.  Seems like an OK guy.  Too bad he's dead.  I digress, I liked his book because it implied that we are like kangaroos.  We carry children in our pouch as we bound about in lives of sin.  By exposing children to our flaws, we are carrying them with us towards hell by influencing them, awhile none of us truly know where we are going but are absolutely positive that we don't want to wait to get there.  Humans have an internal need for bad things to happen to them, he asserts.  We seek constant pleasure in our lives.  By living in such an impersonal, go-go world, we have lost touch with our true humanity.  In order to reclaim this, we must yearn for some sort of spiritual guidance and question the world around us, instead of letting ourselves be zipped around by a magical hospital bed, by our parents, older brothers, friends, or by lust.  The narrator connected with his roots, pardon the pun, as he became overran by a plant, and came to grips with the errors of his society.  He then died.  Yippee.

  • man has strange disease of vegetation growing on his body, goes to hospital his hospital bed takes him to hell his bed takes him to a home for people waiting to be euthanized 
  • he sneaks out of the euthanasia home with a child 
  • the bed whisks him back to the hospital where he speaks to his nurse one last time before dying 

SOURCE
Abe, Kobo.  The Kangaroo Notebook: A Novel.  New York.  Knopf, 1996.  Print.
About a guy in a magical hospital bed that whisks him off to hell.