ashwednesday

Words don’t always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, say things they don’t believe. But connection, with ourselves and others, is the only way we can live.

I’m half tempted to recommend this to all my friends right now. Just to see how far they would get before calling it quits. 

Word Exchange had a compelling story, one that keeps you going in the hopes that things will start to make sense. And it did… after a while. For a time I started to understand why Graedon chose to tell the story the way she did and it was pretty clever, though admittedly challenging to wade through. There’s an element of subtle commentary, and by extension relatability, within the speculative, peridystopic setting that makes you stop questioning this book’s ambition and wonder how close is the future this is selling? But somewhere past the halfway mark, it started to collapse in itself. Doubts resurfaced, sympathy for the characters slipped further and the themes this was trying to highlight became too obscure for me to keep track of.

The book is told from the alternating first person POVs of Anana and Bart/Horace, employees of the NADEL (i.e. the North American Dictionary of the English Language), the last known printed Dictionary. The books is basically both characters’ journal entries in recollecting the series of events that led them to an obscure present time where certain details of their whereabouts are withheld from the reader (and revealed only at the end). The only thing that is disclosed is that the world has been infected by a “word flu”, a virus that has led to the decay of the English language, through man’s absolute dependence on technology.

It all starts with Douglas Johnson, Ana’s father and the editor of the Dictionary, disappearing under suspicious circumstances, a few weeks before the release of the new edition of the NADEL. Entailing the help of the logophile haplessly in love with her, Ana follows a trail of clues in the search for Doug which led her to uncover a bigger technological conspiracy that can very well cost the not-so-innocent lives of thousands and the slow painful death of civilization.

This was a pretty smart book. The kind that would impress anyone, mostly because it reads like a thesarus threw up all over the place, but also because it took a different spin to the whole man-enslaves-technology-enslaves-man discussion. The Word Exchange tugs at a different loose thread in our willingness to cede our freedom to think in exchange for convenience. I don't really think I'm contributing to a possible apocalyptic scenario when I use my iPhone to google the meaning of "ersatz" or when I wiki 2 Girls 1 Cup, but this book explores that scenario. A little too ambitious seeing as it tries to bridge hardware, software and, holy shit, people dying out of incoherent speech.

Wait, what?

That was a big impediment to my overall opinion of this book. I couldn't fully fathom the gravity of the situation. I appreciate the effort to make the idea of Word Flu plausible, the research was pretty impressive dabbling into virology and genetics. But I felt this fell short into illustrating the actual application of all that theory into something that is relatable enough to elicit any emotion. Initially, I imagined a Babel-like scale of chaos as I tried to wrap my mind around the abstract peril of a virus that destroys language. But all that business of people infected dying from not being able to speak was a perpetual head-scratcher for me. With symptoms as non-specific as vomiting, nausea, weakness, bouts of silence and egotism... HOW EXACTLY DO YOU DIE FROM BEING INCOHERENT? Outside someone getting pissed at you and shooting you outright to shut you up? 

I mean for someone who spends a lot of time babbling nonsense (here and in real life) it was just a bit of stretch in my imagination. And leaving it as a mystery in the end was a big frustration for me. Because I'm not really THAT into language as a science so my curiosity about this story stems more from wanting to see HOW this will make me care about that Doomsday scenario. I mean, I suppose I am concerned the imminent extinction of print media in the digital age but I couldn't fully see the big horrible picture this book was intent on painting. The line from point A to point Z was blurred and wavering.

Or I might just be an irrevocably apathetic philistine.

The narrative... Oh God, how do I even begin? The chapters are recollective journal entries from Anana and Bart and I am forced to choose whose perspective I hate more between them. On one corner, there's the socially-awkward lovelorn Logophile whose thoughts went from

Ana qua Ana is, basically, flawlessness qua flawlessness, sui generis.

to (because he got infected)

They kazh not to. They've asht a lot of things. Like that you saved my life, shongot me those pills. And that it's the last night of your quarantine. That makes me very, vesmen happy. And chay their information-sharing goes both ways.

I guess it does give some verisimilitude in Bart's predicament but something about his transition from Bart at point A to Bart at point F speaks of rocks and hard places. 

Rocks, hard places and Anana apparently, because on the other corner, there's this heroine who makes it her mission to do everything humanly possible to make me want to throttle her.

✔︎Someone tells her not to use the Meme (the evil handheld device)? she uses the meme. 
✔︎ The instruction in the antiviral pill bottle says take one three times a day? She takes it twice. 
✔︎ She sees an assembly line of incoherent, sickly workers in the subbasement of the building where her father disappeared from? She tries on the creepy implant all of them are wearing. 
✔︎ Her ex-boyfriend who dumped her unceremoniously once he struck it rich, comes to her doorstep evidently sick with the mysterious virus? She lets him in.

When does it end???

She's the kind of character that you don't even understand why she's in the middle of the shitstorm, making a big drama out of it when she's basically that girl who knows the guy everyone is after. She's only important and interesting by association and serves none of the story's progression. Ana could've died in the second act and I'd probably look at this book kinder. 

I hate writing lengthy reviews because it all sounds like a long, nitpicking rant in my mind. But this just tested me in ways I didn't know I can be tested. It was a long and winding road of barely coherent techno-babble forcibly tied to philosophical musings that just went over my head. Perhaps I'm just too uncultured to appreciate what this had to offer or perhaps the very fact that I didn't understand the concept of The Word Exchange in my present incarnation says a lot about the feasibility of what this managed to imagine. After all, none of the characters anticipated these turns from happening either. And maybe that miscommunication is a different kind of success in itself. But as a work of speculative, dystopic fiction, read on a digital device for 10 hours, I think my limited imagination is going to stick with nuclear holocaust, thanks.

Sometimes talking is an act of kindness. Sometimes silence is.

Review Copy provided by the publishers for an unbiased review. Quotes are taken from an uncorrected proof and may not appear in the final edition.