Mark Z. Danielewski. (2015). The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Mark Z. Danielewski. 2015. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Mark Z. Danielewski, The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Mark Z. Danielewski. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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   • fileAs: Danielewski, Mark Z.
   • bioText: MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI was born in New York City and now lives in Los Angeles.
   • name: Mark Z. Danielewski

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The Familiar, Volume 1

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From the author of the international best seller House of Leaves and National Book Award–nominated Only Revolutions comes a monumental new novel as dazzling as it is riveting. The Familiar (Volume 1) ranges from Mexico to Southeast Asia, from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, with nine lives hanging in the balance, each called upon to make a terrifying choice. They include a therapist-in-training grappling with daughters as demanding as her patients; an ambitious East L.A. gang member contracted for violence; two scientists in Marfa, Texas, on the run from an organization powerful beyond imagining; plus a recovering addict in Singapore summoned at midnight by a desperate billionaire; and a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine might unleash consequences far exceeding the entertainment he intends. At the very heart, though, is a twelve-year-old girl named Xanther who one rainy day in May sets out with her father to get a dog, only to end up trying to save a creature as fragile as it is dangerous . . . which will change not only her life and the lives of those she has yet to encounter, but this world, too—or at least the world we think we know and the future we take for granted.
(With full-color illustrations throughout.) 
Like the print edition, this eBook contains a complex image-based layout. It is most readable on e-reading devices with larger screen sizes. 

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reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
   • content:

     "Thrilling and magnetic. . . . . The Familiar: Volume One is a boldly original, gorgeous, and suspenseful work of literature. . . . Thoroughly encoded with the language of our design-conscious, cinema-saturated, tech-centric era. We're fluent in it because we're living now."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Robert J. Wiersema, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
   • content: "A new novel by Danielewski requires a new way of reading. . . . Reading [The Familiar] . . . as one approaches the pilot to a new TV series, Volume 1 becomes a revelation, a thrilling, compulsive reading experience. . . . A tour de force, less a novel than it is an experience. . . . The next volume--episode--can't come soon enough."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Allison K. Hill, Los Angeles Daily News
   • content: "Danielewski has somehow created a format, an experience, that mimics the best of the digital future we've been told to expect, while exploiting the best of print, that which we've been told to mourn. . . . The reader is called upon to commit, to actively participate and engage in the unconventional structure and its relationship to the sprawling, eight-plot narrative, but also to enjoy: as serious as this all may seem, Volume 1 has a playfulness, a mischievousness, not unlike a cat."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Andrew Munz, Planet Jackson Hole (Wyoming)
   • content: "As our society gets more technology-weary, it's nice to see books like The Familiar: Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May break the mold and tell a story in a new and innovate way exclusive to physical pages between two covers."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "[Danielewski is] America's foremost literary Magus. . . . He transmutes the pages of base books into rare new forms and formats. . . . [The Familiar: Volume 1] is a 'remediation' of television series like Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad . . . [and also] resembles Altman-inflected movies . . . or the time and place-skipping novels of David Mitchell. . . . I'm definitely in for Volume 2."
6. • premium: False
   • source: S. Tremaine Nelson, Green Mountains Review
   • content: "Excellent. . . . It reminds you of the novel's unknowable potential. Danielewski does this better than anybody. It's like he crinkles up a page with words and then straightens it out and pastes it into the book, so that only the most important words remain legible, while teasing you to try to figure out the blurry, scarred sentences hiding in the margins. . . . I love Xanther, love her, and I can't stand the thought of something bad happening to her, and, yes, I'll keep reading this series as long as her story continues."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Zach Borenstein, Everyday eBook
   • content: "A herculean achievement. . . . The wild visuals render beautifully on an e-reader, but suggest that the medium of physical books is not entirely replaceable. This book may even have a chance to become this age's equivalent to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Danielewski's certainly not aiming any lower."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Cady Drell, Newsweek
   • content: "[Danielewski is] the most aggressively avant-garde popular writer working today. . . . The Familiar: Volume 1 is as much a narrative story as it is an experiment in visual and typographical forms. . . . It all adds up to something between a graphic novel and a novel-novel."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Jefferson Grubbs, Bustle.com
   • content: "I found it helpful to think of The Familiar as less of a 'book' in the traditional sense of the word, and more as a piece of experimental visual art. . . . If you're a House of Leaves fan like me, then this is a book you cannot miss--because there's simply nothing else like it."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Jonathan Russell Clark, LitHub.com
    • content: "The Familiar [is] Danielewski's most ambitious narrative undertaking yet, which is saying a lot. . . . More than any other contemporary writer, Danielewski has blown the door wide open on novelistic experimentation. . . . [He] has shown, emphatically, just how much formal experimentation can truly enhance a narrative experience. . . . His books are freewheeling adventures into intricate depths and wide expanses, and they've helped usher in a new era of the novel."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times
    • content: "The Familiar is performance art as well as book. . . . The Familiar will be a delight to fans of House of Leaves . . . This, like all of Danielewski's work, is a verbal structure made for puzzle solvers."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Los Angeles Magazine
    • content: "Incontestably the shortest 880-page novel you'll ever read. . . . It flies by wi
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 9, 2015
      Set mostly in the L.A. area during a rainy day in May, our first heroine in this metanarrative of typographical trickery is the precocious 12-year-old Xanther, who embarks, with her stepfather, Anwar, on a trip to get a dog—instead, they find a kitten dying in the rain and Xanther’s desperate attempts to save it are intercut with unspooling story fragments. There’s Anwar’s past as developer of a mysterious game engine, his vanished partner Mefisto, and copious hints that reality itself might be a dream or program. Other story lines include the cyberpunk adventures of two programmers in Marfa, Tex., on the run from their own creation; a dogfighter named Victor on the verge of encountering a miracle; a repentant criminal in Singapore; an ace detective named Oz—and so forth. The narratives pile on (each with its own signature font), though none of them of contain any real significance or a three-dimensional character. Danielewski’s (House of Leaves) interest is clearly not in storytelling, but in faux profundity; hence the book’s multitude of wise-sounding quotations, random punctuation, fake code, blank pages, cheap pop-cultural citations, and The Matrix–aping techno-clichés make for familiar reading indeed.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 1, 2015
      Fabulist and avant-gardist Danielewski (House of Leaves, 2000, etc.) embarks upon a long-promised 27-volume fantasia with this sprawling, continent-hopping potpourri.On its face, this first installment is the story of a girl. And rain. And a "ridiculous dog bed." And a cat. And then the whole of human civilization and of the human propensity to do wrong while struggling to do right. The storyline is scarcely describable. Think of it this way: what if a prepubescent Leopold Bloom had fallen down a rabbit hole and wound up in Southeast Asia with a Pomona street gang in tow? Young Xanther, bespectacled, mouth full of metal braces, acne-spattered and left-handed, epileptic, self-doubting and sometimes self-hating, is a mess, just as every 12-year-old is a mess. She is also, her doctor assures her, something more: "If I could grant you one certainty, Xanther, one which you could hold on to without dissolving under all your scrutiny, let it just be how remarkable a young girl you are." So she is: there's scarcely a thing in this world she's not interested in and has theories about, spurred on by a brilliantly eccentric dad who's always talking about engines and the thought of Hermagoras of Temnos, "whoever he was, a rhetor, whatever a rhetor is." So what does she have to do with an Armenian cabbie, a pidgin-speaking Singaporean, and a Chicano street gang? Ah, that's the question, one that the reader will be asking hundreds of pages on, tantalized by the glimmerings of answers that peek through rainy calligrams and sentences endlessly nested like so much computer code. Danielewski's efforts at street-tough dialect verge into parody ("Like this be plastic shit. All scratched up and chipped"), but most everything about this vast, elusive, sometimes even illusory narrative shouts tour de force. Strangely, it works, though not without studied effort on the reader's part. And as for all the loose ends? No worries-there are 26 volumes to come in which to tie them up.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 2014
      

      Danielewski, who got worldwide attention for House of Leaves and a National Book Award nomination for Only Revolution, offers the first of an ambitious multivolume project. The settings swing from Mexico to Southeast Asia to Venice (Italy and California), and key among the array of characters is 12-year-old Xanther, who sojourns forth with her dad to get a dog and ends up caring for a creature that's far more edgy and exotic.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 1, 2015
      

      This 800-page tome initially seems quite daunting, especially since it is only Part 1 of an ongoing story, but astonishingly it proves thoroughly readable. Danielewski (House of Leaves) employs multiple fonts and page layouts to differentiate and expose eight plot lines, all of which unfold on the same rainy day in May. The story of 12-year-old Xanther, her parents, and her precarious medical condition predominates in scope and sentiment, but the other narratives are equally intriguing and thematically distinct, including a story of gang life and an enigmatic sf thriller. The text is typographically inventive, with the standout aspect being how the dialog in Xanther's story is punctuated like computer code: {surprisingly} \ on a level beyond gimmick, evoking a complex and nuanced world of possibility with regard to punctuation. VERDICT This novel goes beyond the experimental into the visionary, creating a language and a style that expands the horizon of meaning. The strict encoding of words is married to the extensible coding of computer language to form a metalinguistic hybrid that hints at an evolved form of literature. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 1, 2015
      

      This 800-page tome initially seems quite daunting, especially since it is only Part 1 of an ongoing story, but astonishingly it proves thoroughly readable. Danielewski (House of Leaves) employs multiple fonts and page layouts to differentiate and expose eight plot lines, all of which unfold on the same rainy day in May. The story of 12-year-old Xanther, her parents, and her precarious medical condition predominates in scope and sentiment, but the other narratives are equally intriguing and thematically distinct, including a story of gang life and an enigmatic sf thriller. The text is typographically inventive, with the standout aspect being how the dialog in Xanther's story is punctuated like computer code: {surprisingly} \ on a level beyond gimmick, evoking a complex and nuanced world of possibility with regard to punctuation. VERDICT This novel goes beyond the experimental into the visionary, creating a language and a style that expands the horizon of meaning. The strict encoding of words is married to the extensible coding of computer language to form a metalinguistic hybrid that hints at an evolved form of literature. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos Lib., CA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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From the author of the international best seller House of Leaves and National Book Award–nominated Only Revolutions comes a monumental new novel as dazzling as it is riveting. The Familiar (Volume 1) ranges from Mexico to Southeast Asia, from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, with nine lives hanging in the balance, each called upon to make a terrifying choice. They include a therapist-in-training grappling with daughters as demanding as her patients; an ambitious East L.A. gang member contracted for violence; two scientists in Marfa, Texas, on the run from an organization powerful beyond imagining; plus a recovering addict in Singapore summoned at midnight by a desperate billionaire; and a programmer near Silicon Beach whose game engine might unleash consequences far exceeding the entertainment he intends. At the very heart, though, is a twelve-year-old girl named Xanther who one rainy day in May sets out with her father to get a dog, only...

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