MOORE@YOURLIBRARY
The Fifty Year Sword
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski Publisher: Pantheon Reviewed by: Alex Batchelor, Information Services, Moore Public Library
M
ark Z. Danielewski’s breakout hit in 2000, House of Leaves, is a story within a story within a story that makes use of multiple narrators, rabbit-trails of footnotes, appendices, and labyrinthine text layouts to convey an absolutely terrific story about a haunted house. In 2006 his novel Only Revolutions was a finalist for the National Book award, and utilizes multiple narrators on opposite sides of the page, requiring the reader to flip the book over to get the full narrative. All of this to say Danielewski is not known for writing conventional books that are content to just sit within the cover and tell you a story. The Fifty Year Sword is no different. Set in east Texas, the story centers around Chintana, a local seamstress who attends a fiftieth birthday party at the home of an eccentric old man, and finds herself babysitting five orphan children during the event. A strange, AncientMariner type of man identified only as The Story Teller arrives to entertain the attendants with an epic, and, as the night wears on, increasingly unsettling story. The simplicity of the story works well with the complexity of the structure. The text of the story is printed only on the left pages, while the right pages consist solely of illustrations that are not drawn, but stitched in thread. The events of the evening are recounted by a rotating set of five different narrators denoted by quotation marks of various colors. This all sounds very complicated, but Danielewski’s books, which rely heavily on their visual components, are surprisingly easy to navigate once they are physically in front of you. The visual and textual components of The Fifty Year Sword work together to create a story with a wonderful tone of foreboding creepiness. The familiar, contemporary
ADULT BOOK REVIEW
setting of a small, east Texas town offsets the fantastical narrative related by the Story Teller, and readers are allowed to be carried along with this strange story as a result. Because of the layout of the text, the 288 page count is somewhat misleading. The words are so sparsely spaced that the book is relatively short. The Fifty Year Sword is not Danielewski’s most ambitious, nor even his best work, but it’s a brief and enjoyable introduction to his unique, experimental style of writing, and readers who enjoy it would be well served by looking into some of his other books.
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TheMooreDaily.com. 56 | MOORE MONTHLY | MARCH 2013