Negative Space

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Horrifying in a compulsively readable way, Negative Space charts the erratic and disturbing movements of a group of teens living in a small New Hampshire town. For these kids life in this town is a stultifying existence, as evidenced by the copious amount of drugs they consume. They take a lot of drugs, and I mean a lot of drugs. Popping pills first thing in the morning, smoking weed all day long, winding down in the evening with some shrooms or acid…and then there is WHORL. A rich experimental writing style weaving together age old Satanic-panic fears and their modern day manifestation. She is uncommonly good at writing about being embodied. When she learns of her husband’s infidelity, she starts wringing her hands and notices for the first time that this is not only something that happens in books. As if to shout down cliches about finding one’s voice: “After my marriage breaks, I go to the top of a mountain and scream. The wind whips the sound away, disappearing it out of my mouth before it has even hit the air. I scream in the empty house. I scream at the empty house. I yell in the bath.” Testing her voice This searingly intimate literary debut from top Irish art critic Cristín Leach weaves words and art with an unravelling of self that comes when a marriage breaks. In a multi-layered and incisive narrative, Leach writes about the gaps between reality and perception, about writing and anxiety, body and brain, breaking and making, succeeding and failing, conventionality and independence. Tyler is a Virgil-like, shamanic figure that guides us deeper and deeper into the WHORL-abusing, self-hanging, 4chan-posting underworld of Kinsfiled, Massachusets. “Everyone knew Tyler was going to die young,” Ahmir says at some point, and this pervasive sense of doom, of inevitable heartbreaking end infects the entire novel and every character that comes into touch with Tyler. Yet none of them shy away from this doom, just like they don’t shy away from the overwhelming feelings of love and dread that feel them, or their sexuality and fragmented personalities and identities. They are not likable people, but that doesn’t invalidate their stories.

We've seen a lot of highly creative, quality work from the Brazilian ad studio Leo Burnett, and this clever campaign for Fiat encouraging people not to text while driving is a highlight. Let me first get to what I enjoyed about the book. I did enjoy the alternating point of views shown of 3 main characters in the first person perspective. I also liked how there is a fourth protagonist who we only read about strictly from the narrative of the other three people. I haven’t read many books but I thought this was really creative and it made this medium was enjoyable. Other then this, I really don’t know how I feel about the contents of the book itself. It’s an established and sometimes awkward genre, the memoir or personal essay with forays into describing or analysing beloved artworks. But here it feels immediate and wholly convincing. A sculpture by Dorothy Cross based on the negative space inside a kiss, the “accusatory stare” of Saoirse Wall in a video self-portrait, the voice and presence of Doireann Ní Ghríofa as she reads her poetry aloud – all of this serves not as aesthetic or intellectual displacement of pain, but to ratify and enrich Leach’s understanding of it.

And then we have the lingering presence of Werner Baumhauer, a local physician and writer, who tried to weigh his soul by weighing himself before and after hanging himself on those same weighs. His assistant, who weighed the body after the Bauhauer’s death was in for a disappointment. When WHORL appeared in the book, the first drug that came to my mind was salvia, a drug my friends and I started hearing about probably in the late 90s, early 2000s. First came the rumors of kids committing suicide after taking salvia, and then came actual confirmed cases. The reported details around the high obtained from this drug did not hold much appeal to me, and I think our only interest came from the fact that salvia was legal and relatively easy to access through the mail, unlike other drugs which had to be procured from sketchy dudes you never wanted to actually hang out with, like this novel's character Kai (spot on, that).

Negative Space is a whole different beast. While I eventually was able to appreciate what Amydalatropolis did, by reframing 4chan posts as literary art, and revealing the absolute barbarism which lies at the "heart of darkness" which is the free, wild web, and that Yeager is perhaps the first novelist to ever UNDERSTAND the Internet and express this in a text worth reading--I adore Negative Space, because it does something wildly different exploration of a wildly different phenomena.The characters are all the same and all super annoying. There was no point to the multiple POVs because they weren't differentiated at all. No character development or growth. Tyler is literally the worst throughout the whole book and never gets better. I didn't feel bad for any of them. Considering and improving the balance between negative space and positive space in a composition is considered by many to enhance the design. This basic, but often overlooked, principle of design gives the eye a "place to rest," increasing the appeal of a composition through subtle means. Negative Space – the title invokes drawing lessons from her mother – is partly about allowing her writing to become more personal: or better, more physical. Criticism and autobiography start to merge, and Leach finds correlatives for her predicament, or instruction on how to get beyond it, in a wide array of art and literature. It will claw its gravitational grasp, pull you into a dark fever dream, and it won't let go. It will crawl into your thoughts and wrap them in bleeding hallucinations. It's been over a week since I finished reading this book, and I can still hear it whispering like a night wind that blows free through my skull. You might wonder how you can design with something that, in a sense, doesn’t exist. If you design it, is it still blank?

For a writer whose subjects are primarily visual, she pays a lot of attention to sound, detailing the tinnitus (“an internal bell, an inner alarm”) that means she is never quite unaware of her own insides. While training as a perinatal yoga instructor, she learns to channel and appreciate the sounds she had made giving birth to her children. This nightmarish zone made accessible by WHORL remains ominously ambiguous throughout Negative Space, and its influence on the town is left spookily undefined: is it the cause of the decades-long suicide epidemic in Kinsfield? Is someone using these indeterminate entities as a means of exacting revenge? Or, is this realm a hellish form of purgatory, a spectral catchment full of wandering souls once belonging to the suicidal townsfolk? While the story obliquely gestures to each of these interpretations in kind, with particular attention being paid to whether Tyler is the conjurer or conduit of these unspeakable forces, the real strength of the novel is its refusal to settle on any one answer, instead harnessing vagueness and obscurity as a fertile source of dread and terror. This book transcends sexuality by presenting these teens as having seemingly no preference in who they love, are with, and are themselves (there is even a character who is often referred to as 'she' and 'he,' making it hard for the reader to know exactly who or what this person identifies as). Several times throughout the novel, intense trauma is followed by a jarring tonal shift in perspective. These shifts in point of view are effective in creating an atmosphere of dread and nausea as the story weaves itself together and tears itself apart simultaneously. That being said, the absence of one perspective can speak as loud as entire sections of another. A successful marriage of form and function. There’s a lot of potential for re-reads to give clarity and make connections that weren’t apparent the first time around. I read aloud many parts of this book because they were so disturbing and intriguing to me. There is one section where a book is being read by one of the characters and the excerpt pertains to corn seedlings releasing a pheromone when they are being eaten by caterpillars, which draws in wasps to eat the caterpillars. So it is forcing the wasps to do the bidding of the seedlings without the wasp being aware that they are being manipulated. Then it asks the question of what that means for humanity and how people can manipulate other people for their own ends, making the person being manipulated think that the idea came from their own head and not some external source. Can you think of anything more terrifying than realizing how easily we can become the puppets of external sources, both human and supernatural?Negative Space is one of the truly great, smart horror novels I’ve had the pleasure to read in my thirty-nine laps around the sun. It was both an emotional journey and a skin-crawling experience. It shows obvious influence from Blake Butler’s monolith 300 000 000, but it is also indebted to Clive Barker and H.P Lovecraft. This novel will make your feel ugly and vulnerable in the best possible way, like someone stared into your soul and looked at every little imperfection. Learn everything you need to know about book cover design, book formatting, typesetting, and design principles to more effectively navigate the self-publishing industry. A Note for MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji - Iimura". Mfj-online.org . Retrieved 2009-11-11.