Two wanderers make a journey across the Nevada desert in search of the loneliest highway in North America. A mummified torso is found in the caves of central Idaho with a G.I. Joe piece lodged in its stomach—an exact replica of the torso itself. An artist makes collages from plastics found in the bellies of ocean salmon while working on a floating fish processor. A Hiroshima survivor e-mails his estranged daughter, telling her the story of his life after the war. The text proceeds as a fragmented assemblage, a complex juxtaposition of fact with fiction, image with text, order with entropy, all of which culminate in a coherent, if partial, image of globalized complexity.
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“Eric Blix’s constellation novel The Prodigious Earth rethinks frontiers and borders in a profusion of keys, from geographical to narratological, technological to epistemological, through a series of narraticules built on echoes, harmonies, slant rhymes, and quotations. The result is an invitation for the reader to seek patterns where they both exist and don’t, even as spatial and temporal scales fluctuate continuously. Sparkling, bright, challenging, haunting, ever surprising, and immensely gifted.”
-- Lance Olsen, author of Skin Elegies and My Red Heaven
