Tomas Caldon's Reviews > Attila

Less a traditional or even experimental novel than a book-length epic prose-poem, as indebted to Homer and Gilgamesh as it is Joyce - a seemingly shapeless and boundless mass of barraging literary/historical/mythic references, false/archaic/fusion/loan-words and literary forms (cycling through the novel, the play, and poems of various styles) - even in the (frequent) moments and swathes in which I found myself unable to parse the meaning, thematic or even literal, of words, sentences, pages, the hypnogogic rhythm and flow of Coll’s language conjures images of their own, arising just from the shape of his syntax, just as music conjures images in the listener, despite being wordless collections of chords, notes, modes, harmonies. Practically demands a second, third read, one with close attention, access to an encyclopaedia and a pencil, but even skating by and leaving with the feeling of having only carved a thin groove into the surface, the obviousness of the book’s greatness lingers regardless.