Insomnia and the Aunt
Lin s book, with its central themes of family history, death, and repetition winding dizzyingly together like a glossy Chinese finger trap for the intellect, startled me with its elegiac atmosphere: for all its detached accounts of television reruns and mini-treatises on the beauty of lies, I found Insomnia and the Aunt to be a terrifically somber, heartfelt text ... These emotional tonalities I was inferring from the text surprised me, particularly coming from an author who proclaimed he was perfectly happy with his audience falling asleep. I have been careful to distinguish Lin from the young narrator, but the first person narration and emphasis on family details encourages me to read it as memoir. With these generic concerns in mind, if we read Insomnia and the Aunt as an extension of Lin s BlipSoak01 (Atelos) interest in inattention and distraction, than perhaps this newest book seeks to explore the human elements at play in an ambient universe. --Constant Critic