The Flame Alphabet

Written by Ben Marcus

Narrated by Andy Paris

Ben Marcus has received numerous awards for his groundbreaking fiction, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes. In The Flame Alphabet, Marcus creates a chilling world where the speech of children is killing their parents. After being forced to leave their daughter Esther to fend for herself, Sam and Claire end up at a government lab intent on creating non-lethal speech. But when Sam discovers the truth about what's going on there, he realizes reuniting with his daughter is the only way to keep his sanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781464008221

Reviews for The Flame Alphabet

[x57_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Really its a terrific what hook , but you have to tell a story. It is,although I must admit I only got 7 pages,no difference from goerge saunders earlier funny but profound conciets but he tells a story he doesn't have a glimps then imagine a person who isn' entirely bedridden ie desperate wants to wade their way thrrough something arhythmic and atonal--tone deaf to the everyday-verbiage. This writert wasd compared to Ballard -true utterly tone deaf

[harahel_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

About three-quarters into this book, I still wasn't sure where it was going. The conceit was interesting as was the fall out, but the general unlikeability of the characters made it difficult to engage. I also have to say as a Jew that the use of Judaism made me wince. It beat on themes that are familiar and disturbing without a clear reason why.

[hairball_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I give this book high marks for being really original and surpassing my expectations in every way. On the other hand, I had a hard time getting through it--I would almost call the experience grueling. I did not expect, from the reviews I read, to "enjoy" Flame Alphabet as much as I did. But it always surprised me. I haven't tried to parse the text. As I said, I was just trying to get through the novel. I'm not sure what sort of recursive statement a book about language as a disease makes.Definitely one of the best books to arrive this year.

[litfan_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I very much admire Ben Marcus' writing style and his unique, original voice; however I must say that in this case admiration does not equal enjoyment. I spent much of the novel feeling like it was over my head (which it very probably was) and that I was trying much too hard. While a good intellectual exercise, it didn't make for a pleasurable reading experience. This is a novel that is dark, sharp, and holds nothing back. The writing is "in your face" and Marcus does a fantastic job introducing the reader to the horrors of this new world in which language kills. One of the best things about the book is how deeply it makes you think-- about how powerful language is, and about what we would be in our society, our relationships, and our inner lives, without it. What made it difficult to enjoy was the lack of any connection to the characters. They were never very fully developed (and some were just plain unlikeable), so it was tough to stay engaged in the plot without having any investment in their fate. On more than one occasion I found myself wishing it was just over. Additionally, there were some interesting facets of the world that were never fully explained or developed, leaving one with a frustrated sense of curiosity. So in the end, for this reader it was a mixed bag: awesome writing and a unique premise, that was bogged down by poor character development and a plot that dragged. I admired it greatly, I just wish I had liked it a lot more.

[jimelkins · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An interesting hybrid between conceptual or experimental fiction, and story-driven literary fiction. Or to be more exact: between Tom McCarthy's kind of conceptual fiction and Cormac McCarthy's violent narratives. There is some extremely strong writing here, even if it is a bit unremitting (everyone in this book is desperately sick, from the first page to the last, and Marcus loves nauseating descriptions, his welts and odors and crusty sores and hemorrhaging bruises and seeping wounds), and there are also strong ideas, even if some are muddled. The book's central conceit is that the language of children has become toxic. At its best, in Part One, the book is a kind of parable about speech, articulateness, parenting, tolerance, belief, and Jewishness. At its worst, in Parts Two and Three, the details veer from literary fiction to genre fiction or science fiction, because Marcus finds himself having to explain how mass evacuations work, how detention centers are kept secure, how food is scavenged, how antidotes are manufactured, how scientists try to explain the "virus," and so forth. The book's uneven reviews are justified, because it slowly shudders out of Marcus's control. The cliché metaphor is that such a book is a train wreck. That isn't exactly the right image, because trains presumably crash all at once. When a book's logical machinery goes wrong, it happens in a series of small distractions, contradictions, and oversights, which build up in the reader's mind until it finally becomes impossible to suspend disbelief. It's more like a car gradually breaking down: first a small hum, then a funny smell, then a shudder, then a loud sound... and finally it just doesn't run. There are dozens of examples, but they have a familiar form; in the abstract, they constitute the wrecked machinery of any overly complex book. It's not so much the logical problems that bother me (how does the main character can research ancient scripts when he can't read anything without collapsing in pain?) as the conceptual problems (t's never explained whether or not speech is painful because it has meaning or because it causes "understanding, knowing"; p. 196). What matters is that Marcus never really figured out exactly what his allegory is. In that sense this books deserves a much longer review than it has gotten in the press. Is the language "virus" like what happened in the Tower of Babel, or not? Is all language a disease, and has it always been (as he hints in a number of passages, even making up citations from actual authors; p. 84)? Is the mystical faith of the narrator a matter of not communicating truths (i.e., a classical mysticism), or an allegory Is language a disease precisely because it is ultimately comprised of the names of God (the flame alphabet, a 17th c. idea; p. 65)? Why, exactly, aren't internal representations of language painful, given that introspective life and inner monologues continue even when the characters are mute because their own speech hurts them? Does language act as an "acid over its message" (p. 44), or, as in most of the book, is the message the acid and language the medium? Or to put it more rigorously: is the polemic against sense, meaning, denotation, langue, or parole? Other equivocations are fine, because they're part of the ambiguous moral message: it's not resolved, for example, whether or not this is a specifically Jewish "virus"; it's not resolved whether or not the central character's moral passivity and confusion are related to his ability to survive, or his value for people trying to control the "virus"; and it's not resolved whether or not the mystical form of Judaism the narrator practices is, or is not, genuine or valuable or hopeful. Those kinds of ambiguity isarecompatible with allegory, but evasions and contradictions about the allegory itself are signs of a lack of control. (The idea of the "forest Jews" here owes something to "hole worship," a 19th c. Russian practice described by Ceslaw Milosz; if Marcus doesn't know that, he should, because their anti-mimetic religion is close to what he's conjuring here. I wonder, too, in passing, if he saw my own book "Domain of Images," which has many of the examples of scripts he mentions, including Bamum and Alaskan pseudowriting.)In terms of affect, the book's strongest passages are the brilliant conversations between the narrator, his wife, and their rude, clever, rebellious daughter. (For example p. 27.) But on p. 103, there's a passage that strongly suggests bad parenting might be related to the "virus," that it might be a kind of unconscious collective retribution. But it apparently didn't occur to Marcus to develop this, and eventually it seems that the narrator hasn't been a particularly bad parent. But on the other hand, he is consistently depicted as oblivious of other people's thoughts... and so on. The book could have been spectacular if it had kept the conceptual focus of Tom McCarthy at his best; Marcus has no problem keeping his language as intense as Cormac McCarthy, or for that matter Annie Proulx. Hopefully the next book will be tighter.

[suetu_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sharper than a serpent’s tongue…I was recently joking with a friend, “If not for Jewish literary fiction, what would I read?” This is not exactly unusual territory for me, but I have to admit that I really struggled with Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet. I was drawn in by an intriguing, high-concept premise. In the world of Marcus’s imagining, language has become toxic. Not just toxic, but deadly. It begins with the speech of children (Specifically Jewish children?) but eventually expands to include all speech and ultimately communication of all kinds. The tale is told from the point of view of everyman Sam, who is desperate to hold his small family together, even though their teenage daughter, Esther, is literally killing his wife, Claire, and himself. Civilization is unspooling around them, but Sam’s narration keeps the scale of the tragedy human. Meanwhile, individuals like Sam, as well as entire governments are racing to find an elusive cure.So far, what I’ve described is strange, but straightforward enough. It’s not that straightforward. Sam and his family are Jews, but they practice Judaism in a bizarre and completely unreal way. Additionally, there’s a character known as Murphy who is both enigmatic and sinister. While there are lengthy sequences of the story where not all that much happens—they try another form of language and another and still get sick—there is much happening in the background that is strange and incomprehensible. I knew there were Jewish influences, and I kept thinking, “If only I knew more about Kabbalah…”At least that was MY feeling as I read, and I know I’m not alone. Therefore, I jumped at a recent opportunity to hear Mr. Marcus speak about his novel. His talk was interesting, but one-on-one conversation with the man was not only delightful, but for me as a reader, invaluable. He told me that no one should need esoteric knowledge to read his novel. That there were influences, yes, but mostly he just made stuff up. That he hoped the weird and incomprehensible stuff would sort of just flow over the reader. In our discussion, I had compared his work with the weirdness of Haruki Murakami. I admitted, in my ignorance of Japanese culture, that’s exactly what I did with the weirdness in his work. However, as American Judaism was my own culture, I was digging much harder for those connections and influences that might not even exist. With the author’s permission to just take the story in, and to appreciate it on an individual human scale, I let go of what I failed to understand and had a greater appreciation for what I did.Ben Marcus is a terrific prose stylist, and the language in this book about the death of language is beautiful. There are a lot of ideas floating around within the text, and much that is worthy of consideration. This book won’t be for everyone, but hopefully potential readers will have a better idea of what they’re getting into. The Flame Alphabet is challenging, interesting, strange, beautiful, and at times incomprehensible. I’m very glad to have read it, and if you’re curious, I say go for it.

[drfp_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Flame Alphabet is the first novel by Ben Marcus I've read. It's a mixed bag. The first section of the story, which compromises approximately half the book, was very good. It wasn't what I was expecting: I didn't start the novel thinking I'd be reading some sort of biohazard style horror story. Yet it was very effective and those 140 pages were some of the more unsettling literature I have read in a long while (and I find it very hard to be scared or unnerved by writing). Unfortunately, after that point, the story sags. I feel like you could remove the entire second section and really not miss very much. It's almost entirely a storyline cul-de-sac. A lot of research regarding the nature of the "virus" is conducted but because Marcus never pins down the exact nature of the virus this whole section goes no where. This isn't helped by the deadened atmosphere of this part of the story, even if it makes sense in the context of a world increasingly without communication. Part 3 does reach a conclusion but it's one that felt slightly cheap all things considered.So, the flow of the story was uneven and something that bothered me. Other things in the story that were questionable included the odd Jewish thrust of the story. I understand Marcus has a slight Jewish background but this part of the story sits uneasily within the novel. The theme exists and is unsettling but the fact that Marcus does little with it, not properly resolving the issue, leaves one to wonder why it figured in the first place. I also wonder why Esther is written as such an unattractive character. With her awful attitude I constantly wondered why her parents cared so much for the one who was causing them such fatal distress. Is it simply the fact that, not being a parent myself, I can't empathise? But really, it would have been quite simple to make her a pleasant character, not the unsavoury one she is.These issues and the weak nature of the second half of the book did spoil what was a very enjoyable, if slightly horrific start to The Flame Alphabet. It's a shame the novel lost its way but it's obvious that Marcus can write well and I shall look into his other works in order to give him a second chance.

[jbushnell_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nice to see what can happen when a great experimental novelist turns his attention to writing something with some narrative pull. An apocalypse of a sort we haven't seen before, complete with mysterious devices, strange mystic traditions, difficult moral choices, and pungent loss. Not for everyone but I loved it.