I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
This is an extremely postmodern text that many readers may not understand upon first reading. I gave this a reread to give myself more clarity about the piece.I feel that Heiko Julien's writing style is extremely odd. It's more like a combination of Tweets or a list of Facebook statuses, but the heart behind the writing is there. Julien speaks truth. The irony in his words is clear by this structure. His humour emphasises by the online chat style 'haha,' after his sentences. Ironic. Haha.He covers the hardships of life and I feel he is somewhat insulting the people of the modern world. He insults our computer screen identity. He insults our society. But the true story behind it is love. 'I Am Ready to Die a Violent Death,' like the title says, is also about death. Many people are too fixated on unnecessary things in life that they end up dying alone without having achieved what they should have. Don't fall into a technological trap of believing the cyber you is the real you. Live your life. Go out and meet someone. Go on loving.The only problem I have with the book is that I cannot tell if this is the work of a literary genius being ironic, or if it's genuinely the writing of some stoned internet presence on Tumblr.I love you like the rabbit loves the fear. I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death is only 21 pages long. Each page is a chapter and none of the chapters takes up an entire page. You can read this story in not much time. Though I call it a story only out of habit. I suppose it is a story. It seems to be an entirely new sort. I don't understand. Is this what really good lit blogs look like? Is this what comes after post-modernism? I want to declare this little story/treatise the greatest work of the last 12 years but since it's only the first thing I've read circa 2012 I'm a worthless declarer. And I wish I could write like this. To put down only what are my deepest truths. Heiko Julien, you are the writer of our generation. I'm scared to read any of your other stuff in case it's not nearly as good. Or what if it was better? That would be terrible in a strange way, too.There's a clear voice, a protagonist. He is delineated as Other. Individual. Just Your Next Door Neighbor. Or, The Guy You Happen To Sit Beside On The Subway On The Way To Work. But his identity is close to ours. He's one of our kind. Another Child of God. Heiko Julien takes us through the looking glass to a vantage point from which we can look back, as though through a cloudy and swirling mirror, in order to see, in the rich other-world of his work, the inversions of our world while simultaneously maintaining eye-contact with the reality of our still very real world. Thus the magical comparisons Julien evokes between the extremes of contemporary existence while somehow hanging on to the history that has led up hereinto so that we can so clearly see ourselves in our time and place. When the experiences of the protagonist are painted in such beautiful strokes, the need for irony goes out the window. Revealing that all along it has been another mere device, the wonderfully portrayed inversions of empirical existence render irony unnecessary. They take its place in the form of really good beautiful art. To give just a brief idea of this very-short work, there's this protagonist who is also closely associated with the reader, and then there's his Girl, his Woman, his Fantasy, and she's related to the speaker in such a profoundly veridical way that she seems, after this fashion, to be so intimately related to us.Heiko Julien made me feel like an American more so than any person or work of art ever has. I don't know what it means to be an American. Heiko Julien, I love you like a rabbit loves the fear.
What do You think about I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death (2013)?
I thought this was excellent. At times humorous, at times profound, and oftentimes both.
—SSJ
i really love this book i find heiko's writing smart and relatable and funny and good
—Blanka
After finishing reading this I decided I'm going to read it again everyday. thanks.
—acantu
