{"id":7253,"date":"2012-05-09T16:12:44","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T20:12:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=7253"},"modified":"2016-07-14T17:45:52","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T21:45:52","slug":"svetislav-basara-the-cyclist-consiracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/05\/09\/svetislav-basara-the-cyclist-consiracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Svetislav Basara: The Cyclist Consiracy<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Cyclist Conspiracy<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Svetislav Basara (Fama o biciklistima<\/em>, 1988)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the Serbian by Randall A. Major (2012)<\/span>\r\nOpen Letter Books (2012)<\/span>\r\n280 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
I’m a fan of\u00a0conspiracy theories in literature. I love the antiquities and the act of imagining what secrets have been lost to history — or hidden from history. My problem is that I’m a bit ignorant of the best books on the subject, whether fiction or nonfiction, that have fun but are well written, appropriately dark,\u00a0and interesting\u00a0aside from being about some secret (suggestions are welcome). We are given the wrong impression that\u00a0if one wants to deal in historical secrets hidden in plain view, one has to read Dan Brown and his like (I have gone there, I admit), but those types of cookie-cutter books don’t get the job done. I’m happy to say that I found what I was looking for in The Cyclist Conspiracy<\/em>. I mean, who among us\u00a0can resist a book that begins, “Endless are the secrets of provincial libraries.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Cyclist Conspiracy<\/em> is a fun, mad-dash\u00a0read through letters, lost manuscripts, research papers, stories, poems, dialogues, diagrams, and anything else you can imagine compiling for a book about some secret and ancient\u00a0cult of cyclists.<\/p>\n
The first thing\u00a0in the book is\u00a0an Editor’s Preface, signed by S.B.\u00a0Here S.B. briefly tells about an autumn evening he spent looking through\u00a0the piles of books and papers\u00a0in the cellar of the Municipal Library in Bajina Ba\u0161ta, where he had retreated to take “refuge from\u00a0sadness the cause of which I still cannot mention.”\u00a0There he came across The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale<\/em>, published in Z\u00fcrich\u00a0in 1903. This book, which has taken who knows what path to get to the cellar of the Bajina\u00a0Ba\u0161ta’s Municipal Library, is the third of only six\u00a0copies printed. Indeed, publishing six copies and then sending each\u00a0copy someplace in the world\u00a0where it would find the right reader seemed was to be the book’s\u00a0standard mode of dissemination because that right reader would then publish six copies and send them around, etc. S.B. has breached\u00a0this protocol — any one of us can buy and read this book now —\u00a0but he did this for a purpose:<\/p>\n
In handing this collection over to the reader, I realize that several years ago, searching for colored pebbles, I came across a pearl, but also that the pearl had been awaiting a proper owner and found an improper one instead, who would turn it into a glass bauble by reduplicating it in an insufferably large number of copies. The only justification is that, in our time, which falls within the autumn of the year of years<\/em>\u00a0(about which Captain Queensdale speaks), even the sparkle of a glass bauble shines through the darkness gathering on the horizon.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The book then steps back into history to the reign of the apocryphal king (because he himself\u00a0wrote history so that he would appear to be apocryphal (or he really is apocryphal)) Charles the Hideous, a man who can see the future and the past. One day, a group of Two-Wheelers exiled from Paris come to Charles’ court. They bring a clay tablet containing The Book of Javan the Son of Nahor (“to those yet unborn”). They tell him of a great project: the Tower of Babel will be rebuilt. This is just the beginning. Charles invokes Freud, and later it turns out Freud himself is a member of the conspiracy and a character whose writings will appear in this book.<\/p>\n
Much of the fun to be had here (but not all) is in finding new characters and following their relationship with the cyclists. For example, who is Captain Queensdale, whose manuscript S.B. found at the beginning? He was a ship captain who, in 1761, was the sole survivor of a shipwreck. He ended up on an island north of Iceland where he finds a community of cyclists. Who published that manuscript in Z\u00fcrich\u00a0in 1903? That was Rheiner Meier, another of the novel’s characters, and a bit of a skeptic. Here is his introduction to the six volumes he had published and sent around the world:<\/p>\n
It is possible that the whole thing is a joke. Someone with an English sense of humor (the copyist is English) is doubtlessly willing to undertake extensive and expensive preparations in order to, after his own death, make fools of a small group of unknown people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We are also pleased to find a missing Sherlock Holmes story, entitled “The Final Case of Sherlock Holmes: The Maniacal Cyclist.” A small piece to the puzzle that is The Cyclist Conspiracy<\/em> (though the first where we see a cyclist going around smashing random clocks), this brief story was a large part of the fun.<\/p>\n
And it keeps going through journals, treatises, illustrations, constellations, symbology, etc. We learn about\u00a0a master plan\u00a0to build the\u00a0Grand Insane Asylum, which will have capacity for 20 million. Indeed, the conspiracy is so large that one can be part of it and never know it. The pieces of the puzzle keep coming and with them come switchbacks, half-truths, contradictions, blatant misinformation — in other words, history.<\/p>\n
So, yes, this is a fun, though intricate (requiring some give and patience) read, but there’s more to it, a darkness suggested about the workings of men and the presence of history in the present. There are many reasons the bicycle is the chosen symbol to represent so much, but we know it could have been almost anything else. What feels right, fated, even fore-known, is arbitrary, and the Grand Insane Asylum, whose details are lovingly described by a certain inmate, seems a good fit for more than 20 million. Indeed, why didn’t S.B. just retreat to that library cellar? Because no matter what the sadness was that drove him there to begin with, there’s something invigorating about chasing down darkness on this scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Svetislav Basara’s The Cyclist Conspiracy<\/em>, translated from the Serbian by Randall A. Major. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800],"tags":[878,910,992,658],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-7253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-1980s","tag-910","tag-open-letter-books","tag-serbian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/The-Cyclist-Conspiracy.jpg?fit=345%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-1SZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7253"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19383,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions\/19383"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7253"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}