Always Crashing in the Same Car

A Novel After David Bowie

De: Lance Olsen

Narrado por: Liam Price

A prismatic, imaginative exploration of David Bowie's last days

An intricate collage-novel fusing and confusing fact and imagination, Always Crashing in the Same Car is a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives—the protean musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and others in Bowie's orbit.

At its core beat questions about how we read others, how we are read by them, how (if at all) we can tell the past with something even close to accuracy, what it feels like being the opposite of young and still committed to bracing, volatile innovation.

Set during Bowie's last months—those during which he worked on his acclaimed final album Black Star while battling liver cancer and the consequences of a sixth heart attack—yet washing back and forth across his exhilarating, kaleidoscopically costumed life, Always Crashing in the Same Car enacts a poetics of impermanence, of art, of love, of truth, even of death, that apparently most permanent of conditions.

©2023 Lance Olsen (P)2023 Tantor

"The rest is just the rest."

"It is rather the case that language can’t locate the appropriate language. It isn’t as if, if you tried hard enough, you could rummage out the right phrase. It’s that our system of communication just can’t tolerate certain pressures and torques."
- Lance Olsen, Always Crashing the Same Car

Almost broke me in parts. Nearly broke me in pieces. Experimental, playful, sad. Let me process and I'll get back and expand on my experience with Bowie. Always writing the same review twice here on Goodreads.

Fragments that could
all be their own
review:

- Chapter as a glossary
- Chapter as Bowie's favorite books
- Chapter contradicting previous chapter
- Author as narrator
- Author as fan
- Narrator (Alec Nolens) anagram of author (Lance Olsen)
- Author as mensch
- Memory in fragments
- Knowledge as fragments
- Love as fragments
- Decay as fragments
- Art as fragments
- Art as theft
- Death as theft
- Love as theft

We live in a world of fragments: twitter, tiktok dances, instagram photos, quotes, collective memories and memes. Someone like David Bowie is constructed into this world, before the world. Bowie is a strange UFO that shoots and screeches across a green screen, appears, and then disappears. How do we make sense of the mosaic? What are these collection of facts, myths, images, constructs, songs, lovers, but a giant play pretending to be a life pretending to be a man trying to communicate in a sea of strangeness. How can we ever really know our heroes? Our idols? Our lovers? Ourselves?

Olsen doesn't give the reader any answers, but gives us enough ways of looking at the Icon from Mars, the Thin White Duke, that you start to believe -- not in Bowie, not in Tom, not in Newton, but in billion of stars that exist, love, shine, and eventually darken and die together.