Cleave the Sparrow

Read Time: 2 Minutes

Cleave the Sparrow feels a bit like somebody trapped a philosophy lecture, a political satire, a quantum physics rant, and a mushroom trip inside the same audiobook and then shook it violently before pressing record.

The story starts around Wilder Crick, the least likable US presidential candidate imaginable in history, a man who seems to hate basically everyone while obsessing over the idea that reality itself is fake. To prove the point, he shoots himself in the face during a live presidential debate to prove it.

After that, Tom a reluctant reporter following Crick ends up dragged into Crick’s strange post-death orbit and becomes presidency itself, while the story starts spiralling through ideas about consciousness, ego death, pain, religion, quantum mechanics, and the nature of reality. There are also random philosophical tangents, strange future-history elements, discussions half pulled from Plato’s cave and half from somebody explaining the universe to you at 3am while absolutely blasted.

It’s not really clean or straightforward in any way, but it all kind of joins together as it goes. The book bounces around constantly, throwing disconnected ideas at you that later loop back together in ways that somehow feel weirdly inevitable. It has that absurdist logic where nothing makes sense right now, but twenty minutes later your brain quietly goes “oh… alright then.”

The whole thing gave me the feeling that the author was either incredibly smart, completely unhinged, or possibly both at once. A lot of the philosophy and physics discussions sailed directly over my head at times, though not in a smug “look how clever this is” way. More in a “I think this audiobook just unlocked a university lecture I was not prepared for” sort of way.

It feels less like a traditional novel and more like experiencing somebody else’s hallucinatory thought process in audiobook form. Like the literary equivalent of being cornered at a party by someone who starts explaining the meaning of existence and somehow keeps getting more convincing the longer they talk.

On the narration side, Brad Grochowski handles the chaos well. Nothing flashy production-wise, but solid enough that the performance never gets in the way of the increasingly strange material.

I am still not entirely sure I understood all of it, and this absolutely feels like one of those books that would reveal more on a second listen. But even when it drifted into total absurdity, I never really stopped being interested in where it was going.

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