Citadel Paperback – Import, 25 July 2018

Jack Remick’s dystopian Citadel is the most complex of his novels I’ve read. This sui generis book-within-a-book is also the most far-reaching cerebrally in that it transcends the traditional literary narrative’s boundaries by compelling the reader to recast their view of themselves as sentient human beings. Remick simply calls into question our grasp of desire, “that residual evolutionary response,” and how it governs our lives, especially between genders. He transcends the challenge by effecting a substantive shift in one’s perception. What thoughtful woman, for instance, upon finishing the novel will hence forward not recall that she is “a daughter of the Citadel… born carrying the disease of desire”?Citadel strips us of our pretenses related to sex and desire through the artifice of literature, thus making it so potent. We are lured into protagonist’s Trisha de Tours’s editing process and gradual self-discovery. We see ourselves reflected in her struggles with the Diava Izokaitis’s “divergent evolution” manuscript and its disquieting foreshadowing. A scientific tract on parthenogenesis might enable a shift of one’s reason. But Citadel attacks the very center of the reader’s being in a manner that effectively renders him powerless to dismiss its premise. “Who are we?” it asks. And then sets about revealing the answer to each of us.Throughout Citadel Remick casts off the narrative restraints and exploits the subject at hand with a lyrical intensity that intermittently caused me to pause and savor the language:“Writing is dangerous because words are only an intermediate step between writer and reader where feeling detaches from each word with the harsh cruelty of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. The pain, the tragedy of existence, the theater of desire, all live under the words that are never anything but a wild guess at the river of emotion that lives in each cell, that feeds on desire and hungers for being. The magic is not in changing words, but in spreading language over the residue of desire.”Midpoint in the novel while editing and absorbing the import of Daiva’s manuscript, Trisha’s anguish is palpable: “I have transcended sex and so find myself carrying a past in my body that sickens me—the thought of senseless, crippled, half-destroyed creatures swimming to my womb leaves me in a state of morbid rejection of who and what I used to be.” The questions raised here are so primally deep-seated that the writer and the reader become one in this section. The carapace separating the creator and observer has been ripped away. Here is where the pulse of Citadel is laid bare. How does one resolve the confrontation?Yet in a relatively short space we move onto the equally layered and sagacious ethnography of the Exo-Culture which provokes and delights the intellect in a manner Trisha’s questions do not:“In conclusion, it appears that the language of the Exo cultures is in every sense moribund. With rare exceptions the language as spoken is essentially composed of transformed Old Society profanity; it is full of antiquated oaths which represent submerged concepts, predicated historically upon a di-sexual society, but which are no longer extant.” How can one not see a reflection of themselves, their species, being stripped of pretense in the shorn-of-emotion and scientific analysis of the Exo social structure but as a humorous and caustic indictment of our present culture.Citadel summons the reader at various junctures to marry such cogent leaps of inquiry, each lending themselves to an informed review. I view the novel as a virtuosic achievement, one that can be read on several levels, like any important and visionary work of literary fiction.

Jack Remick is a novelist and poet whose extensive body of work demonstrates his masterful creativity and talent. Still, his latest novel, Citadel, takes this work to new level. Citadel is a complex novel within a novel that will mark each reader and what each takes from the read will be uniquely personal.Citadel is a mind-bending feminist exploration of male and female interactions and a call for women globally to say no to continued manipulation, abuse and control by men. A science-based novel, it questions what the world would look like with women in control and what it means to be human in a world where men are no longer necessary for procreation.One of numerous aspects about Remick’s new novel that stand out is his treatment of the relationships between author and editor and between editor and manuscript. As Trisha edits Daiva’s manuscript, she enters the story and becomes a character in the work she is editing. Remick works these shifts between the inner and outer stories seamlessly, leading readers to question where one ends and the other begins just as he asks us to consider a world where women have absolute choice over all aspects of their reality.

Wanted to like this more than I did, but I didn't dislike it. A bit slow paced. I was waiting for a battle that never happened, a fight, a train wreck, something exciting. Instead there are character histories that left emotional scars and wars that left a lopsided and angry female population eager to control the weakened and confused male population. I had a hard time cheering for anyone. If you decide to read Citadel, enter with an open mind. Be patient. Consider it a science project or a prophetic warning to society. Try not to be as judgement all as the characters in the story. Non of them are likeable.

Jack’s new release ‘Citadel’ has stirred up some controversy. It left an impact and aroused my sense of being a woman because Citadel is a brilliantly written novel based on the idea— “What if Women Ran Everything?”Just when you think you have read it all, here comes Citadel. Remick’s mind in this novel rocket your world into a different galaxy. Citadel brings out feelings and questions of uncertainty in both women and men as it asks who we are and what we will become. This novel is a real attempt to shine light on the fear women face every minute while trying to empower ourselves in a world molded by the past and limited by modern society gender and role models. This is a complex vision that questions our place in the 21st Century then pushes the story into a technological future that might not be so far away.Citadel is a novel within a novel. The outer novel takes the reader into the mindset and relationship of author and editor. Tracking the growth of their relationship and the challenging debate over what exactly constitutes a novel, Remick depicts for us the life of a writer whose work is being molded by the editor. This act alone, in the novel, gives the reader insight into the code of ethics and editorial practice of publishing while questioning everything writers have been taught about form and structure.The inner novel in Citadel is a horrific, post-apocalyptic war zone combining history and violence against women. The story shows us how women deal with violence, how women through choice become warriors or mothers. Choice, female choice drives this story as women, vowing not to return to the past, combat for control of the culture set by religion and society. The progress of women overcoming the limits imposed on them in today's world leads to the rejection of the Old Society (Remick’s words) where women are ‘Living in the Niche.In The Niche, women control destiny, lives and procreation. They master choices and freedom as the Y Chromosomes are genetically mutated and become extinct. A new generation of daughters in a female-run world. There are no men in Citadel except for one strong character, Caleb, the sibling of the publisher, Clara. In Citadel, the XY (the male) is referred to as Exo, Gland, or Mutant. This triad really asks the deeper question in the novel: Are men and women on divergent evolutionary paths as women now choose mates based on wealth, position, and power while in the past, they chose for speed, size, and aggression?