You’re soaking in it, he thought, not for the first time. Could he quote David Hume, he wondered, and say, All there is is detail and anything else is conjecture, no, he could not quote Hume, at least not accurately, with that particular sequence of words, though of course he could not be certain that Hume did not say or think such a thing. The thought stands though, he thought, or the words that seemed at least to him to convey the thought, not that anyone reading the words would be in a position to judge the distance, if any distance is possible, between the thought and the words he wrote, but this is a whole other story and already he had come unfortunately quite far from that about which he purposed to write, he carefully wrote. All there is is detail, actually, he qualified deliberately, and we use these details to construct the sad narratives of our lives, or happy narratives, why not, though it would be more accurate to say that the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, neurology will back me up on this, he thought, no footnotes forthcoming, the narratives choose the details and not the other way round, he wrote, living and reading are not so different after all, the damage or whatever to the brain is the same whatever other harms may be avoided. Reality is produced by our failure to reach the actual, he wrote, but who he wondered could he pin this quote on. Anybody’s guess. A novel is more or less full of details, if there’s such a thing as more than full, in fact literature is all detail of one sort or another, supposedly all relevant and chosen by the authority, the reader has no business to think that there’s anything more, but also, he thought, no business to think that there isn’t anything more, in any case in the world of detail that we’re soaking in we assume there is more than those morsels of which we are aware, though in fact there may not be and no experiment can relieve us of this possibility, how claustrophobic, but let us assume for the sake of argument, if you want an argument, or for the sake of the opposite of claustrophobia, whatever that is, agoraphobia perhaps, the terrifying infinitude of possibility from which we protect ourselves with stories, to not be overwhelmed, that if we could let down our stories just for a moment we could expose ourselves to other details, unstoried or unstoried-as-yet, which could support quite other stories and all that attaches to those, or whatever. For three days in October in 1974 Georges Perec challenged himself to *merely observe* whatever passed before him in Saint-Sulpice, recording his observations as fast as he could write, except for when he was ordering coffee or Vichy water or Bourgueil. Observing without presupposing a story gives an equivalence to all details, the oridinary and what Perec calls the infraordinary are full participants in a thoroughly democratic ontology, every detail shines with significance even if it signifies nothing beyond its own existence. Almost it is as hard a discipline to stop a story suggesting itself as it is to suspend the stories we bring, although, I suppose, he thought, any story that suggests itself is in fact a story I have somehow brought with me even if I was unaware that I had it on board, which is interesting, he thought, in itself. No conjectures! Of course Perec cannot write fast enough, time, whatever that is, moves on or whatever it is that it does, the moment is torn away before he can catch much of it, the limits of his capacities affect his ability to observe, he is overwhelmed by his task but not destroyed so not in fact overwhelmed, so many details are suppressed by practicality, there must be some story taking place, the story of the observing I, of the capacities and the limitations that make up Georges Perec perhaps. Why these details and not other details given that we generally assume there to be a limitless amount of details *out there*, are we to conclude that every attempt at objectivity is autobiography, someone’s story, by necessity, at best. Subjectivity is a product of time, he thought, or produces time, whatever that is, the progression of our attention through a certain set of details, the constraining force that suppresses all but the supporting details, the readable details or at least the ones that we read, in either literature or life, the subjectivity that burdens us with personhood and other what we could call spectres of the temporal. He couldn’t get all the infraordinary down, he wrote, referring to Perec, Perec made an attempt at exhausting a place in Paris but his attempt was doomed to fail, just as it was revealing possibilities which made it a success it failed, due to time, due to the particular set of limitations that passes in this instance for Perec, he couldn’t get more of the infraordinary down without stopping time, without removing himself or at least seeming to, without taking a place, a small place, perhaps of necessity a fictional place but I’m not sure of this, without taking a place and truly exhausting it, stopping time, recording every infraordinary detail and watching them vibrate with the potential for unrealised story, without in other words sitting down and writing, soon after writing this book, his masterwork of detail, Life, A User’s Manual, he wrote.

“Absence is inconceivable, as long as there is presence. For the bereaved, the world is defined by absence,” she wrote. She went to Olevano, some distance from Rome, in the hills, in the winter, two months after her partner died, the bereavement was taking hold, she no longer fitted into her life. It was winter, as I said, she stayed alone in Olevano, she looked out of the window, she went for walks, she took photographs, she wrote. The whole place, and the text she wrote, was cold, damp, dim, filled with mist, vagueness, echoes, mishearings. Well, of course. This is not to say that her observations were not precise, preternaturally precise, and the sentences she wrote to describe them, they too were preternaturally precise, whatever that means. “In the unfamiliar landscape I learned to read the spatial shifts that come along with changes to the incidence of light.” She is unable to think of the one who is lost, rather, the one she has lost, she is unable to face an absence that at this time is an overwhelming absence, instead she observes in minute detail, with great subtlety, as if subtlety could be anything but great, the particulars of the day and the season, the fall of light, those things that only she could notice, or only a bereaved person could notice, the weight of noticing shifted by her bereavement, death pulling at everything and changing its shape, changing the fall of light, even, or making her aware of changes in the fall of light, and in the shape of everything, so to call it, that are inaccessible to the non-bereaved. There are other worlds, but they are all in this one, wrote Paul Éluard, apropos of something, if it was him who wrote it, and if that was what he wrote, if these are different things, but as we can cope with the world only by suppressing almost everything that comes at us, even at best, we notice only as our circumstances allow, our mental circumstances, our emotional circumstances perhaps most significantly, and we are somehow sharing space but seeing everything differently from others and some more differently than others. We live in different worlds in the same world. She was bereaved, she saw what she saw, observed what she observed, with great precision and intensity as I have said, out of the mist, among the fallen leaves. There is a cemetery in every town, or vice-versa, she visits them all, acquaints herself with the faces of the dead, but not her dead, not the one of whom she is bereaved. She writes of herself in a continuous past, “I would.” she writes, “Each morning I went,” she writes, as if also all that is observed also continues in this continuous and unbordered way, which might be so. Death, first of all, is an aberration of time, bereavement acts on time like a point of infinite gravity that cannot be observed but which bends all else. Memories are the property of death, there can be no memories if she is to face each day, though the memories pluck at her in her dreams. She observes, she wanders, she acts on nothing, she changes nothing, the season moves slowly through darkness and chill. She travels to the nearby towns and into the hills, the mists. She recognises herself more in those displaced like her to Italy, the migrants and the refugees, those for whom no easy place welcomes them, those who have lost something, recently, that the others around there have perhaps not recently lost. “We sized each other up as actors on a stage of foreignness,” she writes, “Each concerned with his own fragmented role, whose significance for the entire play, directed from an unknown place, might never come to light.” She is aware, everywhere, of the loss that outlines and gives shape to that which goes on, and the mechanisms of loss that are built into the function of a whole town, or a whole human life. She sees the junkyard by the bus station, “an intermediate space for the partially discarded, whose time for final absence has nevertheless not yet arrived.” She visits the Etruscan tombs and sees the reliefs there as a membrane separating the living from the dead, their loss is one of space as well as of time, what is shared between her and them is two dimensional only, “as if the dead would know how to reach through the cool thickness of the masonry to touch the object’s or animal’s other side, invisible to us, and hold it in their life-averted hands.” The membrane is infinitely thin. It is only two dimensions. It is everywhere. She asks, “Will it wither away, the hand I pull back from the morti?” Time passes. Something unobserved is changing beneath the changes she observes, “the Spring air a different shade of blue-gray.” She leaves Olevano and leaves the first section of the book. Because she, we, you, I perceive only a fraction of what we could call the external, the fraction to which we are at a moment attuned, it is easy to fall out of tune with others. For her, whom bereavement has differently attuned, or untuned, her reattunement must be achieved by words, she who lives by words must recalibrate her world through words, descriptions, care, precision, nuance, it is wrong to think of nuance as somehow imprecise, it, all this, is an exercise in slowness, and we who read must also change our speed to the speed of her noticing if we are to experience the text, if we are to experience, through the wonder of her text, somehow, her experience, or something thereof. The external reveals itself only to those moving at the precise right speed of perception, so she shows us, and so too her text reveals itself only to those moving at the precise right speed, those who read the text at the speed the text requires. In the second section she remembers, memory being the province of death, or vice-versa, her father, of whom she has also been bereaved, a little longer ago, and the holidays in Italy of her childhood, with him, and, presumably, with her mother, though this section deals specifically with memories of her father, perhaps because her mother is still alive, if she is still alive. This section is the section of the father, of the memories of the father more particularly, the only way her father now exists, he has finished contributing to memories that might be had of him and fairly soon these memories become the memories of memories, the parts magnified becoming still more magnified, the other parts abraded, becoming lost. Each memory contains a necropolis, it seems. With nothing, she begins the third and final section. She rents a cottage, so to call it, in the delta of the Po. Marshes, salt pans, mists again, fogs, rains. Birds. It is winter. “Everything had been repeatedly disturbed, was forever suspended between traces and effacement.” All that is human, and all of nature is abraded. “It was even hot when I arrived, the air similarly gray and viscous, and the landscape lay motionless, disintegrating under its weight; on hillcrests and in the occasionally visible strips of riverbank clung fragments of memory that had been torn away from a larger picture and settled there.” Time moves differently, again, here, she lets it, broken things stand about, the past is forgotten but is everywhere, is in the dust and mud, more often mud, the rain, the fog. “It was a place that could only be found in its absence, by recalling what was lost, therein lay its reality.” But here in this slow nowhere something almost unperceived begins to change, the emptiness provides a space, the past gets somehow out of her, death begins not to completely overwhelm her, memory relinquishes something of its choke. She even gets a ride to town with the owner of the cottage, in his car. Perhaps she comes to think that history is the proper province of the past. “Among the places of the living are the places of the dead,” she says, and not vice-versa nor one inside the other. She visits Ravenna and in Ravenna the two mosaics spoken of to her by her father not long before his death, actually the last time she saw him before his death. The mosaics are now outside her, sensed, and no longer trapped inside, her father’s experience of the two blue mosaics likewise no longer trapped, the experience of her father, something of a connoisseur of blue, no longer confined inside the one who is bereaved, the bearer of his memory, but somehow shared with her. These two mosaics, I wonder, for her, also a connoisseur of blue, are, perhaps, the mosaic of life and the mosaic of death. “These two mosaics — the dark-blue, bordered harbour with its still unsteady boats; and the light-blue expanse with no obstruction, nothing nameable, not even a horizon.”

He had always found the countryside horrible. This, he now realised, was not due to anything inherent in the landscape, so to call it, but due to the rurality that has been imposed everywhere upon the landscape, a rurality fundamentally at odds with the landscape, smothering it, a rurality in some places intolerably dense and in other places miserably attenuated yet everywhere resulting in what he experienced, driving through it, as a terrible claustrophobia. The road, and how he clung to it, provided the only chance of escape from the rurality pressing down upon him, and yet it was the road that brought them, with every bend, deeper and deeper into the countryside. As he drove, he thought of the book that he was reading, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton, there on the back seat, just in case, though circumstances were unlikely to allow any reading on this journey, or at least he hoped not, certainly not when he was driving, although he had been known to read a book when riding a bicycle, foolishly, where was he, the book, and how the feeling of unease inherent in the stories in the ‘Prairie’ section, especially what he now remembered as the feeling of unease when the narrator is driving through the prairie, though what even is a prairie, he wondered, is any of the landscape we have been driving through today anything like a prairie, the feeling of unease perhaps arises from the unresolved transitional state that the narrator finds herself in, in the prairie or driving through the prairie, whatever that is, either by herself or with other people, members of her family perhaps, or other people, somehow sharing a small capsule of hyperawareness moving through an indeterminate and possibly oppressive landscape, just as in all car journeys and in all stories, borne on detail by detail through what otherwise could have been a long view, though a long view is nothing but impressionistic at best, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with impressionistic. The road is what matters. In Dutton’s stories, he thought, all manner of often small but generally disquieting uncertainties and disruptions, if uncertainties and disruptions could be anything but disquieting, are introduced into the text or into the narrator’s mind, if there is any difference between the text and the narrator’s mind, and move their weight upon it in causing bends and dips that the narrator must steer herself around or through. In a classic story, as Chekhov iterated, any detail introduced must eventually be discharged, the gun seen early will be fired later, but this, he thought, is fundamentally a lie, life is not like that really, and neither are Dutton’s stories. The firing of Chekhov’s gun, he thought, provides relief from the expectation that the gun will at some point be fired, literature is fundamentally reassuring in this way though it has no reason and no right to be. Is that why we read? He had wondered. Dutton’s stories have no such reassurances of shape and no catharses. Details bulge into hyperawareness and the narrator must intensify her awareness of them and steer her anxiety around them and between them, and the cumulation of undischarged and perhaps undischargeable details in the stories result in angst, just like in real life, or so he has found and in fact, if he admitted it to himself, has recently increasingly found, or so it seemed to him, grasping the steering wheel and turning it this way and that as he drove them through this increasingly intolerable rurality. He was now overaware of every turn of the steering wheel, of every acceleration and deceleration, of the way that every slight move he made of his body was translated into or was dictated by the movement of the vehicle upon the infinite turns and inclines of the road, each turn and incline composed as it was of an infinitude of subturns and subinclines, each of which required a subresponse from him as he drove upon them, each of which demanded of him that he not make even the slightest error in his driving. Whereas once he used to feel himself or managed to somehow make himself one with the machine, an extension of the vehicle, moving as one being over the terrain, he was now finding himself uncomfortably separate from the vehicle, acting upon it and responding to it consciously, to every minute variation of the terrain consciously, to every bend and every incline, hyperaware, as if he was writing an infinitely detailed story or a set of instructions for achieving an impossibly complex task, the task of guiding them safely through the rurality of this possibly prairie-like non-prairie landscape, keeping the car not only on the road but comfortably so, a task certainly impossible in its totality but, he hoped, perhaps just achievable as a string of details, a string of details for which the accumulating angst was certainly preferable to discharge. Is the vehicle responding differently, very slightly differently to the terrain, to the bends and inclines that comprise the road they are travelling upon, is there something in the steering, he wondered, or in the wheels, or in the response of the engine to the accelerator, he couldn’t isolate anything, everything seemed fine and the wheels had been recently aligned so it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the car, so perhaps the disconnect he was experiencing was between his awareness-and-intention and his body, perhaps he was becoming or even needed to become hyperaware of his own body, perhaps he was inducing in himself by merely thinking about it one of those degenerative conditions in which, before it is too far progressed, every movement necessarily becomes a set of conscious micro-instructions to the body, micro-instructions that make the movement at first possible but ultimately impossible. He had once written a very detailed description of a person walking up some stairs, he had broken down this action into the smallest possible micro-actions, he himself had walked up some stairs and worked out how to describe these micro-actions in words and it had filled or wasted several pages, and after that he occasionally found himself repeating the exercise, and it had initially just been an exercise, involuntarily for other actions, which was at first intriguing but ultimately very unpleasant, even horrific, the mind is a fragile instrument to which everything becomes a threat. Everything. He drove on. 

When something is at rest it is only conceptually differentiated from the physical continuum of its location, but when moving its differentiation is confirmed by the changes in its relations with the actual. Likewise, humans have in them a restlessness, a will to change, a fluidity of identity and belonging that Olga Tokarczuk in her fine and interesting book Flights would see as our essential vitality, an indicator of civilisation so far as it is acknowledged and encouraged, otherwise a casualty of repression or of fear. “Barbarians stay put, or go to destinations to raid them. They do not travel.” Flights is an encyclopedic sort-of-novel, a great compendium of stories, fragments, historical anecdotes, description and essays on every possible aspect of travel, in its literal and metaphorical senses, and on the stagnation, mummification and bodily degradation of stasis. The book bristles with ideas, memorable images and playful treatments, for instance when Tokarczuk reframes the world as an array of airports, to which cities and countries are but service satellites and through which the world’s population is constantly streaming, democratised by movement, no preparation either right or wrong in this zone of civilised indeterminacy. To create a border, to restrict a movement is to suppress life, to preserve a corpse. Tokarczuk’s fragments are of various registers and head in different directions, but several strands reappear through the book, such as the story of a father and young son searching for a mother who disappears on holiday on a small Croatian island. Historical imaginings include an account of the journey of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Poland following his death, the ‘biography’ of the ‘discoverer’ of the achilles tendon, and an account of a peripatetic sect constantly on the move to elude the Devil. For Tokarczuk, we find ourselves, if we find ourselves at all, somewhere in the interplay between impulse and constraint. 

In this beautifully abject and uncomfortable biographical novel, Sara Stridsberg suspends her subject, Valerie Solanas, indefinitely at the point of death in San Francisco’s disreputable Bristol Hotel in 1988 and subjects her to a long sequence of interrogations by a self-styled ‘narrator’, superimposing upon the distended moment of death two additional narratives stands: of her life from childhood until the moment  Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and from the trial via the mental hospital to society's margins and the Bristol hotel. Stridsberg has strung a multitude of short dialogues in these strands, typically preceded by the narrator setting the scene, so to call it, in the second person, and then scripting conversations between Solanas and the narrator, or with Solanas’s mother, Dorothy, or with her friend/lover Cosmogirl, or with Warhol or ‘the state’ or a psychiatrist or a nurse, or with the opportunistic Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press published Solanas’s remarkable  SCUM Manifesto , a radical feminist tirade against the patriarchy at once scathingly acute and deliciously ironic. Stridsberg (aided by her translator into English, Deborah Bragan-Turner) conjures Solanas’s voice perfectly, animating the documentary material in a way that is both sensitive and brutal. This is, of course, both against and absolutely in line with Solanas’s wishes, making herself available to “no sentimental young woman or sham author playing at writing a novel about me dying. You don’t have my permission to go through my material.” The Solanas of the dialogues is often largely the deathbed Solanas, suspended in a liminal state between times and on the edge of consciousness, whereas her interlocutors are more affixed to their relevant times, for instance her mother Dorothy forever caught in Solanas’s childhood — in which Valerie was abused by her father and, later, by her mother’s boyfriends — yet hard to get free of, due to “that life-threatening bond between children and mothers.” The scene/dialogue mechanism that comprises most of the novel appears to remove authorial intrusion from the representation of Solanas’s life more effectively than a strictly ‘factual’ biography would have done, while all the time flagging the fictive nature of the project. “I fix my attention on the surface. On the text. All text is fiction. It wasn’t real life; it was an experience. They were just fictional characters, a fictional girl, fictional figurants. It was fictional architecture and a fictional narrator. She asked me to embroider her life. I chose to believe in the one who embroiders.” Stridsberg does a remarkable job at being at once both clinical and passionate, at undermining our facile distinctions between tenderness and abjection, between beauty and transgression, between radical critique and mental illness, between verbal delicacy and the outpouring of “all these sewers disguised as mouths.” Solanas shines out from the abjection of America, unassimilable, a person with no place, no possible life. “It was an illness, a deranged, totally inappropriate grief response. I laughed and flew straight into the light. There was nothing to respond appropriately to.” At the end of the book the three strands of narrative draw together and terminate together: Solanas shoots Warhol at the moment of her own death two decades later, and the personae are released. All except Warhol, who lived in fear of Solanas thereafter: “People say Andy Warhol never really came back from the dead, they say that throughout his life he remained unconscious, one of the living dead.”

The inability to tell on a coldish day whether the washing you are getting in is actually still a bit damp or merely cold is a universal experience, he thought, at least among those whose experiences include getting in washing on a coldish day, which would not be saying much (‘A’ being the universal experience of those who have had the experience ‘A’) if it were not for the fact that perhaps the majority of people (in whom I am immersed and from whom I am separate) have actually had that experience. Why then, he wondered, is Amy Arnold’s book Lori & Joe the first book I have read that records this experience? And why do I find it so thrilling, he wondered, to read this account of what could be termed a fundamental existential dilemma writ small, why, in my deliberately solitary pursuit of reading this book, am I thrilled by the most mundane possible universal experience? Maybe exactly for that reason, the unexceptional experiences, the fundamental existential dilemmas writ small, are exactly those that connect us reassuringly when we are reading solitarily. What is thought like? What is my own thought like? What is the thought of others like? I am not particularly interested in what is thought, he thought, I am more interested in the way thought flows, surely that is not the word, the way thought moves on, or its shape, rather, if thought can be said to have a shape: the syntax of thought, which, after all is the principal determinant of thought, regardless of its content but also determining its content. If my primary interest is grammar, then what I want from literature is an investigation of form, an adventure or experiment in form. I think but I do not know how I think unless I write it down or unless I read the writings down of the thoughts of another in which I recognise the grammar of my own thoughts. What I think is a contingent matter, he thought. Why washing is called washing when it is in fact not washing but drying is another thing he had wondered but maybe nobody else has wondered this, he thought, it does not appear in this book but this book does not pretend to be exhaustive of all possible thoughts either explicit or implicit in quotidian experiences, though it is fairly exhaustive of all the thoughts that rise towards, and often achieve, consciousness, so to call it, in its protagonist, so to call her, Lori, who takes up her partner Joe’s morning coffee one morning just like every morning and finds him dead, not like any other morning. Lori immediately then sets off on a long loop walk over the Westmorland fells, in typical weather and mud, and the book consists entirely of a record, for want of a better word, of the pattern of her thoughts, looping themselves onto the armature of a fairly constrained present, winding twenty-five years of repetitions and irritations and unexpressed dissatisfactions, such as we all have, I suppose, he thought, memories of all those years since she and Joe came to live in the cottage, their isolation, the landscape, the weather, the routines of mundane existence, ineluctable and cumulatively painful when you think of them, their breeding neighbours, no longer neighbours but no less inerasable for that, the small compromises made when living with another that become large compromises, perhaps less conscious ones but maybe intolerably conscious ones, consciousness after all being what is intolerable, through repetition over decades, all wound over and over and around themselves and around the armature of the present, drawn repeatedly, obsessively to whatever it is that troubles Lori the most, but always turning away or aside without reaching that something, or in order not to reach that something, which remains as a gap in consciousness, unthinkable, but a gap the very shape of itself. Lori & Joe is a remarkable piece of writing that shows us how the mind maintains its claustrophobia even in the most wide-open spaces. Amy Arnold shows how Lori’s thoughts swarm and cluster, accumulate in ruts and run thin over past traumas, stuttering in proximity to the unfaceable that yet shapes everything it underlies. It reminds me, he thought, suspecting that readers of his review might respond better to a little name-dropping than to his attempts to express his own enthusiasm, of works by Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard in its fugue-like form, its musicality, so to speak, in the way that it perfectly calibrates the fractality of thought, so to term it, and he wished that he had not so termed it, upon the unremarkable slow progression of the present.

David Coventry's novel is informed and formed and de-formed by his experience suffering from ME, an illness of chronic systemic dysregulation that makes ‘normal’ life impossible, fractures the supposed link between the self and its biography, narrows and distorts the focus of awareness, and disestablishes comfortable conventional notions of the ongoingness of time. Dealing not much at all with the half-life of bed and sofa that is the main occupation of the chronically ill, the book is rather a multi-stranded literary performance of remembered travels, conversations, stories and encounters, seemingly Coventry’s own or those of persons close to him, burning with moments of great vividness and intensity yet also constrained by the blockages and blanks imposed on narrative by his illness, which reaches backwards through the medium of his memory to the whole of his life and beyond. Coventry’s illness is an unconsented catalyst to ways of writing freed from the performative conventions of literature and into territory where the urge to impart sense and form burns where both sense and form are impossible. The book contains much that I found compelling, thoughtful, memorable, suitably frustrating and disconcerting. It is a unique contribution to the literature of illness.

Read Thomas’s interview with David Coventry about this book:

Énard 's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the ‘Zone’), past and present. Énard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 520-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Énard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Énard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them. 

An essay is at once a wound and an act of piercing. An essay is not only about (‘about’) its subject but also, whether the writer is aware of this or not, about (‘about’) writing about the subject (and also, by extension, about (‘about’) reading about the subject (although Brian Dillon in his excellent and thoughtful book Essayism is interested primarily the writing of essays (or rather in what he terms ‘essayism’: “not the practice of the form but an attitude to the form — to its spirit of adventure and unfinished nature — and towards much else. Essayism is tentative and hypothetical, and yet it is also a habit of thinking, writing and living that has definite boundaries.” (note here, incidentally, the introduction of the subject of this review within (closer to the surface, though, than this observation) two levels of parentheses)))). An essay is a transparent barrier, a means of focus at once providing intimacy with and distance from its subject, or, better metaphor (if any metaphor can be better than another (and better by what criteria, we might ask (though that is another matter))), an essay is a stick at once both joining and separating the writer and the subject, a tool by which the writer can lever weight upon the subject, which, although never able to be wrenched free from its context (what we might call the hypersubject), a context innately amorphous, unwieldable and inconceivable, provides a point of leverage from which the writer may rearrange the disposition of that grab-bag (or “immense aggregate” (William Gass)) of feelings, thoughts and impressions that is, out of convenience and little more, referred to as the self. To write is to continually and simultaneously pull apart and remake the ‘I’ that writes. An essay is, in Dillon’s words, “a combination of exactitude and evasion,” an eschewing of the compulsion for, or the belief in the possibility of, completion or absolutism, an affirming instead of the fragmentary, the transitory, the subjective. The operating principle of the essay is style, the advancing of the text “through the simultaneous struggle and agreement between fragments,” the production of “spines or quills whose owner evades and attacks at the same time.” Style is the application of form to content, or, rather, form results from the application of style to content. Style can be applied to any subject with equivalent results. Essayism is an essay about essays, or a set of essays about essays, about the reading and, more devotedly, the writing of essays, about the approaches to, reasons for and functions of essays. Dillon especially examines the connection, for him at least, between the essay and depression: “Writing had become a matter of distracting myself from the urge to destroy myself” (even though “away from my desk it was possible to suppress or ignore the sense of onrushing disaster” (suggesting perhaps that it was only writing itself that presents the void from which it must then rescue the writer (always at the risk of failure))). Is the essay a cure or palliative for depression, or a contributor to, or ‘styler’ of, depression? “What if the ruinous and rescuing affinity between depression and the essay is what got you into this predicament in the first place? Will a description of how you made your way along the dry riverbeds of prose and self-pity provide any clues as to how to get out of the gulch again? How to connect once more, if in fact you have ever really known it, with the main stream of human experience? Such questions seem too large, too embarrassing even — though they have never been too grand for the essay. Or they may seem too small, too personal. Same answer.” As the best essays do, Essayism provides understanding without answers and leaves the reader with a habit of thinking, writing and living which will help them to ask just the sorts of unanswerable questions about their own experience, so to call it, that will increase both their intimacy with and detachment from it.

It got so that he could no longer listen to music. He had used to enjoy listening to music but suddenly or gradually it had become intolerable. He could not bear the repetitions of the small and large segments of music while he was listening to it, and what more was music than repetitions of small and large segments of itself, and he could not bear that the music repeated itself endlessly in his head after had listened to it, or, really, after just hearing it without even listening to it: every snatch became an öhrwurm burrowing into him for days. He could not bear even a few bars of music that he knew, because those few bars, that snatch, that hook, drew up the whole of the intolerable music to torment him, and he could not bear music that he did not know as each new bar struck him as inevitable and he always had the dreadful feeling that he had heard and suffered from this music before, or, rather, that his hearing and suffering from this music, whether he had heard it before or not, was a hearing and suffering that stretched into eternity in both or all directions. Of course, it was not only music that he could no longer tolerate: any kind of stimulation of his senses and any kind of self-replicating thought plunged him into the deepest suffering. He could not decide whether to call this suffering imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome, for he always felt compelled to nullify his experiences with words, but these terms, once he had thought of them, just repeated themselves in his mind and became examples of the phenomenon that they were a weak attempt to describe. Desperate and weak. He was almost at the point that he could not bear to perform the necessary but necessarily repetitive actions that allowed him to function in the world, or what passed as functioning in his case; he could not bear this constant daily getting up, moving about and eventually going to bed at last, each day the same or each day the same with pathetic little variations that merely reinforced the inescapability of the repetition of the whole, the rolling inevitability of the day. He had not yet tired of going to bed. All he wanted to do was turn his brain off. If he was an insomniac he would not last a week, he thought. Now, though, he thought, that I have thought that thought I will probably lie in bed tonight thinking about how intolerable my imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome would be if I was an insomniac and could not turn my brain off, and I will probably think this insomniac thought over and over until I become an insomniac by this repeated thought; thinking about not being an insomniac will make me into an insomniac, he thought. I will not last the week. In Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel The Calculation of Volume (five volumes of which have been written and published in Danish and two so far in English translation by Barbara Haveland), the narrator finds herself endlessly repeating the eighteenth of November, or, rather the eighteenth of November endlessly repeats itself and she seems to be the only person not caught up in this repetition. Is time somehow caught in a loop, and if so why is she aware of this loop, both trapped in it and outside it, fractured from the endlessly repeating matrix of stopped time; or are all moments in fact like this, is there nothing but an infinite set of static and unpassing moments through which our consciousness shoots itself like a rocket, breaking through each day into a new day, a new set of moments strung together merely on our awareness of them, in which case why can’t the narrator move on, what is it that brings her back to restart each day as the same eighteenth of November? She returns home (she has been away). She hides in her house in a room that her husband does not go into that day. She observes her husband, she observes her garden and the weather, she soon knows exactly when the house will creak, a bird will sing, a car will pass: it is the same each day; each day is the same day. She observes and observes and the scale of her observation alters: the infraordinary bristles with significance but significance amounts to nothing in the end. Everything is reset. The narrator tries making contact with her husband but eventually tires of explaining the situation anew every day: he cannot remember what she told him on the previous iteration of this one repeating day. Without memory there is no time. There is no companionship in the narrator’s husband. Only the narrator experiences a progression of time, only she is moving on though only she is aware that nothing else moves on so, maybe, actually, she is the only one who does not move on. What the narrator consumes is not replenished. Everything else is replenished. What the narrator does is not undone. Everything else is undone. She wonders, what is a person’s impact on the world? She wonders, how much experience can you squeeze from or into a single day without losing your capacity for experience? We wonder, when is even a single day too much? Even though his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome was beginning to make every aspect of his life intolerable, every aspect that is except the relinquishment of consciousness that presents itself as sleep, for some reason his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome was not aggravated by reading On the Calculation of Volume, in fact it was slightly emolliated, if that is the word, his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome was soothed a little by an account of total repetition, although perhaps it was not an account of total repetition but an account of liberation from and within the context of total repetition, which might, he thought, be helpful to him in his imagery repetition syndrome or dysphoric recognition syndrome and its accelerating terrifying approach to total repetition, an approach that could soon make life intolerable. Too much hangs on this, but he was ready, he thought, to read Volume 2. 

“Art is always an overreaction,” writes Yoko Tawada in her lithe and compact novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (translated from German by Susan Bernofsky); this statement being in itself an overstatement, as all statements are overstatements. Did we not learn at school, he pondered, that every overreaction provokes an equal and opposite overreaction, that the impact of each overstatement causes another overstatement to leap out at the end of the line, and so forth back and forth until the Newton’s cradle of the mind is finally still if it ever can be still. Does any movement towards certainty destroy the very certainty towards which it moves? Is that for which we reach inevitably destroyed by the reaching? This is no way to start a review, he thought; in his search for clarity he has produced a wash of vague sensations barely distinguishable from life itself, so to call it, a fractality of precisions more complicated than disorder; what is literature for, after all, if not to make life more wieldable, or our thinking about it more wieldable at least? No such luck. If the words for things can be used as substitutes for things, they are subject to linguistic forces and relations to which the things themselves are not subject. There’s an illness in all of this, a linguistic illness, or an illness of consciousness, that blurs, ultimately, or penultimately, or by something preceding the penultimate by one or several or many steps, the distinctions between words and their objects and between words and other words, a blurring that allows for or entails the febrile reconfiguration of language into new forms, he was going to write new and less useful forms, but the utility of language is no measure of its other functions (its other pathologies, he almost wrote). The narrator of Tawada’s novel refers to himself as ‘the patient’ and refers to himself in the third person (“third person is a form of salvation” (as we know)) and gives an account of the stayings-in and goings-out that are constrained by the vagaries of his illness and the vagaries of the illness of the world at large, if these are not one and the same: “The patient leaves the house as seldom as possible, and every time he is forced to go out, he first checks to see if the coast is clear. The coast is seldom clear, hardly ever.” If he ever does go out. He meets and befriends one Leo-Eric Fu, who shares with Patrik (Patrik is the name attached by others to the one who calls himself the patient; the patient's name as he approaches the collective world (plausibly a kind of healing (“A person who can continue to distance himself from home, one step farther each day, is no longer a patient.”))) a love and knowledge of the work of Paul Celan, a poet who made from German, a language broken by the trauma of hosting the Holocaust, a new language of beauty and possibility made entirely of the marked, traumatised and broken pieces of that language, and with whose work this novel is a form of conversation (please note that it is not necessary to the appreciation of the novel to be familiar with the other pole of that conversation, though the novel may lead a reader towards that pole). For the patient it is, we assume from the deliberately inconclusive evidence, the trauma of the Covid 19 pandemic that has broken language, either because of the collective circumstances in which he finds himself or also because he himself is actually in addition to metaphorically ill. I am not unfamiliar, he thought, as he attempted to continue with what was intended as a review but was suffering from an illness which made it both not really a review and very hard to sustain, with the linguistic deliria induced by fever, with the disintegrative and recombinatory compulsions that reveal something about language and are in fact structurally inherent in language but usually suppressed for reasons of utility or ‘health’. Any illness will remake language, given the chance to spread. In the delirium of the novel, the patient’s illness (“an autoimmune disorder of the mind”) attacks the distinctions between the binaries it posits: isolation/connection, illness/health, internal/external, uncertainty/comprehension, experience/identity; and attacks all borders generally: those between persons individually and those set between groups and nations. There are no contradictions. “People say I'm sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.” The forms of thought that gave rise to the illness, whatever it is, are broken and remade: “I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge. These are the fields in which I'll find my role.” It is possible, even probable, he thought, that the entire book takes place within the patient’s head, if such a place exists (“What if Leo-Eric isn't really sitting here and this is all just taking place in my imagination?”), although, towards the end, the Patrik-impulse begins to gain a little ground from the patient-impulse, and the possibility that the idea of Patrik and also the ideas of Patrik could exist in the minds of others begins at last to emerge. Language, ravaged by trauma and isolation, begins to adopt new forms. Is this healing? Illness, we begin to see, is entangled in time: “The present is a constant deferment.”

“Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. In a certain sense some people abandon affections, sentiments, as if they were things. With determination, without sorrow. They become strangers. They are no longer creatures that have been abandoned, but those who mentally beat a retreat. Parents are not necessary. Few things are necessary. The heart, incorruptible crystal.” Fleur Jaeggy’s unforgettable short novel, named after the ship upon which the narrator, aged fifteen, and her estranged father (unreachable, “aloof from himself”) spend an unprecedented and unrepeated fourteen-day cruise in the Greek Islands with members of the Swiss guild to which the father belongs, is a catalogue of mental retreat, relinquishment, estrangement, loss, and turning away: enervations towards a non-existence either hurried or postponed but inevitable to all. Jaeggy’s short sentences each have the precision of a stiletto: each stabs and surprises, making tiny wounds, each with a drop of glistening blood. When the narrator looks at her father Johannes’s diary, “written by a man precise in his absence,” her description of it could be of her own narration: “It is proof. It is the confirmation of an existence. Brief phrases. Without comment. Like answers to a questionnaire. There are no impressions, feelings. Life is simplified, almost as if it were not there.” Jaeggy writes with absolute, clinical precision but narrow focus, as if viewing the world down a tube, to great effect. Johannes, for example, is described as having “Pale, gelid eyes. Unnatural. Like a fairy tale about ice. Wintry eyes. With a glimmer of romantic caprice. The irises of such a clear, faded green that they made you feel uneasy. It is almost as if they lack the consistency of a gaze. As if they were an anomaly, generations old.” The account of the Greek cruise forms the core of the novel, but it is preceded, intercut and followed by memories of childhood and of subsequent events (mostly the deaths of almost everyone mentioned), all related closely in the present tense, but non-sequential, resulting in a sense of time not dissimilar to that experienced when repeatedly tripping over an unseen obstacle. Most of the book is narrated in the first person but the narrator achieves a degree of detachment from incidents that threaten “the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation” by relating them in the third person, referring to herself as “Johannes’s daughter”: the death of Orsola (the maternal grandmother with whom she lived after her parents’ divorce, her mother’s effective disappearance, her father’s sudden poverty and his effective exile from her life) and the violent sexual experiences she receives from two of the sailors: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. But she does it all the same. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage, Johannes’s daughter will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again.” The narrator writes her memories not so much to remember as to forget, to relinquish. Words turn experience into story, which interposes itself between experience and whoever is oppressed by it. As Jaeggy writes, “people imagine words in order to narrate the world and to substitute it.”

In the Yolŋu language, it seems, there is a fourth tense, which conveys the reality that something that has happened is still happening now and will always be happening. (I suppose, by extension, something that happens is also always just about to happen.) Certainly whatever it is that assails us through what we call our memory is not something that no longer exists. Whatever happened in the past cannot cease to exist, even if we somehow manage to shrug our contact with it. Certainly whatever it is that we call literature, or story, exists perpetually outside the usual tenses we impose upon ourselves for shallowly practical reasons. For some reason, although often composed in the past tense, a story clutches us in a perpetual now, endlessly accessible but itself unaffected by our access. Richard Flanagan’s remarkable book Question 7 is an interrogation of the ways he has responded, voluntarily or otherwise, or could perhaps respond, to the elements of his life that have affected him through experience or memory, that are affecting him now through experience or memory, and will always affect him, it seems, through experience or memory. Some of these elements are undeniably traumas in themselves: his near-drowning in a whitewater canoeing accident, or the enslavement of his father as a prisoner of war and the nuclear bombs that marked a new access of death and yet saved his father’s life, enabling the author to be conceived; and yet it is not only the traumatic and the dramatic that persist in the fourth tense: small, subtle, beautiful, and tender moments also always exist outside our transactional notions of time. How do all these evers make the experience of our life, and how do these experiences make literature? Flanagan’s writing loops and roves around the unassimilable aspects of his life, returning and returning to the key elements and yet never resolving or anaesthetising them. He writes of his grandmother Mate withstanding the taunts of the baker’s children about her family’s convict heritage: “Mate sat in the dray, eyes averted from the dust kicking up behind it and the baker’s children running alongside. She sat in the dray, she sits in the dray, and even now, long after her death, she is sitting there still, straight, looking past them and towards the future, reinventing herself by reinventing her past, not knowing the past stays with us, that was was, is and shall be, as the baker’s children chant, Crawlers … crawlers, through time and space haunting her and haunting Tom and haunting us all, unable to be unheard: Crawlers … crawlers … crawlers.” Later he writes, “Though it happened then it's still happening now and won't ever stop happening, and that writing about it, that writing about anything, can’t be an opinion about what happened as if it had already happened when it is still happening, still unintelligible, still mysterious, and all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can ever have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it…” I wonder, though, is it literature’s purpose to communicate experience and perpetuate it and explore it, as we like to think, or to neutralise, at least a bit, the threat that experience has for us, a threat that could seem for us an unwithstandable threat were we not able withstand it by the articulation of an ersatz version of this experience, a story, a representation that stands in for the experience and provides at least some relief from the clutch that experience has upon us, an editable representation even, a replacement that brings the details of our lives in from the raw and the wild, into the safer mundane refuge within the pale of grammar? And does not memory perhaps work similarly? Do we not replace experience by an account at least to ourselves of this experience, and replace this account with an account of the account and so forth, until all we have is a little story, an artefact, a tame work, that we could as easily forget as remember? Do we crave nothing more than anaesthesia? Whatever process is occurring, Question 7 is a compelling account of the author grappling with the elements of the past, so to call it, that press themselves so forcefully against him. If he survives this pressure, what will he become and how will these elements arrange themselves around him in whatever form he allows or compels them to resolve? For those who write, writing is both the arena and the product of the assimilation of experience, whatever this does to experience itself. After a period of mystical dissolution in the Tasmanian wilderness that followed his drowning, Flanagan returned to the world of the partial and the incomplete, the world of entities and fracture, the practical world, the world of human congress: “Somehow the confusion, the falseness, the incomprehension not only of others but of myself, and all the pain that these things brought, somehow this was also the very condition of living that would soon return.” That’s life. 

How does a word reveal its meaning at the same moment as it becomes strange to us, he wondered. Or should that be the other way round, how does a word become strange to us at the same moment as it reveals its meaning. Same difference, though he was a little surprised. No closer to an answer in any case. Words, experiences, thoughts, the same principle seems to apply, he thought, or certainly its inverse, or complement, or opposite, or whatever. Familiarity suppresses meaning, he thought, the most familiar is that for which meaning is the least accessible, for which meaning has been obscured by wear until a point of comprehensibility has been attained, a point of dullness and comfort, a point of functional usefulness, if that is not a tautology, a point of habituation sufficient for carrying on with whatever there is to which we are inclined to carry on, if there is any such thing to which we are so inclined. Perhaps ‘meaning’ is not the right word. Or ‘strange’. Or the others. I should maybe start again and use other words, or other thoughts, or both, he thought. All philosophical problems can be solved by changing the meanings of the words used to express them, he had somewhere read, or written, or, more dangerously, both. All that is not the same or not exactly the same as to say that the simplest thing carries the most meaning but is too difficult to think about so we complicate it until we can grasp it in our thoughts, at the moment that its meaning is lost, the moment of comprehension, he thought. Again this strange use of the word ‘meaning’, whatever he meant by that, he was no longer sure. The everyday is that to which we are most habituated, that of which we are the most unaware, or the least aware, if this is not the same thing, to help us to survive the stimulation, he thought, a functional repression of our compulsion to be aware, but this comes at the cost of existing less, of being less aware, of becoming blind to those things that are either the simplest or the most important to us or both. Our dullness stops us being overwhelmed, awareness being after all not so much rapture as terror, not that there was ever much difference. Life denuminised, that is not the word, flat. How then to regain the terrible paradise of the instant, awareness, without risking lives or sanity? How to produce the new and be produced by it? These are not the same question but each applies. They are possibly related. Perhaps now, he thought, I should mention this book, Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration between poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek, as there appear to be some answers here or, if not answers, related effects that you could be forgiven for mistaking for answers even though there are no such things as answers. Near enough. Poetry seems sometimes capable, as often here, of briefly reinstating awareness, as does the discipline of painting, as does the presence of a baby as it simultaneously wipes your mind. And alters time. What a relief, at least temporarily, to lose what made you you, he thought, or remembered, or imagined that he remembered. What a relief to be only aware of that which is right now pressing itself upon you, or aware only, though only aware is the more precise choice. “Which is more miracle: the things / moving through the sky or the eyes that move / to watch them” asks the poet, looking at a baby looking, he assumes. Such simplicities, the early noticings of babies, infant concepts, are the bases of all consciousness, he ventured, all our complexities are built on these. The first act of comprehension, he thought, is to divide something from that which it is not. “A border is / as a border does.” This book, the poems and the paintings in this book, continually address this primal impulse to give entities edges or to bring forth entities through their edges. All knowledge is built from this ‘bordering’, he thought, but it is always fragile, arbitrary, subject to the possibility of revision, more functional than actual. The second act of comprehension is to associate something with something that it is not (“One cannot help but make associations,” the poet writes), but it is never clear to what extent such associations are inherent in the world or to what extent they are mental only, the result of the impulse to associate, he thought. Not that this matters. Everything is simultaneously both separating and connecting, it is too much for us to sustain, we would be overwhelmed, we reach for a word, for an image, for relief. We pacify it with a noun. To some extent. To hold it all at bay. But also perhaps to invite the onslaught, he wondered, perhaps, he thought, the words release what the words hold back, perhaps these words can reconnect while simultaneously holding that experience at bay. Not that that makes any sense, or much. “One / cannot help but make / nouns,” the poet writes, but there is always this tension, he thinks, between accomplishment and insufficiency in language, never resolved, the world plucking at the words and vice-versa: “Something is there that doesn’t love a page.” “It is this kind of ordinary straining / that makes the margins restless.” The most meaningful is that which reaches closest to the meaninglessness that it most closely resembles. He has thought all this but his thoughts have not been clear, he has lost perhaps the capacity to think, not that he ever had such a capacity other than the capacity to think he had it. He feels perhaps he has not been clear but this beautiful book by Edmeades and Leek is clear, these poems and these paintings address the simplest and most difficult things, the simplest are the most difficult, and vice-versa, this conversation, so to call it, between a poet and a painter, reaches down to the bases of their arts, he thought, to the primalities of consciousness, have I made that word up, a gift to us from babies, perhaps the babies we once were. It is not as if we ever escape the impulses we had as babies. A baby comes, the world is changed. “Goodbye to a future / without this / big head / in it.”

“The disasters that befall you are always different from the ones you imagine,” states a character in one of the stories in Ursula Scavenius’s riveting and unsettling collection The Dolls, a collection suffused with unidentifiable or unquantifiable threats, threats that leave the narrators transfixed by the mundane details of lives distorted by unbearable forces that they cannot comprehend or name. It is hard to make a case that 'real life', so to call it, operates any differently. Is it the case that the unbearable arises from the mundane, that the unbearable is inherent in the mundane but suppressed to make the mundane bearable, or, rather, is it that by suppressing the unbearable we are left with the mundane, the only evidence we have, perhaps, of the forces set against us? Is the mundane therefore the surest point of access to the unbearable? Is the most unbearable closest to the most mundane? The potentising restraint of Scavenius’s prose, the withholding of all but the most resonant details, gives great power to that which is excluded, to that which it is impossible to include. Just as the universe is, supposedly, comprised mostly of dark matter, which we cannot sense and for which the only evidence is the effect it has upon that portion of the universe that we can sense, so too literature is most effective when attending to the effects upon the mundane of forces that cannot otherwise be directly or adequately addressed. The total, comprised primarily of dark matter, cannot be expressed. Any idea of 'the total' comes at the expense of the parts, by the suppression of some parts and the magnification of other parts. Any idea of 'the total' is a distortion of that which it purports to represent. A ‘story’, a ‘development’, likewise, is a totalitarian concept. Naturalism is a totalitarian concept. Scavenius has Kafka’s gift of being able to allow her details to resonate in the spaces that surround them, echoing in spaces that cannot otherwise be delineated, intimating the complex forces seething beneath her deceptively simple prose. Her characters move about in worlds strangely sloped, the familiar becoming unfamiliar and revealed as evidence of the unbearable. Time slips, the past is seen to be a threat, even an idyllic past is a threat because it contains the circumstances out of which the problematic present arose. “Birds chirp in the bushes outside. I laugh, realising it’s only a memory.” Every detail, every occurrence is a point of pressure, a point at which the mundane is assailed by dark matter. In the title story, ‘The Dolls’, the arrival of some refugees reveals the fascistic potential latent in the local community, including in the narrator’s father, and the distorting effect of that force upon thought and language: “There is no way to prove whether the scream was real, someone on the radio says. … It sounds real, but these days anything could be propaganda.” The force of the unbearable is always felt first upon language. 

What is the relation between the real-life Sheila and the Sheila of this book, her real-life friend Margaux and the Margaux of this book, between her other real-life friends and acquaintances and their counterparts in this book? These are not interesting questions (unless you happen to be Sheila’s demon-lover Israel (in which case, serve you right)). This book is at once an excoriating self-examination, a pitiless self-satire (although it may in fact not be as satirical as it seems to be) and an unforgivably self-indulgent exercise in self-exposure (and is these things all at once and not by turns). You will be irritated by Sheila, but she is irritating in pretty much the same way that you are irritating to yourself, and you will grow tired of Sheila, but in the same way that you grow tired of yourself. You will put the book aside, but, without really knowing why, you will keep coming back to it in pretty much the same way you keep coming back to vaguely important but imprecise and somewhat irritating aspects of your own life. Sheila nobly asks herself “How should a person be?”, and gets the same unsatisfactory, earnest and ridiculous answers as you would get if you asked yourself the same impossible question. The book contains passages of painful honesty and vapid bullshit (both at the same time, mostly), and beautiful, sad and hilarious passages, too (again, beautiful, sad and hilarious all at once and not by turns). By asking big questions in a life that contains only small answers, Sheila holds herself up to show us that we don’t know how to be, or how to make our lives the way we want them, or even to know what we want with any sureness or consistency: “Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”

My life is a sort of an orbit, he thought. My life is a repetitive circular thing, or something very closely approximating a circle, not that an orbit needs to be circular, necessarily, but I think mine is. How many times will I pass this same point in the geography of my life, so to call it, how many times will I pass by, caught in the momentum of my orbit, unable to touch what I observe of my life below, changing slowly, or fast, as it does by the influence of various forces that I also cannot touch. But what am I if I am remote from what I have just called my life, he thought, what am I, the orbiting observer, if I am not my life, if I am orbiting above my life as the astronauts or cosmonauts in the space station in Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital orbit above the planet Earth, orbiting and observing, enthralled by the attractive wonderful damaged planet below, remote from it but falling always towards it though never getting closer, in an equilibrium of gravity and momentum. An orbit, after all, he thought, is always firstly an act of attention. “Is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?” Harvey asks in the novel, as the astronauts stand in awe at the systems and patterns below them. “If you could get far enough away from Earth you’d be able finally to understand it.” Are understanding and participation mutually exclusive, he wondered, then, in my life, on this planet, necessarily, or is participation in itself a form of understanding, albeit enabled by an inescapable narrowing of perspective? As I circle in my orbit, far above my life, falling towards the object of my attention but carried away anyway by momentum, there in the equilibrium of my distance, I see there are no borders, no edges, no entities other than a oneness, if that could even be thought of as an entity, no entities other than those that exist in our minds, arbitrary borders, arbitrary edges, arbitrary entities, not seen from above but only by the participants in the struggle that they enable, the struggle that they condemn us to maintain. The moonshot is the opposite of an orbit. We divide ourselves with edges to get things done, to act one thing upon another, to intend and do, to participate or at least be aware of what we think of as our participation to the limited extent that we are somehow aware. This is how we get things done. This also is how harm is done. Up here in my orbit I observe how tiny all that is, I understand to the extent that I am remote, I am in a plotless place, I am in a place where everything is in an indefinite tense, where everything is a submission to a larger system, somewhere that I am hardly me. “As long as you stay in orbit you will be OK,” says the astronaut. “You will not feel crestfallen, not once.” I do not want to return, he thought. I do not want to leave my space of suspension, though “our hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.”

“I write: I write because we lived together, because I was once amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.” Both of Perec’s parents were killed in the 1939-1945 war, his father early on as a French soldier, and, soon after, his mother sent to a death camp. Their young son was smuggled out of Paris and spent the war years in a series of children’s homes and safe villages. “My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don’t know much about,” he writes. W alternates two narratives, the first an attempt by Perec to set down the memories of his childhood and to examine these not only for their accuracy but in order to learn the way in which memory works. Often factual footnotes work in counterpoint to the ‘remembered’ narrative, underscoring the limitations of the experiences that formed it. Right from birth the pull of the Holocaust is felt upon Perec’s personal biography, and his story is being shaped by this force, sucking at it, sucking his family and all stability away. Sometimes he attaches to himself experiences of which he was merely a witness, the memories transformed by remembering and by remembering the remembering, and so forth, and by the infection of memories by extraneous imaginative details. “Excess detail is all that is needed to ruin a memory.” The absences around which these memories circulate fill the narrative with suppressed emotion. The other narrative begins as a sort of mystery novel in Part One, telling how one Gaspard Winckler is engaged by a mysterious stranger to track down the fate of the boy whose name he had unknowingly assumed and who had gone missing with his parents in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego where they had gone in search of an experience that would relieve the boy’s mutism. In Part 2, the tone changes to that of an encyclopedia and we begin to learn of the customs, laws and practices of the land of W, isolated in the vicinity of Terra del Fuego, a society organised exclusively around the principles of sport, “a nation of athletes where Sport and life unite in a single magnificent effort.” Perec tells us that ‘W’ was invented by him as a child as a focus for his imagination and mathematical abilities during a time when his actual world and his imaginative world were far apart, his mind filled with “human figures unrelated to the ground which was supposed to support them, disengaged wheels rotating in the void” as he longed for an ordinary life “like in the storybooks”. Life and sport on W are governed by a very complex system of competition, ‘villages’ and Games, “the sole aim to heighten competitiveness or, to put it another way, to glorify victory.” It is not long before we begin to be uncomfortable with some of the laws and customs of W, for instance, just as winners are lauded, so are losers punished, and all individual proper names are banned on W, with athletes being nameless (apart from an alphanumeric serial number) unless their winnings entitle them to bear, for a time, the name of one of the first champions of their event, for “an athlete is no more and no less than his victories.” Perec intimates that there is no dividing line between a rationally organised society valuing competition, and fascism — the first eliding into the second as a necessary result of its own values brought to their logical conclusions. “The more the winners are lauded, the more the losers are punished.” The athletes are motivated to peak performance by systematic injustice: “The Law is implacable but the Law is unpredictable.” Mating makes a sport of rape, and aging Veterans who can no longer compete and do not find positions as menial ‘officials’ are cast out and forced to “tear at corpses with their teeth” to stay alive. Perec’s childhood fantasy reveals the horrors his memoir is unable to face directly. We learn that the athletes wear striped uniforms, that some compete tarred and feathered or are forced to jump into manure by “judges with whips and cudgels.” We learn that the athletes are little more than skin and bone, and that their performances are consequently less than impressive. As the two strands of the book come together at the end, Perec tells of reading of the Nazi punishment camps where the torture of the inmates was termed ‘sport’ by their tormentors. The account of W ends with the speculation that at some time in the future someone will come through the walls that isolate the sporting nation and find nothing but “piles of gold teeth, rings and spectacles, thousands and thousands of clothes in heaps, dusty card indexes, and stocks of poor-quality soap.”

Could he even write a review of a book he had read about someone writing about sentences that he in turn had read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, he himself had read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which he has also read? The question mark, when it finally arrived, seemed somehow out of place, so far did it trail the part of the sentence he had just written in which the matter of the question appeared early, all those clauses shoving the question mark to an awkward distance, already the thought that the sentence described was changing direction, as thoughts do, but the sentence was still obliged to display the mark that would make the first part of the sentence, and indeed the whole sentence thereby into a question, there was a debt to be paid after all, he was lucky to get off without interest. The separation of the question mark from the quested matter was not the only reservation he had about the sentence he had just written, he had other reservations, both about its structure and its content, in other words both about its grammar and its import, if that is the right word. One reservation was that he had chosen to write the sentence in the third person, a habit he had acquired, or an affectation that he had adopted, that depersonalised his reviews and made them easier to write and, he hoped, more enjoyable to read, certainly, he thought, less embarrassing for himself to read, or should that be re-read, not that he was particularly inclined to do such a thing. These reviews were also written in the past tense, for goodness sake. Could he write in the first person and in the present tense, he wondered, or was that a mode he contrarily reserved for fiction? Can I even write a review of a book I have read, he wrote as an experiment, about someone writing about sentences that he has read which were written by yet other people, some of whom, or, rather, some of which, I have read directly, if that is the word, that is to say not just in the book about sentences in which these sentences also appear and which I have also read?, he wrote, though I must say, he thought, that question mark is more problematic than ever. Also, would it not be ludicrous, he thought, to even attempt to write a review about a book about fine sentences, or exceptional sentences, or exemplary sentences or whatever, from William Shakespeare to Anne Boyer, including sentences from several of my favourite writers, though not perhaps the sentences of theirs that I would choose if I had been choosing, he thought, when my own sentences churn on, when in my own repertoire I have only commas and full stops, a continuation mark and a stopping mark, when those two marks for him are already too much for him to handle, accustomed as he had once made himself to the austerity of the full stop alone, you could write a whole book using only full stops, he thought, or he had once thought. He had wandered, and tried to return to the task in hand, or the book in hand, or to the thought in head, so to speak. Because the book was about sentences he found himself unable to write any sentences about it. If he wrote a review, he thought, he had no doubt that at least some of the readers of that review, if not all of the readers of that review, if there were any such readers, which seemed unlikely, would find his sentences fell short of their subject, or if they did not fall short they would quaver under their scrutiny, weaken and collapse, which is another sort of falling. His sentences would rather point than be pointed at. Thinking of writing would have to suffice. I would like to write, he thought of writing, that this book, Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon, is the sort of book that anyone interested in reading better, or, indeed, in writing better, which goes without saying, as writing is a subset of reading, if that goes without saying, though not everyone’s subset, he thought, and would have said had he been saying instead of thinking and writing, or, rather thinking and thinking of writing, Brian Dillon is good company in working out how text works when it works well, but, although he thought of writing this, as he had said, see, he does say though he said he was not saying, he did not write this as, by this time, his comma-infested sentences were almost unable to move in any direction even if not in a straight line, bring on the full stops, he thought. 

"Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping.” —Jean-François Lyotard

He had always found the countryside horrible, but this, he now realised, was not due to anything inherent in the landscape, so to call it, but due to the rurality that has been imposed everywhere upon the landscape, a rurality fundamentally at odds with the landscape, smothering it, a rurality in some places intolerably dense and in other places miserably attenuated yet everywhere resulting in what he experienced, driving through it, as a terrible claustrophobia. The road, and how he clung to it, provided the only chance of escape from the rurality pressing down upon him, and yet it was the road that brought them, with every bend, deeper and deeper into the countryside. As he drove, he thought of the book that he was reading, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton, there on the back seat, just in case, though circumstances were unlikely to allow any reading on this journey, or at least he hoped not, certainly not when he was driving, although he had been known to read a book when riding a bicycle, foolishly, where was he, the book, and how the feeling of unease inherent in the stories in the ‘Prairie’ section, especially what he now remembered as the feeling of unease when the narrator is driving through the prairie, though what even is a prairie, he wondered, is any of the landscape we have been driving through today anything like a prairie, the feeling of unease perhaps arises from the unresolved transitional state that the narrator finds herself in, in the prairie or driving through the prairie, whatever that is, either by herself or with other people, members of her family perhaps, or other people, somehow sharing a small capsule of hyperawareness moving through an indeterminate and possibly oppressive landscape, just as in all car journeys and in all stories, borne on detail by detail through what otherwise could have been a long view, though a long view is nothing but impressionistic at best, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with impressionistic. The road is what matters. In Dutton’s stories, he thought, all manner of often small but generally disquieting uncertainties and disruptions, if uncertainties and disruptions could be anything but disquieting, are introduced into the text or into the narrator’s mind, if there is any difference between the text and the narrator’s mind, and move their weight upon it in causing bends and dips that the narrator must steer herself around or through. In a classic story, as Chekhov iterated, any detail introduced must eventually be discharged, the gun seen early will be fired later, which, he thought, is fundamentally a lie, life is not like that really, and neither are Dutton’s stories. The firing of Chekhov’s gun, he thought, provides relief from the expectation that the gun will at some point be fired, literature is fundamentally reassuring in this way though it has no reason and no right to be. Is that why we read? He had wondered. Dutton’s stories have no such reassurances of shape and no catharses. Details bulge into hyperawareness and the narrator must intensify her awareness of them and steer her anxiety around them and between them, and the cumulation of undischarged and perhaps undischargeable details in the stories result in angst, just like in real life, or so he has found and in fact, if he admitted it to himself, has recently increasingly found, or so it seemed to him, grasping the steering wheel and turning it this way and that as he drove them through this increasingly intolerable rurality. He was now overaware of every turn of the steering wheel, of every acceleration and deceleration, of the way that every slight move he made of his body was translated into or was dictated by the movement of the vehicle upon the infinite turns and inclines of the road, each turn and incline composed as it was of an infinitude of subturns and subinclines, each of which required a subresponse from him as he drove upon them, each of which demanded of him that he not make even the slightest error in his driving. Whereas once he used to feel himself or managed to somehow make himself one with the machine, an extension of the vehicle, moving as one being over the terrain, he was now finding himself uncomfortably separate from the vehicle, acting upon it and responding to it consciously, to every minute variation of the terrain consciously, to every bend and every incline, hyperaware, as if he was writing an infinitely detailed story or a set of instructions for achieving an impossibly complex task, the task of guiding them safely through the rurality of this possibly prairie-like non-prairie landscape, keeping the car not only on the road but comfortably so, a task certainly impossible in its totality but, he hoped, perhaps just achievable as a string of details, a string of details for which the accumulating angst was certainly preferable to discharge. Is the vehicle responding differently, very slightly differently to the terrain, to the bends and inclines that comprise the road they are travelling upon, is there something in the steering, he wondered, or in the wheels, or in the response of the engine to the accelerator, he couldn’t isolate anything, everything seemed fine and the wheels had been recently aligned so it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the car, so perhaps the disconnect he was experiencing was between his awareness-and-intention and his body, perhaps he was becoming or even needed to become hyperaware of his own body, perhaps he was inducing in himself by merely thinking about it one of those degenerative conditions in which, before it is too far progressed, every movement necessarily becomes a set of conscious micro-instructions to the body, micro-instructions that make the movement at first possible but ultimately impossible. He had once written a very detailed description of a person walking up some stairs, he had broken down this action into the smallest possible micro-actions, and he himself had walked up some stairs and worked out how to describe these micro-actions in words and it had filled or wasted several pages, and after that he occasionally found himself repeating the exercise, and it had initially just been an exercise, involuntarily for other actions, which was at first intriguing but ultimately very unpleasant, even horrific, the mind is a fragile instrument to which everything becomes a threat. Everything. He drove on.