a review of ben marcus’ new novel, the flame alphabet

Likening language to a virus is an old Burroughsian trope, of course, but in Burroughs it’s basically just a routine; a clever abstraction. Marcus makes it more forcefully, hurtfully concrete. Indeed, his creation of a fully immersive fictional world (as opposed to a formal experiment) allows him to take a real emotional toll on his readers. After all, a life without language would be one of harrowing sadness. Deep down, then, The Flame Alphabet is less about linguistics than the decay of relationships, the fracturing of familial loyalties, and the everyday heartbreak of human estrangement.

read the rest at The Millions

an essay on dukla, andrzej stasiuk’s ‘book about light’

Dukla is not, after Flaubert, a ‘book about nothing.’ Such modernist moves belonged to the last days of literature, whereas Dukla reunites literature with its prehistory. It is not that nothing happens in the world, but that the novel must eradicate itself if it is to capture what happens. Fiction threads itself over the real ‘the way cotton candy is wound around a wooden stick,’ but once it’s finished ‘there’s only a sweet emptiness.’ What is a novel worth, anyway? Next to a film, a photograph?  Precious little, unless it’s no longer a novel, more a ‘magic lantern, a camera obscura, a crystal ball in which snow gently falls.’ In the same movement that Dukla destroys the novel, it comes close to uncovering its condition. What is erased is retrieved as unwritten.

read the rest at 3:AM Magazine

a review of mark m. freed’s robert musil and the nonmodern

Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities has taken a while to achieve recognition as a modernist masterpiece. This could be because it doesn’t quite fit with our orderly models of what ‘the modern’ might mean. The trouble is, Musil wasn’t Joyce, nor Proust, and to weigh up his book as some Germanic answer to Ulysses or A la Recherché du Temps Perdu is to miss its point. Or rather, its lack of one. Because, however many times you read this famously unfinished novel, one thing’s for sure: you’ll never fully take the measure of its pointlessness. It’d be a stretch to say that the text makes sense of itself, let alone of ‘modernity.’ Rather, its freewheeling narrative propels it somewhere beyond the familiar aims of modernist art. For unlike those others, this book doesn’t want to build systems, to give order to memory or history, or to shore up anything much against its ruins. Instead, it lets those ruins remain as they are: incomplete, enigmatic, never entirely intelligible.

read the rest at Open Letters Monthly