Vertigo

“very far away there are reasons, connections, networks, invisible things working on us and we don’t understand a thing about them.”

A small village in rural France in the early 2000s, some forty years after the brutal Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962. Bernard unexpectedly shows up at a party for his sister Solange’s sixtieth birthday and retirement. Four decades earlier, he had been drafted and sent to fight in Algeria before he was even old enough to vote. After the war, his life slowly fell apart. He married, had children, worked in a factory in Paris, and then, ten years ago, reappeared alone in this village where he grew up, refusing to talk about the past. He mooches off people and drinks too much. And now he has appeared at the party, all spiffed up, with an expensive gift for his sister that the whole village knows he can’t afford. Solange gets angry at him and people get testy. Suddenly he spies Chefraoui in the crowd, the head of the village’s only Arab family. Bernard wants to know why that “dirty sonofabitch” Arab has been invited. Before the afternoon is over, Bernard has gone to Chefraoui’s house and barged inside, threatening his wife and children. By the time he has finally left, the family dog is found lying in the yard, bloodied and nearly dead.

There are two kinds of wounds in Laurent Mauvignier’s chilling novel The Wound. There are personal injuries that come from words said, promises not kept, money stolen. These are wounds that can never be fully unpacked or understood. In someone like Bernard, they can burn like an eternal flame within, sending a life off on a crooked and destructive arc. So many wounds are, in reality, misperceptions, like misreading the intent of someone’s comment. Small events like these, left unattended for decades, assert their rights to be taken more seriously, and then they become burning passions, compulsions, the points at which tempers overflow.

The other kind of wound comes from the Algerian War. In his Foreword to the novel, Nick Flynn writes, “The Wound is a quiet novel with a war in the middle of it.” But oh, what a war! It’s vicious, visceral, inhuman. The French army fought with a racial hatred and a total unconcern for the civilian population, and the Algerian independence fighters replied with a cruelty they hoped would scare the French back to France. Neither side was bound by any universal “rules” for warfare and no soldier came back unharmed. In its midsection, The Wound follows the war experiences of Bernard, his cousin Rabut, and their friend Février. Bernard might suffer from PTSD, but Mauvignier is here to show us how immensely oversimplified that stock label is.

For about 100 pages, we read about these three very young men as they fight in a brutal and utterly dehumanizing war. If the French soldiers weren’t racist when they arrived in Algeria, the Army was there to make it clear to them that they could destroy property and kill people with impunity. Mauvignier captures the fury, the bloody brutality, and the ferocious carnal instincts that characterizes this kind of modern war of independence from longstanding colonial chains—the determination of the French Army to crush anyone who remotely looks like an Algerian independence fighter or supporter, and the tenacity of the Algerian fellaghas to frighten the French off their territory no matter what it takes.

With only a few days to go before returning home, having fought a war he doesn’t understand against a people he had no grudge against, Bernard can’t “help feeling that if he were Arab he’d probably be a fellagha.” “We’ve come to bring them peace and civilization,” he thinks, with great irony. But he also understands the untenable position of the harki, the French citizens who have lived in peace in Algeria for generations and now are being hounded back to France, unwelcome. In the end, he decides “You can’t believe anybody. They lie everywhere. He thinks he’s been lied to forever.”

And once the brutalized young friends returned home from this hellish event, Rabut finds “it bizarre that nobody asks you anything.” After a while, “you tell yourself it’s as if you never left [France]. As if Algeria never existed.” The Wound takes place over twenty-four hours beginning with Solange’s party, but the wounds it describes won’t be healed in this lifetime.

One of the distinctive elements of Mauvignier’s terrifically controlled novel is the way that his writing is intensely cinematic. The book is very visual, with Rabut, who is its primary narrator, mostly describing what he sees and hears. This gives it the feel of a documentary film. For example, the descriptions and recapitulations of the opening scene in which Bernard arrives at the party, surprises Solange with his gift, and then is ejected after his insult to Chefraoui, consume the first 32 pages of The Wound. This crucial event is viewed several times from several vantage points, often in what feels like slow motion. Here’s one example in which Rabut reexamines a few seconds of the party. This moment occurs after a woman named Marie-Jeanne has accidentally screamed on seeing Bernard offer the expensive brooch to Solange and Rabut realizes that the mood in the room suddenly turned as a result.

And everybody started to laugh, well not everybody yet, no, only the people who were right next to them and had witnessed the scene and could testify later, after he left, that everything was definitively settled and over at that very moment. Because he didn’t laugh at all. He looked at Marie-Jeanne, her iridescent pearl necklace glittering on her large, bulging bust, her apple-green dress and her hooded collar, her dyed hair with glints of mauve and mouse gray, and her smiling mouth, laughing now that he was the one feeling astonishment and stupor, not her anymore. And him not stammering, not a word from him as he faced her, while she was laughing and looking around for the approval of others, for the approval of her husband, Jean-Claude, who had walked over when he heard his wife and then kept laughing, him the husband, wanting to be cute, thinking he was funny, suddenly drawing himself up, blustering almost as he repeated,

Watch out, I’ve got my eye on you, pal.

But, during military maneuvers, everything speeds up.

Outside, the sound—they listen—of more doors being kicked in. You can hear the big clay jars thrown down, smashing apart on the ground. And children, babies crying. And dogs barking. Then a shot. They jump. Goats. A dog, someone killed a dog. And they search the adolescent. Then the others. Then someone gropes the girl’s djellaba. Then the girl looks at her mother as her hair escapes undone, falls over her shoulders. Then she opens her mouth to express surprise. She clenches her fists. The soldier lingers, searching, groping her breasts for a long time. Mouret and Février watch without saying anything. The Février walks up to the girl, the other soldier moves over, Février touches the djellaba and stops when the girls lets out a soft cry, almost nothing, and then takes refuge in silence. Her anger must be kept in the background—she knows, she repeats to herself that she can’t lose her head, above all she can’t get mad, she can’t scream, she absolutely can’t scream, can’t insult them, you have to wait, have to keep quiet.

Mouret looks at Février and motions him to drop it.

In an archived interview with Mauvignier conducted by Julien Bisson in France Today held in 2009, just after The Wound (Des Hommes) was originally published to great acclaim, the writer spoke about the origin of the idea for his novel and his ideas about literature.

This project originated long ago in something very personal, though shared by millions of people from my generation,” says Mauvignier of his astonishing novel. “My mother used to show me pictures my father took in Algeria, where he was stationed for 28 months. In these photos there was no sign of war, or of the violence my mother would talk about. They were almost like holiday pictures, with smiling kids, nice landscapes, sun, the city of Oran. But when my father committed suicide, the question began to gnaw at me: Did the Algerian war have something to do with it? If so, who will speak about what has been silenced? What is it that has been silenced?”
…
I don’t really know what the purpose of literature is,” he replies. “Maybe it is its uselessness that makes it indispensable in a world where everything needs finality. I only know it is a tool for me to expose something I sense is present, very near to us, but has no body, no voice, and whose silence demands to be broken. It is a tool to expose what lies beneath the stones.

Laurent Mauvignier. The Wound. University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Translated from the 2009 French original Des Hommes by David Ball and Nicole Ball.

In a promotional email, the publisher New Directions is hyping the idea that Wolfgang Koeppen’s great trilogy of novels written in the early 1950s “has finally returned in Michael Hofmann’s breathtaking translation.” What New Directions really means is that Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome are all finally being published as a uniform set by a single publisher for the first time. Originally written in German in 1951, 1953, and 1954, respectively, these captivating post-war novels, which each reflect back on the Nazi era in different ways, were actually translated by Hofmann in 2020, 2001, and 1992. The Hothouse and Death in Rome had previously been published by W.W. Norton & Co., while New Directions somehow got the rights for Pigeons on the Grass in 2020 when no other publisher seemed to have an English translation.

The upside of the republication of these novels by New Directions is the attention and new readers they are drawing. Already there have been major reviews in The New Yorker (April 27, 2026) and The New York Times Book Review (April 28, 2026), where Dustin Illingworth called the trilogy “one of the great reading experiences of my life. . . Taken together, the novels compose a grand taxonomy of resentment, one of the most cleareyed ever written.”

A little more than six years ago, I wrote about each of these three books. Take a look!

In Pigeons on the Grass, this wonderful, often antic but deadly serious novel, we follow the actions of approximately two dozen characters through a single day in post-war Munich. The Germans, along with a handful of their American “conquerors” who now occupy the city, shop, have coffee, run errands, pawn their valuables, and generally go about their daily lives. Everything is leading up to one main evening event: a lecture by an important American visiting poet, Edwin.

The Hothouse follows a few days in the life of Herr Keetenheuve, a member of the postwar Bundestag. In 1933, just as Hitler rose to power, Keetenheuve, who describes himself as an ascetic, a Buddhist, a disciple of Zen, and a pacifist, fled Germany to Canada. He then returned at the end of the war, optimistic and “eager to reinvent the nation as a liberal democracy.”

Death in Rome funnels everything toward one culminating event, a performance of a new piece of symphonic music by the young German composer Siegfried Pfaffrath, which will take place in a concert hall in Rome sometime in the years shortly after World War II. Siegfried doesn’t know it yet, but his parents, one of his brothers, and an uncle are also in Rome for a unique kind of family reunion. The most prominent of these relatives is Gottlieb Judejahn, a former SS general who has been convicted and sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg Trails, but who now runs the military of an unnamed Arab nation under an assumed name. The family hopes to convince Judejahn to return to Germany to help revive the struggling National Socialist cause. Unbeknownst to everyone, Judejahn’s son Adolf is also in Rome, waiting to be ordained as a Catholic priest. Throughout the novel, we will follow these family members as they explore the Eternal City, meet in various combinations, plot, sin, and discover family secrets.

Lettrétage, “an anchor institution for Berlin’s independent literary scene,” has announced a special program devoted to W.G. Sebald in their Berlin space on June 6, 2026, called “Sebald Remembering.” The event website says: “At the heart of Sebald’s work lies a deep understanding of crises, an exploration of the effects of catastrophes on the human psyche, both individually and collectively. He vividly describes the narrative disintegration and self-alienation that accompany exile, having spent the second half of his life in Great Britain. In works such as A Natural History of Destruction, he also addressed German wartime suffering and the destruction of German cities, always with an eye toward the politics of the past.”

The event is centered around a quotation from Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz (2001): “I have always resisted the power of time, driven by an inner compulsion that I myself have never understood, and cut myself off from so-called current events, in the hope—as I believe today,” said Austerlitz, “that time does not pass, has not passed, that I can go back to it and then find everything just as it once was, or more precisely, that all moments of time have existed simultaneously.” The event is free, open to the public, and begins at 20:30.

During the first half of “Sebald Remembering,” writers Marcel Krueger, Paul Scraton, and Madeleine Watts will discuss Sebald’s work and his legacy in a conversation moderated by Sanders Isaac Bernstein. The discussion will be held in English. Following a short break, Berlin-based writers are invited to read from their works inspired by Sebald. Readings may be shared in any language. 

Drawing inspiration from Sebald’s work, we invite writers to submit work that is about CRISIS. Submissions do not have to be imitations of Sebald and should not be about him. Instead, we are looking for approaches that seek to make sense of a state of crisis (present or past, proximate or remote), that problematize the act of witnessing, that dig into geography, and that attempt to pry apart layers of history to see what’s inside. Place writing, fact camouflaging as fiction and fiction as fact, and multimedia experiments all encouraged.

Selected readers will be invited to share their work at the event and will have their work published online and in a printed zine commemorating the evening.

Proposals are due by May 17. For submission details and more information about the event, see the website.

As Danielle Del Giudice’s Lines of Light begins, the reader is immediately sharing the senses of a man piloting a small private airplane down a runway, focusing only on what he sees, hears, feels. His elbows are pressed into his ribs. His field of vision is split between “the dials on the instrument panel and the trees in the distance.” But at the exact moment he starts to ascend there is a flash. Another plane is too near, somewhere above. He quickly aborts and re-lands. The pilot of this plane is an Italian particle physicist, Pietro Brahe, named, no doubt, in honor of the 16th century Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He works at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer particle accelerator housed in an underground tunnel outside Geneva, Switzerland.

Lines of Light was Del Giudice’s ambitious second novel, published in Italy in 1985 and translated into English in 1988. His goal in this slim book was to probe the ways we perceive the world—through our senses and our emotions, through the languages of science and literature—and how we try to express the inexpressible. In his first novel, A Fictional Inquiry (1983), his narrator had gone on a quest to understand why an old friend, who had died years before, had never published a single book during his lifetime despite being touted as one of his generation’s most promising writers. In Lines of Light, Del Giudice returns to similar territory. Ira Epstein, the pilot in the other airplane, is a very successful German novelist living in Geneva, who has suddenly decided he will write no more. He has just sent a letter that informs his publisher the bad news. “I believe I can say that I have experienced writing in all its forms, in all its possibilities. Today, I am free of it, with joy.” His plans? “To see beyond form,” is the cryptic explanation he gives his publisher. He now sees his stories in their entirety in his head, stories which he feels are irreproducible. “It’s like a fuse blowing, it’s as if I opened a door intending to enter and instead I exited. . . these things coming into existence are pure energy, pure light, pure imagination, not things at all, but nonthings.”

Although there are a handful of minor characters, Lines of Light is a two-person novel featuring the Artist and the Scientist, both very much wearing their capital letters. Epstein is the older, wiser of the two, and is cast as the free spirit to the young scientist who seems only comfortable talking about physics. The near collision of the private planes they were piloting creates a opportunity for a friendship of opposites. Each man finds the other intriguing and, over time, will try to mentor the other in his own specialized way of seeing. We are given no backstory of any kind for Brahe. He works deep underground, spending much of his time staring hopefully at computer screens, looking for particles that currently exist only in theory. When he looks at his computer screens, Brahe, too, sees nonthings: “curves, parabolas, ellipses, tiny vortices that coiled around themselves. For a time they remained in place, frozen, poised, then it began again. . . [He] knew the past and future of each line. The ideal would be a new line, a line which, though probable, would be where no line had been before.”

Epstein is very curious about Brahe’s project at CERN. But he is also skeptical of the future that science is bringing about. “Things are changing. Not in the common sense one gives to that sentiment. They are in fact disappearing. And the things arriving now, I’m afraid that I won’t be able to feel them. That I’ll only be able to use them.” Then he proceeds to say something that sounds very much like a warning about today’s Internet. “I’m bothered by the prospect of using without feeling. Friendship will be so much more difficult.”

Throughout the book, Del Giudice gives each man opportunities to be articulate in his own sphere and and to demonstrate that they are a bit bereft of words in the other man’s territory. One night they watch fireworks over Lake Geneva. Epstein is able to describe what he saw and heard over four pages in language that is a blend of poetic, emotional, and pyrotechnical terminology. Brahe, on the other hand, can only say that “They were beautiful fireworks.” And after dinner on another night, when the two men take a walk, Epstein repeatedly asks Brahe, “What do you see?” Brahe can only respond each time with descriptions that are little more than nouns. “A boat on a lake.”

It is in the lab that we see Brahe at his most articulate. (Although, to be clear, the expressions that Brahe has in his lab are always mental, not verbal, like Epstein’s.) On the night when his lab finally witnesses “the event” they have been awaiting, when their computer screens tell the story of “a radically new, unexpected symmetry . . . which alters the way they see,”

[Brahe] will never forget the moment he passed suddenly from seeing with his eyes to seeing with his mind. The depth of more than four dimensions, ten, eleven, some so tightly bounded, so curved, so impossible to represent, that he feels the word “space” breaking, the letters splitting, curling into themselves like cylinders, cylinders with other cylinders inside, or nested spheres, but these nest cylinders and spheres, and strips and strings and spirals, are not images, do not exist visually, it is only mentally, that he perceives the folding again of dimensions into themselves and into the four known dimensions of space-time, where you have your familiar fields, waves, particles, including the particles that tonight they are seeing for the first time, and it seems to him that the nuclear force of gravity could be sensed directly, like hearing or touch, but in that evolution of perception such an organ was sacrificed, abandoned in favor of size-temperature-humidity, and that what was once destined for a sense organ like the ear, tongue, fingertip, eye, or nose can now be sensed only through a gigantic prosthesis like the detector in front of them.

Like Epstein, Brahe finds it ironic that evolution has brought science to a stage in which the new dimensions and entities being discovered are beyond human senses and can only truly be distiguished by the computers that discover them. But the next morning, he also remembers “thinking that, with such a large machine and such a refined geometry and such a complex mathematics, the real problem is how to domesticate infinity, to put it in coherent, concrete terms, like asking, ‘Do you feel warm?’ and hearing the answer ‘Yes, warm.'” He’s finally beginning to think emotionally.

The real joy of Lines of Light is watching Del Giudice write about fireworks, time, space, piloting airplanes, mathematics, and particle physics, using language that is both poetic and precise, often delighting in the obscure language of a scientific or technical discipline. When Brahe and a colleague go to the CERN’s stockroom to obtain parts, Del Giudice gives us nearly a full page of the names of various parts—potentiometers, klystrons, and niobium plates, and so on. “Each item is displayed with equal dignity. . . In order, available, like a vocabulary.”

Del Giudice (1949-2021) began taking notes for this novel while serving as an artist-in-residence at CERN in the early 1980s (a program that still exists). In 1983, during the time he was likely writing Lines of Light, a two-man team that included the Italian particle physicist Carlo Rubbia discovered the W and Z bosons at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The pair won a Nobel Prize the following year.

Danielle Del Giudice. Lines of Sight. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Translated from the 1985 Italian original Atlante Orientale by Norman MacFee and Luigi Fontanella.

“I only knew Anneliese for half a year, but . . “

I imagine there was an ironic smile on the face of James Elkins when he titled his 570-page novel A Short Introduction to Anneliese (Unnamed Press, 2025). James Elkins doesn’t do anything halfway. Anneliese is profound, confounding, and astounding, all at once. It might bore you on occasion, it might frustrate you, it might make you want to skim some pages (go right ahead), but don’t give up. This book is like no other, and there were pages that brought me to my knees with what I can only call intellectual awe at the presentation and discussion of ideas taking place in my hands.

Anneliese is the second book to be published in an ambitious five-volume novel by Elkins with the collective title Five Strange Languages. It’s volume II in the series. Volume III, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, was published first in 2023 and you can read about it here. In that book, we were introduced to Samuel Emmer, who works for the Water Management Department in Guelph, Ontario. In 2019 his life pretty much fell apart. His wife left him, his daughter went off to college, and he was reassigned at work. In Anneliese, it’s early 2020 and his boss has suggested he have dinner with a friend of hers when he is passing through the Frankfurt airport after a business trip.

Anneliese Glur is a scientist of some sort who seems to have been recently relieved of her last academic post. She shows up to dinner with her brother Paul and proceeds to talk for hours about her health, her nasty ex-colleagues, the uncle with dementia for whom she is responsible, and other unrelated topics (twenty-some pages of this are documented in the book). Samuel repeatedly tries to interrupt her, but she goes on and on. She’s aware that people want her to “please please please just come to the point!”

I do come to my point! I am Professor Doctor Anneliese Glur! I am wild in my thinking, but it is the wildness of passion! Of invention! . . .I neither indulge in asides nor pause for irrelevant commentary, no, every single sound I utter is native to my innermost spirit, intent, and argument! By comparison with my book-length thoughts and their thousands of imbricated and enmeshed ideas, their intricately qualified positions and elaborately balanced judgments, by comparison with my arrays, lattices, and matrices of postulates, suggestions, and hypotheses, my expressive and often striking images, my articulate judicious, and eloquent turns of phrase, my apparently careless asides, my strategically positioned repetitions, and even my occasional struggles with metaphors, analogies, prepositions, idioms, and other peculiarities with that unapproachably magnificent accomplishment of thought and speech your little ‘Oh god oh god, I can’t stand to listen, please, please please just come to the point’ is nothing, it is the splurting noise a camel makes when it hacks up its phlegm, it’s a turtle’s burp, it’s the ploppy sound a fish makes when it excretes a bubble!

Eventually, she makes Samuel pay the check, then tells him: “You have the capacity to understand me, and the goals and purposes of my life and work, not just adequately but deeply.” Samuel, who barely spoke a few sentences, replies “I kind of doubt it.” But he is doomed. Over several more meals in different cities, Anneliese talks at Samuel almost non-stop for another three hundred-plus pages, while he continues to protest that he is not the man for whatever plans she has for him. Slowly, the horrifying details of her project emerge. She has been writing for more than twenty years and has been focused on her “idea” for more than forty. “As my work developed, I was led into extremely complex problems . . . I still don’t know, I may never know, whether it all makes sense.” And that is where Samuel comes in. Anneliese wants him to read her manuscript. Samuel refuses.

As Anneliese’s writing project kept expanding, she realized that it would help her ever-growing manuscript if she studied other very long books, and so more than half of the monologue that Samuel must listen to is comprised of her extraordinary descriptions of the scores of long (and I mean very long) books that she reads. This is the section that leads us to the heart of Elkins’ own mission, which is to write a very long book of his own. On the website Elkins keeps that is related to his five-part novel, there is a spreadsheet called “Work, word counts,” which shows that by the end of its fifth volume, Five Strange Languages will total 2,242 pages and over 605,000 words.

For me, this was also the most hugely entertaining section of the book, with its encapsulated summaries of the universe of lengthy tomes, like Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (“only 1,509 pages long”), the Narada Purana (“2,071 pages long” and “a cataract of weirdness”), the Mahabharata (“1,800,000 words long”), and The Manas, a poem written in the Kyrgyz language (“553,500 lines long. I read that and I’m sorry I did”). At this point Anneliese calmly drops the fact that she only uses 71 languages in her book. Samuel merely responds, “I am listening.” As Elkins tells us on his website, Anneliese also reads “many long novels including Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Lucy Ellmann, Proust, Joyce, Arno Schmidt, and Marianne Fritz [and] decides that each of these books, in its own way, fails at controlling its structure.” If you look at the spreadsheets on his website, you’ll see that Elkins has no intention of letting his five-volume novel lose control of its structure.

Then Anneliese suddenly dies, and one day Samuel finds two large wooden crates in his laboratory, containing Anneliese’s 120 notebooks. He opens the notebook labeled Preface and Table of Contents. Anneliese has titled her manuscript Psūkhḗ, a Greek word that can mean something like “the breath of life,” “a soul,” or “a person’s mind.” She claims her book “compiles the knowledge about biological life from Aristotle onward. . . into an expression of truth . . . science made into liberal art.” Moreover, “the design of this book submits chaos to the control of art and language and not just of science, and therefore it gives irrationality the form of wisdom.”

Ω

“I am always careful to select words that are precise and yet as irritating as possible.” (Anneliese to Samuel)

“My real intentions, my ultimate intentions, my unexamined intentions, my deliberately unexamined intentions, those are tricky . . .” (Anneliese, writing in her Preface)

With a bit of calculating, Samuel comes to realize that Anneliese’s notebooks contain about 7,522,500 words, 29,050 pages, and 8,850 images, not counting diagrams. And to prove it, Elkins reproduces 1,140 very tiny pages that purport to be Anneliese’s manuscript across twenty-two pages of Anneliese. Elkins tells us that “some of the images are modified from scans of books by Marianne Fritz. Some contain images that also appear in Books 1, 3, and 4, and there are images from Anneliese’s interests (marine worms, ticks, bacteria, viruses) and marginal references (to the Black Notebooks).”

Just reading the Table of Contents causes Samuel to panic. “She had filled two of the last notebooks, 800 pages, on the different ways people waste their lives.” In the end, he abandons the notebooks, decides he will read no further and just walks out of his lab for the last time. “Suddenly these notebooks seemed alien, as if I had walked into a library in a dream and discovered all the books were written in a language that had died out centuries ago. The bent covers on some notebooks made them look like animals. They covered the lab tables like the shells of enormous beetles.”

Still, Samuel had a grudging sense of admiration for what Anneliese had accomplished. “What had I done with my own life?” Anneliese, on the other hand, had shown him “what it looks like to write for yourself, when no one is watching, no one is waiting to see your work, what it’s like to push away ordinary language and common sense until you come to an unpleasant place where you hear your synapses talking to themselves.”

When Anneliese proper ends, there are still about eighty-five pages left. These pages are for the Notes that go with the 49 tiny footnotes that are easy to overlook. At first glance, much of this Notes section appears to be given over to discussions about the extreme difficulty of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), with pages of actual music reproduced. Don’t be put off by this. For one thing, the Notes provide a fascinating mini-introductory (of sorts) to late-20th century avant-garde music, and simply being exposed to this was mind-blowing. But buried within the Notes Elkins continues the novel’s narrative a bit. It is here we learn that Samuel wrote Anneliese forty years earlier, and that he is writing these Notes now in his retirement in the wonderfully named village of Shallow Lake, somewhere in northern Canada. “Forty years ago, I wrote this book to help me think about Anneliese. This month, I wrote these notes to explain the odd sensation of reading about a person I had nearly forgotten and hearing Stockhausen’s music in her place. I read about Anneliese’s loudness, how her voice hammered, and that reminded me of Piano Piece 9.” Elsewhere he remembers “her insistence that her thinking was not random or insane. That reminds me especially of Stockhausen. They were both nearly hysterical and yet fiercely dedicated to making sense. Both built systems of outlandish intricacy, which sounded to people who heard them like froth, like nonsense.”

Ω

Elkins recognizes that Anneliese, and perhaps all his projected 5-volume novel, is not for everyone. On the website for the novel he has written:

It’s usually assumed a novel is for anyone, provided they are interested in the story. I might not be interested in a novel on the working conditions of miners in the north of France in the 1860’s (Zola, Germinal) or the lives of people in a council estate in London (Zadie Smith, NW), but those books are accessible to me if I am. The assumption is fiction doesn’t have levels like science or engineering, and that it doesn’t refer to previous fiction in such a way that precedents need to be read first.
I think this assumption has never been true. This book is unusually specific in its prerequisites, because it is about long books, so it’s for people who have attempted to read long books of fiction, history, or philosophy, and ideally it’s for people who have tried to write books longer than, say, 1,000 pages. Chapter 7 is legible without knowledge of any of the specific books that are mentioned, but the entire novel will be most meaningful for people who have a personal interest in reading or writing long and complex books. In this, A Short Introduction is similar to Finnegans Wake, Bottom’s Dream, Montano’s Malady, or other books that are about actual books.

Elsewhere in that same document, he thinks about Thomas Bernhard, the writer with “the most visible influence” of Anneliese and whose narrators are notoriously and deliberately irritating. “Anneliese’s monologue is longer than Bernhard’s. I hope this produces a different kind of exhaustion and irritation.”

If Elkins’ project really intrigues you, he has written a nearly 200-page online GoogleDocs guide to the five novels in his Five Strange Languages series called Ideas and Materials. I already have the Advance Reader’s copy of Stories, Like Illnesses, Volume I on the series, which will be published in September. Look for a post on it about then.

“the metaphysical decorum of calculation . . .”

As the book opens, the narrator of A Fictional Inquiry and a “middle-aged military man” are on some railroad tracks. They must walk the last kilometer to Trieste because their train has broken down. “‘See that perspective?” the military man asks, pointing to the horizon line. “We do scores of calculations for perspective, to reproduce a defect of vision.” When the narrator arrives in Trieste, he visits several bookstores, then the city library, then has a meal. He seems to be stalling. He finally takes a cab to a hospital with a long-term care unit and is shown into the room of an elderly woman, who begins to reminisce. She finally mentions a name, Roberto Bazlen. She continues talking for a bit before asking, “What is it that you want to know about him?”

“Why he didn’t write,” is the narrator’s answer.

And so, indirectly, fourteen pages into the novel, an insignificant character finally broaches the subject of the book. Throughout Inquiry there is the sense that whatever is meaningful lies beneath the surface, that the real events are occurring indirectly. The narrator keeps missing the signals and Del Giudice is hiding them from us.

Written in 1983, but not translated into English until last year, this was the first novel by Italian writer Daniele Del Giudice. Impressively, the back cover had a five-paragraph blurb by another Italian writer, the rising star Italo Calvino, which concludes this way: “What does this remarkable book herald? Another debut novel by a young writer? Or a new approach to representation, to narration, consistent with a new system of coordinates? (Mercator’s map is one of the key images.)”

Roberto Bazlen (1902-1965) never published anything in his lifetime, although the posthumously issued Notes Without a Text and Other Writing contains his unfinished novel “The Sea Captain.” Instead, he lived a life steeped in literature. He was a regular at cafés where writers met and talked with each other. He promoted writers’ works to publishers. The consensus is that he decided to live a full life rather than devote himself full-time to writing.

The narrator goes about his search for Bazlen, his friend who died ten or twenty years earlier, with a distinct lack of passion, almost reluctantly. Bazlen was a man who had the promise of becoming one of the great writers of his time but died without having published a single book. The narrator suddenly wants to know “Why didn’t he write?” To try to answer this, he decides to visit aging friends of Bazlen’s in Trieste and London and listen to their fading memories and their conflicting theories, while he mostly stares out their windows or glances around their rooms.

During one such interview in Trieste, a woman takes a scrapbook from a bookcase and opens it to pages of photographs. Some of them must show Bazlen, but the narrator can’t look. “Each time she turns a page I blur the image, crossing my eyes and focusing on the tip of my nose.” As soon as the scrapbook is closed, he excuses himself and hurries back to the train station and onto the next train home. “I look out the window with a general sense that something has changed. I think I came here to understand why a writer didn’t write. Now everything is diverging.”

Instead of parallel lines that mysteriously merge and point to the horizon, those lines now diverge, spreading out from him, but also pointing back to the narrator. In the second half of Inquiry, it becomes more obvious that this search is as much about the narrator as it is about Bazlen. His next stop is London and a Mrs. Blumenthal, who knew Bazlen well and happened to be the person who found him when he died. As she prepares to serve the narrator tea and cake, she wants him to tell her something about himself. “I find I am unable to summarize myself on the spot, or instantly convey an idea of who I am.” While he watches her slowly and surgically cut two pieces of cake with a knife, he rephrases and, crucially, expands the four-word question he has been asking everyone preceding her.

“‘What I am interested in,’ I say, ‘is a point at which knowing how to be and knowing how to write perhaps intersect. Everyone who writes imagines it in a different way. With him, however, there was an omission at that point, a refusal, a silence. I would like to understand why.'” In addition to trying to fathom Bazlen’s refusal, there is a hidden rhetorical question in the narrator’s first sentence. “What I am interested in is knowing how to be.” This is clearly also part of his inquiry.

The narrator never tells us anything about himself. Not one biographical detail slips out. But twice he engages in extended reveries that reveal his desire for a life that might be more orderly, perhaps with all “defects of vision” corrected. In the first such episode, he is killing time once again, sitting on a bench in the port of Trieste facing a docked French naval ship. A young couple declares they are French to an ensign on the ship and he offers them a tour—which the narrator proceeds to conduct in his imagination, stop by stop. He tours the couple through the chartroom, the engine room, the pilothouse (“a disappointment”), the orlop deck, and other key rooms on the ship without leaving his bench.

“The compass binnacle, floor timber, the alidade on the plane table: These terms the ensign would not likely to pass up for any reason. Some words cause one to behave in a certain way. Then too he likes these words because they have no synonyms, and they are able to combine technical precision with a certain amount of suggestion, eliminating everything in between.”

After the young couple depart the French ship, the narrator remains on his bench and think of all the ways in which he envies the life of the ensign, “his way of seeing things: very often he glances sidelong, he’s used to seeing by collimation.” Collimation is the process of aligning optical elements or light/radiation beams to ensure they are parallel.

The second imaginary reverie occurs on the plane from Rome to London. The narrator momentarily becomes the flight’s “second-in-command, [who] will take radial 292, a standard route over the sea from Rome Fiumicino” (Rome’s airport). The narrator proceeds to explain in precise aeronautical terms how the plane will make its way across the Alps, across Europe, to London’s Heathrow Airport. The co-pilot, he tells us, is using a map based on the older Mercator map,

“the map on which the world is cut out with scissors, rolled up and unrolled, then laid out flat. The meridians remain equidistant; the parallels curve convexly toward the poles, ever more smiling mouths in the north and progressively sadder in the south. But the Mercator map is not a geometric projection; it is devised with precise calculation, and with near-perfect mathematics. Its other name is Representation.”

The Italian flight crew will pronounce their plane’s ID through a protocol—India Delta Oscar Foxtrot November—so that it won’t be “incomprehensible” to others. The narrator mentions how the anemometer, the artificial horizon, and the altimeter operate, before mentioning that these can occasionally fail. At which point he imagines the plane suddenly bursting through the clouds, headed straight toward Mont Blanc at 800 kilometers per hour. The eyes of the flight crew “might sense a brown-and-white mass beyond the windshield and fast-moving wipers, and that image, hypertense with adrenaline, would remain in their eyes, if it’s true that the retina retains the last thing one sees.”

Death is already part of the narrator’s calculation. One morning he tells us that he has woken up “with my arms crossed over my chest, in a position my body assumes on its own now, but that sooner or later someone else will have to arrange it in.”

Del Giudice’s original title for his novel was Wimbledon Stadium, which, I realize, is not as marketable as A Fictional Inquiry. (Just think how many books these days, fiction and non-fiction, are based on searches for people, lost, forgotten, or disappeared.) But there was a reason Del Giudice titled the book after the famous tennis grounds. On the way to his second and final visit with Mrs. Blumenthal, the narrator emerges from Wimbledon Station and once again stalls for time. He wanders into the Wimbledon Stadium Museum, “where all the objects are devoid of emotions, indeterminate, like photos.” He goes out onto the famous center court, silent and empty under the retractable roof, and imagines “where a ball must have traced a horizontal eight between one player and the next, like the infinity sign.” He realizes that his upcoming meeting might be his last chance to ask questions about Bazlen, but he can’t think of anything new to ask. Instead, “any words, whatever they may be, run counter to the setting. I would just like to gaze, and feel; and for the first time I’m sorry, right now, not to be able to photograph.” It’s in the great Stadium where victories and defeats are earned that comes to understand that his search is invalid.

“I have never been so close to the answer, and so indifferent to the question.”

From the beginning, the narrator had been reluctant to seek out Bazlen’s old friends, and now he realizes that their representations of Bazlen’s life and why he chose not to write have been useless to him. At the very end, he settles for an object, one of Bazlen’s old sweaters, which Mrs. Blumenthal has given him during their final meeting. As his train departs Wimbledon Station, he holds the pullover “as gently as one would cradle a baby.”

Daniele Del Giudice. A Fiction Inquiry. New Vessel Press, 2025. Translated from the 1983 Italian original by Anne Milano Appel.

“The seemingly unsolvable problem of Montevideo”

Montevideo, the latest novel by Enrique Vila-Matas to be translated into English, is a tale of two rooms. As the novel opens, the nameless narrator gives us a bit of his backstory, which tracks closely with that of the book’s author. “In February of ’74 I traveled to Paris with the anachronistic intention of becoming a writer from the 1920s, ‘lost generation’ style.” He soon becomes the author of books with the wonderful titles of A Carriage of One’s Own and Virtuosos of Suspense, the descriptions of which echo the author’s own Never Any End to Paris and Montano’s Malady. Like the narrators of nearly every one of Vila-Matas’ books, the man who narrates Montevideo has more than a touch of “literature sickness, an incurable obsession with literature.” Early on, he announces that he is writing a “biography of my style.” And he is going to name names. On the pages of Montevideo, he namedrops and often discusses scores of writers that he admires: Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Elizabeth Hardwick, José María Lezama Lima, Stéphane Mallarmé, Julien Gracq, Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald, Rodrigo Fresán, Josep Pla, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes, Vladimir Nabakov, the list goes on and on. The narrator (Vila-Matas, really) is creating his own literary family tree by tracing his roots back through Fleur Jaggy, Roberto Bolano, and a group of late twentieth century writers, back to earlier twentieth century ones that include Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and W.H. Auden, further back through Hermann Melville, and ultimately to Laurence Sterne with his “constant, glorious digressions and the erudite comments.” Atop this literary family tree sits Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), the “magical book that’s proven to be my lucky charm through many a trial.”

But at the moment, the narrator admits that he suffering from writer’s block. So, with extra time on his hands and still struggling from the “repercussions” of his father’s recent death, an invitation to give a talk in Montevideo, Uruguay sounds promising. Montevideo happens to be where the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar was staying when he was inspired to write his 1956 short story “La puerta condenada” (“The sealed door”). Long obsessed with Cortázar’s simple, but mysteriously haunting story, the narrator of Montevideo decides he must try to stay in the same room at the very same hotel where Cortázar resided. (You can read an English translation of Cortázar’s story here.)

In Cortázar’s story, a businessman spends several nights in Room 205 at the Hotel Cervantes and each night he is awakened by the sound of a baby crying in the room next door. A times, he thinks he can hear a woman trying to speak softly to calm the baby down. Each morning he talks to the hotel management about this and they assure him that it is a lone woman who occupies the neighboring room. The first night after the woman has checked out, the man goes to bed and finds once again that he cannot sleep. Ironically, now he misses the sound of the baby crying. Then, the crying begins again.

The hotel in Montevideo (which is currently the Esplendor by Wyndham Cervantes) has changed dramatically in the intervening seventy years and no one on the staff recognizes the famous short story when the narrator arrives. Nevertheless, he settles into Room 205 and easily locates the sealed door that leads to the adjacent hotel room, now hidden behind a bureau which he has moved aside. Curiously, the door is ajar. Our narrator enters Room 206, where, in theory, the woman and the baby would have stayed in Cortázar’s story. “That meeting point between real life and fiction was taking up more and more space in my mind.” His exploration of the room seems to take him into the realm of the imaginary. “Once or twice I got lost in unexpected nooks and crannies, down paths I’d never taken before.” Eventually he spies something he had not seen before, despite his meticulous search. In the middle of the room a red suitcase “had inveigled its way into my life and into Cortázar’s story.” He takes the suitcase out to have the management dispose of it, but a drunk steals it. Eventually, he works up his courage to enter Room 206 for a second exploration. Once again, the red suitcase stands in the middle of the room, but this time a large, dead spider sits atop it.

When the narrator tries to return a third time, sliding the bureau aside, the door to the adjacent room has disappeared. The hotel management team, which he refers to as the Marx Brothers, is adamant that the door has been sealed over for decades and that there is no room numbered 206. The narrator is rapidly growing more paranoid, worried that all of this must be due to secret societies or cults. “Had they been planning to murder me?” It was time to get out of town, escape the “seemingly unsolvable problem of Montevideo,” and return to his home in Barcelona.

The narrator’s extended engagement with Cortázar’s short story becomes something like a multi-day performance piece in which he tries to summon forth the original room from the 1956 story. For Vila-Matas, the encounter provides an opportunity to ingeniously update and rewrite Cortázar’s 70-year-old story, substituting a red suitcase that won’t go away and a horrible spider for the woman and her crying baby. He has converted Cortázar’s eerie narrative into something that seems to represent his own personal fears.

Ω

Shortly after returning to his home in Barcelona, the narrator meets with his friend, the fictional artist Madeleine Moore (who might just be modeled a bit on Vila-Matas’ friend, the artist Sophie Calle*). He tells her about his experiences with Room 205 in Montevideo and she tells him about her upcoming exhibit at the Centre Pompidou. Quite by coincidence, she is going to include in her exhibition a new installation based on a fictional hotel room from the 1950 British film So Long at the Fair, starring Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde. In that film, a brother and sister visit the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and stay at the luxurious Hotel Splendide. One day the sister returns only to be told that her brother’s room, Room 19, doesn’t exist and the hotel staff claim that they have never seen her brother. Moore decides that only she and the narrator will have keys to this hotel room she is going to construct. Moore tells him: “I think it will do you good to get to know your true room and reflect on it deeply, and also to search, if the opportunity arises, for a door that might lead you to a new place and a new book.” She’s hoping it will break his writer’s block.

When Madeleine Moore’s exhibition opens, our narrator makes his way to Paris for the opening reception. He uses his key to enter Room 19, where he is greeted by a humid warm breeze. As his eyes begin to adjust, he spies a red suitcase—this time without a spider—and, in the distance, a door. At the same time, his ears begin to hear something. “There came the voice we hear inside our own heads when we think . . . not only was it a good imitation of my own voice, but it kept saying things that sounded familiar, because I’d written them.” He is horrified to hear his own words thrown back at himself like this. He angrily calls Moore from his cellphone and complains, but her only response is to tell him that the red suitcase once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. All at once the audio in Room 19 turns to that of a torrential rain. “You are in Bogotá,” the voice says several times. Bogotá, the narrator informs us, is where he spent one of his most unfortunate trips. It was “hell,” he tells us.

While it doesn’t cure his writer’s block, the experience with Room 19 gives the narrator a momentary feeling of hope, of having his “true identity” revealed to him, But Moore brings him back to earth, revealing the real reason she created “a masculine version of Virginia Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own'” for him. She had been thinking about men and their “immortal pages” and she wanted male writers to “rue the day they wrote such nonsense instead of learning how to work alongside feminine literature.” The narrator thinks of various responses to Moore and wisely decides it would be better not to say any of them out loud.

As it turns out, that other door led to a hidden door in Madeleine Moore’s Room 19. On a return visit, the narrator enters it and finds yet another door awaiting him. He thinks long and hard about opening it but decides “I didn’t want a room next door to the room next door.” A few days later, he is back at home in Barcelona, having “found the way out of my writer’s block.” Out of curiosity, he looks at the website of the hotel where he stayed in Montevideo and is surprised to learn that he can view Room 205, the room where he stayed, from his computer. But this Room 205 looks nothing like his Room 205. It is twice the size of the one he stayed in and has much more sunlight! “It was the second time a room in the same hotel had disappeared on me.” At the book’s end, he thinks back to what his mother used to tell him to shut him up when he pestered her with too many questions. “The great mystery of the universe was that there should be any mystery at all.”

In truth, I have ignored more than half of Montevideo in this summary. This book, like almost every other book that Vila-Matas has written as far back as Bartleby & Co, more than twenty-five years ago, is frequently referred to by its narrator as a diary. So, there is endless to-ing and fro-ing to places like Reykjavik, New York, Paris, and St. Gallen, Switzerland, plus his recollected vision of the circumstances that made his previous visit to Bogotá so hellish. As Vila-Matas’ writing matures, his books have become something like four-dimensional Rube Goldberg devices, moving up, down, and sideways, and back and forward in time. They have become impossible to characterize without greatly oversimplifying and leaving out their considerable complexity. Vila-Matas is always telling us exactly how to read his books. In a recent one he wrote that his literary output “is just one single book, composed of the various books I have written. . . I repeat myself in order to move forward.” And at the end of Montevideo, he returns to a theme that has echoed throughout many of his books. He tells us he is “trying to return to a time when no one expected stories to make sense and, moreover, when all stories were stripped of even the slightest obligation to do so.” The narrator dreams of the “end of plots.” This, it seems to me, is an indication that we are meant to think back to the time of Tristram Shandy, and even before, to Don Quixote (1605). Enrique Vila-Matas may be our era’s Cervantes, sending his main man out to do battle with evil hoteliers and secret cults or anyone who seems determined to take the fun out of literature.

Ω

*I only suggest this because of Sophie Calle’s artwork L’Hôtel, 1983-1986, which is owned by the Centre Pompidou. While it does not physically resemble the room described in Montevideo, it could easily have been an inspiration. It consists of seven rooms containing photographs and texts from the time that she worked as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, investigating the traces left behind by the sleep and daily activity of the room’s residents. The artwork can be seen here. Vila-Matas has written about Sophie Calle before in his book Because She Never Asked (2007/2015)

Enrique Vila-Matas. Montevideo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025. Translated from the 2022 Spanish original by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. The wonderful cover of the Spanish first edition from Seix Barral publishers (shown above) reproduces the painting Four Rooms, Interior from the Artist’s Home, Strandgade 25, 1914 by the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi. One section of the fictional art installation by Madeleine Moore is based on this painting. I really prefer this cover image to the weak imitation chosen by Yale.

The idea of creating new poetry by eliminating or redacting some of the words from the another source text has intrigued me for many years. One of the reasons this genre of poetry attracts me is that these poems often have an striking visual element. Redaction poetry is sometimes made through blackout, using those bold black bars we’re used to seeing in censored documents in newspapers. Poets can also redact using commercial white out products or they can draw lines by hand through the words they want to eliminate. It turns out there are multiple ways to obscure unwanted words; by erasing, smudging, or painting over them, or simply making some of the words disappear, leaving gaps where they once were. Finally, the poet can do away with any visual hint at redaction and simply write a new poem using another text as the source for its words.

A few weeks ago I went down a rabbit hole searching for something about redacted poetry and when I finally surfaced I no longer remember what I had been looking for, but I realized that it would have helped my obsessive journey if there was a bibliography of books of redacted poetry to guide me. So I decided to create one, along with a short bibliography of selected literature about the genre. So up at the very top of my blog, among the headings in red typeface, is Redacted Poetry – Bibliography. Click on it and this is the Table of Contents you will find:

1 Introduction
2 Books With Redacted Poetry
3 Articles About Redacted Poetry
4 Books About Redacted Poetry
5 Internet Only Resources
6 Key Artists & Artworks Using Redacted Texts

The history of redacted poetry is fifty years old. The earliest published book of poetry I know about is Ronald Johnson’s Radi os,1977. It’s an elaborate near blackout of the first four books of an 1892 edition of John Milton’s paRADIse lOSt. Not surprisingly, many examples of redacted poetry use works by other writers as their source text, basing their new poems on works by John Milton, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Bruno Schulz, or John Ashbery, to name some of those poets whose works have made their way into new poetry.

Increasingly, however, redacted poems are taking on a documentary purpose, intersecting with docupoetry, and often becoming overtly political. Poets are using the very words of the government or the colonizer or the slaveholder to create counternarratives, poetry that speaks back to the source, that tells the story from the voice of the silenced. These examples of redacted poetry seem to have begun with Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo, a book in which Macdonald redacted much of The 9/11 Commission Report with black ink, leaving a completely different text. A more recent example is Quenton Baker’s Ballast, shown above. Ballast reproduces the very heavily blacked out pages of Senate Document 51 of the Second Session of the 27th Congress from 1842, causing a poem to rise up out of the blackness. “I belong to a dangerous color,” page 34 reads. This document deals with the revolt on a slave ship Creole that held 135 American-born slaves who rebelled and were able to escape. According to Baker, the Creole rebellion was the only large-scale revolt of that nature that “did not end in capture, torture, or capital punishment.” The Senate document deals only with letters between US and British consulates in the Bahamas and sworn depositions from the Creole’s white crew. There was no testimony from any of the 135 Black Americans aboard the ship. In the second half of Ballast, Baker writes an extended poem in which he attempts to speak for the 135 missing voices. This is just one of numerous such examples to be found in the bibliography.

I also included in the bibliography a section on key artworks that depict redacted texts. I did this because artists discovered the visual and philosophical possibilities of redacting texts earlier than poets, and because many poets have cited visual artists and artworks as sources of inspiration. Plus, they’re just terrific to look at.

Finally, the distinguished American composer Melissa Dunphy has taken redaction poetry to the next level by turning three redaction poems by three poets into songs. The poems were made by eliminating words from the federal Form N-400, which is the application for becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The poems and Dunphy’s sheet music may be seen here.

W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn, which is almost always described by booksellers and even its own publisher as a walking tour of England’s East Anglia, has, not surprisingly, served as a literal guidebook for tourists, journalists, artists, filmmakers, and writers seeking either insights into Sebald or inspiration for their own projects. The latest iteration comes from a new music and publishing start-up company located in East Anglia called Briticana. It’s a book called In Search of Anglia, a novella published in a small edition of 400 copies that comes with a CD inserted inside. In their publicity, Briticana seems to be highlighting the musicians more than the author, a writer named J. Kyn, who they describe as “an emerging writer from East Anglia.”

A group of friends [wander] along the East Anglian countryside and coast under April skies on a mission. They stop at pubs to listen to wonderful musicians, eat the food and drink of the land and sample the real ale of life. They talk into the early hours about music, about the storms howling outside and spooky tales of centuries past. New friends are made at the bookshops and galleries they visit, yet this holiday turns out to be a quest to discover if it is possible to create something new without losing the old.”

Jezebel, Simon, and Ismael are “following in the footsteps of an enigmatic writer called Max who died decades ago leaving behind the literary equivalent of the formula s=kLogW; which may be the most elegant scientific equation ever articulated by a human being in the last one hundred and forty thousand years.” That equation is Boltzmann’s entropy formula, which I encourage you to read about elsewhere, perhaps on Wikipedia. They follow the route that Sebald took through East Anglia and have decided that “at the end we would throw away something that had once been very precious.” On their trip, which measures about 80 miles in length by my estimation, they travel by foot, train, and bus. They chat up people whenever they can and converse about Brexit, Quantum mechanics, fascism, DNA, rapacious developers, emigration, London in the 1980s, memory, what England really stands for, trickle-down economics, war, refugees, and more—all topics Sebald would have approved of, I think.

Much of the talk during the trip is about music. At Southwold, listening to the gentle sounds of the sea, Ishmael, who serves as the narrator, is reminded of “Sea Drift” (1903-4) by Frederick Delius, which “conveys the restlessness of the sea to such perfection.” Later on, he describes to his companions his five favorite recordings of “Chants D’Auvergne” (1923-1930) by Joseph Canteloube. And outside the Jolly Sailor pub in Orford, he listens to a man singing the ending lines of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. In pubs along the way, they listen to the songs of the musicians whose work can be heard on the CD that accompanies the book—the East Anglian artists Chloe with the Cyriacs, Miguel Zambujeira, All My Trials, and Efte and Ghost Carnival. The book is also heavily illustrated, with small photographs (as on the left page below) credited to “M B et al” and “Ink sketches by F Carless et al.”

When they reach the end of their trip, the trio ceremoniously drop their cellphones in the sea and start the journey homeward. “The three of us will leave everything we know behind to start something new. We will abandon the complicity of our current life. We will embrace the risk of living in a different way. It has every chance of failing, but we are here only through courage.” In spite of their own minimal sacrifice, the trio insist on thinking big as they reflect back through the history of activism in Britain and commit themselves to carry on the battle “to protect our freedoms and ensure justice stays at the heart of our culture and our land.” It’s a good message for our times.

Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt was first published in Germany in 1995 and then translated as The Rings of Saturn in 1998. In Search of Anglia stays true to the spirit of Sebald’s book without ever becoming slavish to it. The trio follow in his footsteps and his ethic, but they do so very much with their own spirit, bringing it into the 21st century. And the music is really good.

“Where was he, the one who remembered who I was?” – from “Doubt”

Richard Siken is out to make a statement with his new book. Even without an exclamation mark, the book’s title, I Do Know Something, handwritten in capital letters across the solid black front cover, suggests that the poet really means business. Then open the book and stare for a moment at the bright red endpapers, a detail from an artwork by Cecil Touchon called “Post Dogmatist Painting #934” (2017). Touchon’s piece depicts portions of large white letters of the alphabet, jumbled up and overlapping each other, so that the symbols of communication have become mute sculptural shapes, as if Robert Indiana’s famous “Love” sculpture had come tumbling down.

The poems in this, his third book, are all written in tight rectangular text blocks that afford the reader no way in or out between the first word and the last. No enjambments to ponder, just Siken’s singular, captivating voice. The title sentence comes from the book’s fifth poem, “Sidewalk,” in which Siken tells of turning up at a local hospital, sure that he is having a stroke, but no one there will believe him. The doctor tells him he is having a panic attack and sends him home. Five poems later, in “Metonymy,” a poem of staccato short sentences and phrases, a friend finally insists he call an ambulance and go to different hospital, where it is immediately recognized that he is having a stroke. “I slept, I peed myself, I fell off the mattress, I fell out of chairs talking wildly. I scared them, whoever they were, the people I was supposed to know. I knew who James was, he was on the phone. He was in California. You can’t stay there. You have to go to the hospital. You can go to a different hospital. I changed my clothes. It was like dressing a mannequin.” This book is his declaration of return, his account of the struggle to regain language and the use of his body, and of the need to rebuild his memory all over again, beginning with his family history.

At the beginning, I was just making a list of things I was trying to remember. I had a stroke. It wiped me clean. I had to claw my way back into a self, into a body. I lost my right side to numbness, and I had no vocabulary. The poems accumulated as autobiography by default because I had no artifice but felt a great need to get it right. I needed to figure out what a doorknob was, what a sandwich was. Crush played with the ideas of self and other, of overlap and clash and rupture. War of the Foxes played with the self and its representation in painting and in myth. These new pieces don’t play. They’re focused on rebuilding a self in a very serious way.
My neurologist said the fact that I am a painter and a poet is why I recovered. Because of the building of pathways—I already had such weird pathways built on lateral thinking, that continuing to paint and write poetry would help with the neuroplasticity. I made an amazing recovery. I’m lucid, and I can walk, and when I’m rested you can’t really tell I have a limp. I can use my right arm pretty well. So I can make a pretty good recommendation for the power of language and the need for poetry and painting. And maybe I do need to write, but I don’t need to publish and I don’t need to share—and that’s a different thing. [from an interview with Z.L. Nichols in BOMB Magazine Spring 2024 issue]

In three poems that come near the end of the book—”Line,” “Sentence,” and “Paragraph”—Siken tells the reader why he chose this format. I’ll quote from just two of them. From “Line”: “Orpheus descended. The red ribbon unspooled from his mouth in the darkness. He sang and it fluttered. [. . .] When does a line end? How long is a piece of string? A line ends when it is broken. [. . .] A sentence ends with a period but a line continues on. I wouldn’t break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was broken already.”

From “Paragraph”: “I didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in a box. [. . .] I set the margins and surrounded the thoughts on all sides. I made everything the same shape and concentrated on the space between the thoughts.” [My ellipses in both poems.]

Siken returns again and again to this theme that looks like miscommunication on the surface. It occurs primarily between himself and various medical professionals. In “The List,” the narrator complains about a nurse, his grief counselor, and his suicide counselor, all of whom have made up their minds about him based on other patients they have seen in the past. So he gives up on them and begins a second, apparently private notebook in which he is unafraid to write down what he is actually thinking. Here, he will not write in the terminology desired by the professionals. “A doorknob is a rock for the hand. It opens a hole in the wall. —A doorknob is your stupid head. You will not survive this.” As he puts it, “I built up meaning with a double set of books.” The poem “Pain Scale” begins: “My primary care physician is not a neurologist. He doesn’t understand the difference between sadness and damage. I do not like this man. He refuses adjectives. He wants me to say My pain is eight, instead of Thunderous and upsetting. When he says You’ll be fine, I have to explain that I won’t because I have never been fine, but I’m not saying it right.”

At this point, reading “Pain Scale,” which happens to sit exactly halfway through I Do Know Some Things, there is a line that makes it apparent that this theme of miscommunication that Siken has been writing about is about something larger than his stroke. He tells us in one of the poem’s lines that “I think many people struggle with my aesthetic.” I’m sure many of us have sat in a doctor’s office and have been asked to rank some strange pain on a pain scale of 1 to 10, which makes no sense at all. So, we look to a poem like “Spoon” to understand a little more what Siken means by “my aesthetic.” In “Spoon,” the narrator is trying to figure out what makes him different from his two stepbrothers, who were “comfortable, powerful” and “didn’t worry about things.” He begins with some fairly obvious observations: “I was smarter but they had stamina. I was good with hypotheticals but they knew how to get things done, real things, with tools.” Then he moves on to more meaningful differences. Here’s the ending of the poem: “I had a certain capacity, which was a generous way of saying that I had nothing. Their hands were full but their skies were empty. No clouds, no shapes to guess. I was blurry at the edges and unrelatable. Do not try to bend the spoon. There is no spoon. It is only you that bends. I was the spoon and there is no spoon. I was blisteringly invisible.”

“Blisteringly invisible” conjures up the incandescent idea of a superhero of some sort. The young narrator of “Spoon,” looking up at his two older, confident stepbrothers, is realizing, in effect, that he is a poet. He is seeing that the characteristics that seem to put him at a disadvantage—like being “blurry at the edges and unrelatable”—can be attributes of exceptional value elsewhere. Throughout this book, Siken plays with these two extreme opposites, the damaged, hospitalized stroke patient and the man who knows himself far better than the attending professionals and the brawny stepbrothers.

To put this all together though, Siken has the reader pinballing back and forth across the pages of I Do Know Something, puzzling his life story out, much as he himself is trying to pull his own past back out of the black hole of the stroke.

Ω

“I wanted to reclaim the self I had. I was honest because I had no filter. I’m glad I couldn’t lie because I would have been tempted to lie. Why rebuild a self out of contaminated parts? I didn’t think of it as proving I was real or inventing anything. I just wanted to remember my friends, my preferences, what a light switch was. I wasn’t fractured, I was erased. The goal of these poems was very small: try to remember.” From “An Interview with Richard Siken” in Wildness 40

Siken brilliantly uses rhetorical devices like metaphor and metonymy to make his descriptions of concepts and ordinary events vivid. Take a poem called “The Waves,” where all that Siken is really talking about is his struggle to sleep and think clearly while in a hospital bed that has rails. He thinks that the word drift seems to describe his situation and realizes that it is “a sea word.” And immediately the poem takes off in a Homeric direction. “I strung the words and everything under the shattered clouds in sentences. By which I mean, the wine-dark sea. It bruises where the oars strike. . . I am the mermaids singing, twisted in the sheets. I am, I have, I know and say. I know, I have, I will and do. Whitecaps and froth. I yelled at the waves. The ghost of myself slept deep. Try to finish, finish the thought. Do not drop anchor here. . . The fingered dawn. The terrible shore. The complicated mooring.”

Siken slyly moves from the hospital scene into a vivid metaphor of Odysseus on his ship during his multi-year attempt to return home. We see him struggling to get past the Sirens (or mermaids, as he calls them) who are singing to lure him ashore where his ship would crash and he would die. In the following few brief sentences of the poem, the scene flickers between the hospital room and the rough Mediterranean Sea. But Siken leaves it up to us to make the connections, to figure out where we are and when narrator is Siken or Homer. We go adrift in the text in much the same way that the poet went adrift in his hospital room.

The poems in I Do Know Something describe extraordinary physical and mental struggles, but somehow, they manage to seem effortless. In “Piano Lesson,” Siken writes about one particular development in the modern piano. “By 1837, with some refinement of the pedals, a player could sustain the notes even after their hands had moved away.” The musician/poet can lift his or her hands into the air and say “Voila! It’s all magic!” There has always been something fearless in Siken’s poetry, especially in his previous book Crush (2005). But now, broken and repairing, his writing is audacious. He does know something, indeed.

Richard Siken. I Do Know Something. Copper Canyon Press, 2025.