Category Archives: Non-fiction

New Novel, Old Master

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“New Novel, Old Master.” Review of Robbe-Grillet: L’aventure du Nouveau Roman by Benoît Peeters and Réinventer le roman: Entretiens inédits by Alain Robe-Grillet and Benoît Peeters, Times Literary Supplement, 23-30 December 2022, pp. 24-25.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in 1922 — modernism’s annus mirabilis — as though the future nouveau romancier were destined to inherit the experimental spirit of the times, taking postwar literature (and cinema) into uncharted territory. Nabokov, who described La Jalousie (1957) as the greatest love story since Proust, regarded Robbe-Grillet as the foremost French writer of his generation, and for several decades his international reputation, particularly in the United States, would place him firmly in the Camus and Sartre super-league. Yet official commemorations of the centenary of his birth have been conspicuous by their absence in France, a country usually prompt to celebrate its great authors and artists.

In his new biography, Robbe-Grillet: L’aventure du Nouveau Roman, Benoît Peeters suspects that he was deemed too “sexually and politically incorrect” to make the grade. Peeters goes on to suggest that this snub may well have appealed to the novelist’s contrarian temperament, adducing his belated election to the Académie française in 2004. Despite having coveted this accolade since the late 1950s, Robbe-Grillet would never be officially inducted owing to his obstinate refusal to follow protocol — a form of self-sabotage that enabled him to be both an insider and an outsider simultaneously. The arch avant-gardiste was not averse to playing the game, but wanted to do so on his own terms. His agonistic approach to fiction — writing “against” readers rather than “for” them — was matched by his controversial polemics on the novel as a genre. This combative attitude earned him a great deal of enmity at a time when literary matters were still taken very seriously indeed. Peeters reminds us at the outset that if no contemporary writer was ever subjected to so much vitriol (even his funeral elicited a bad write-up in Le Monde), Robbe-Grillet revelled in being reviled. “I owe everything to my opponents”, he once said, reflecting that he had been lucky enough to have had “good enemies” throughout his career. The extreme reactions he regularly inspired seemed, in his eyes, to prove that he was right, spurring him on while also providing his often difficult work with a great deal of free publicity in the mainstream media.

Peeters is a dab hand at biographies, having already produced weighty tomes on Hergé, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Valéry. The challenge here was that Robbe-Grillet had partly pre-empted this exercise with his Romanesques trilogy, published between 1985 and 1994, which combined personal reminiscences (particularly in Le Miroir qui revient) with delirious sexual fantasies (notably in Angélique ou l’enchantement) and outright fiction (see the passages devoted to the shadowy figure of Henri de Corinthe, a putative family friend who may or may not have existed). In the course of these three volumes, the “autobiographical system”, as Robbe-Grillet put it, gradually breaks down.

Another challenge was the sheer volume of material to sift through. Robbe-Grillet’s archives are contained in 459 large boxes — an embarrassment of riches that may serve, as the biographer surmises, as a rampart behind which the author can hide. In 2001 Peeters conducted a series of filmed interviews with the novelist, then almost 80, which were released as a double DVD. They have now been transcribed and published in book form. Réinventer le roman: Entretiens inédits is the perfect companion piece to the biography, giving us direct access not only to the author’s own conversational voice, interpretations and erudition on matters philosophical, historical and even botanical, but also to his jovial good humour and general geniality — characteristics with which he is seldom associated. It often feels, uncannily, as though Robbe-Grillet were giving a running commentary on Peeters’ future biography.

The greatest pitfall would have been to turn Robbe-Grillet into the kind of all-conquering hero he so detested in the novels of Balzac, yet there are definite shades of Rastignac to his boundless ambition. There is also another, more puzzling resemblance. In his infamous 1958 essay, “Nature, humanisme, tragédie”, he claims that in order to appear as true to life as possible, “a good ‘character’ in a [realist] novel must above all be double”. By this token Robbe-Grillet would have made a very good character indeed. As a child he frequently encountered his doppelgänger: he would enter a room and see himself sitting in the armchair. Peeters implies that this was a lifelong occurrence. With this in mind it is striking to note how frequently the question of Robbe-Grillet’s duality (and his duplicity) recurs throughout his career. As a young novelist he scoffed at the notion of vatic inspiration: the creator as a mere conduit, incapable of intelligent reflection on their work. Many of his detractors never forgave him for having the audacity to write novels while producing a theoretical discourse on his practice. The fact that his works were sometimes at odds with his theories enraged them even further — whether this was deliberate, as he later claimed, is open to debate.

The prime example here is La Jalousie — by his own admission (and from the title onwards) a veritable “festival of metaphors” — released at a time when he strongly objected in public to anthropocentric analogies. In the Entretiens Robbe-Grillet claims that some of the more far-fetched theories that were attributed to him, in the early days, actually stemmed from Roland Barthes, who had celebrated his first published novel, Les Gommes (1953), as an instance of object-oriented literature. He further explains that Barthes lost interest in his work as soon as it became patent — with Dans le labyrinthe (1959) — that his interpretations were no longer tenable.

This did not prevent Barthes from accepting to preface Bruce Morrissette’s The Novels of Robbe-Grillet (1963) and giving voice to the idea that there were, in fact, two Robbe-Grillets: the early, anti-humanist one, who slid down the surface of things and a humanist “Robbe-Grillet n° 2”, more preoccupied with symbols and feelings. In his postface to the 1964 paperback edition of Dans le labyrinthe, the theorist Gérard Genette argued, similarly, that Robbe-Grillet was driven to constantly justify himself because he was torn between his “positivist intelligence” and “poetic imagination”. In 1988, when Angélique ou l’enchantement appeared, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, writing in Le Monde, reprised this view, opposing “Robbe”, the novelist, to “Grillet”, the essayist and critic. This theory was finally borne out — or, rather, enacted — by Franklin J. Matthews, who penned the postface to the 1972 paperback edition of La Maison de rendez-vous: in 2001 a researcher discovered that the “Australian academic” Matthews was none other than Robbe-Grillet himself, who had thus authored both the novel and its critique. In the Entretiens we learn that the writer replicated this pattern by dividing his oeuvre into two discrete periods. In the first, encompassing Les Gommes, Le Voyeur (1955) and La Jalousie (three books whose composition was carefully premeditated), everything is filtered through a single consciousness. Unlike its predecessors, Dans le labyrinthe was no longer based on a pre-existing plot line: the figure of the soldier lost in the city mirrors that of the writer now astray in the meanders of his work. It inaugurated a new period in which the narrative coherence of his early novels disappears altogether, along with most ontological certainties, leaving the text as a battleground, where various consciousnesses are vying for control.

Born and raised in Brest, Robbe-Grillet was a successful young agronomist, studying banana-crop parasites and even producing a face cream containing bull sperm. When attempting to account for his sudden turn to literature in 1950, he invoked “our two gendarmes”, Marx and Freud, according to whom everything is either political or sexual. The political explanation is that he came from a fanatically far-right family who supported Marshal Pétain and the Nazi invaders to the bitter end. The lies on which their values rested led him to reject the “world of ideology, where everything always works; everything is ordered”, including the humanist tenets of literary realism that cover up the messiness of the real world. Despite signing the pro-Algerian Manifesto of the 121 in 1960, Robbe-Grillet would always be suspected, in some quarters, of being a right-winger, notably for his rejection of social realism. Art, for him, is never just a means of embellishing a message: it is the message. A novel is therefore self-sufficient — “expresses nothing but itself” — and its “necessity” has nothing to do with its “utility”, political or otherwise.

The second explanation for Robbe-Grillet opting for literature revolves around his predilection for sadistic sexual practices, which — along with his impotence — set him apart, creating a need for artistic expression. This “sexual difference” manifested itself at an early age, with the porcelain dolls he delighted in torturing or the pictures of women being executed that exerted such a hold over him. Peeters describes his highly unconventional, but very happy, marriage to Catherine Rstakian, which lasted fifty years. In 1955 she offered him a whip as a birthday present; two decades on she offered him a young female admirer who longed to be his slave. At one stage they even shared the same mistress. Not only did she go on to write successful sado-masochistic books, she became a dominatrix, organising lavish S&M soirées. Robbe-Grillet, who was, unsurprisingly, often accused of misogyny, always encouraged her, believing it was important for women to express their sexual fantasies. His own played an increasingly important part in his work, even though he knew they would put off many readers.

He often claimed that the greatest opportunity of his career was that his first novel had been rejected by Gallimard, the embodiment of the French publishing establishment. This paved the way for his close relationship with Jérôme Lindon, at the head of Les Éditions de Minuit (which, ironically, was purchased by Gallimard in 2021), where all his books would be published. He soon became a literary adviser, reading hundreds of manuscripts for Minuit, and recruiting like-minded writers such as Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, Claude Simon and Robert Pinget (Samuel Beckett, an early admirer of Les Gommes, was already in-house). Lindon and Robbe-Grillet, who had a knack for publicity stunts, drew attention to this creative effervescence by capitalizing the phrase “nouveau roman” (new novel), which had been bandied about dismissively by a couple of critics. The Nouveau Roman was never a movement, like the surrealists, where you had to toe a certain line for fear of excommunication, but simply, as Robbe-Grillet put it, “a convenient label for writers seeking to express new relations between Man and the world”. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he published a series of provocative articles in L’Express, outlining some of these new relations. They were collected in Pour un nouveau roman (1963), his most commercially successful book, which constitutes a devastating critique not only of the ideology that underpins much of nineteenth-century literature, but also of the contemporary novel’s ossification in the Balzacian mould. The novelist’s present task, he argues, is to describe the material world, not to project herself onto it or colonize it by assigning it a meaning; to record the distance between human beings and things without interpreting this distance as a painful division. “Man looks at the world”, but “the world does not look back”. However, in looking at the world, it undergoes a transformation: Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions seem to create their own objects, their own hallucinatory reality.

Benoît Peeters chronicles the ever-shifting alliances of the Nouveau Roman, the rivalry with Michel Butor (who thought Robbe-Grillet was jealous of his success), the rise and fall of Jean Ricardou as the movement’s theoretician, the American conferences; the times when the novelist was more interested in making films (following his collaboration with Alain Resnais on L’Année dernière à Marienbad) or simply living the life of a gentleman farmer, gardening and curating his collection of rare cacti. The Nouveau Roman was indeed the “last great French literary movement”, and it was high time its figurehead had his own biography.



Avid reader: Sam Mills

The Joys of a Dusty Little Gem

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“The Joys of a Dusty Little Gem.” Review of Fifty Forgotten Books by R. B. Russell. The Irish Times, 15 October 2022, p. 27.

Cultural theorists, such as the late Mark Fisher, have argued that loss itself is what we have lost in the digital age. I suspect this goes some way to explaining our fascination with vanished works of art and literature as exemplified by Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces (2004), Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books (2005), Christopher Fowler’s Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared (2012) or Giorgio van Straten’s In Search of Lost Books (2016).

R. B. Russell’s Fifty Forgotten Books is a welcome addition to this list. The author displays a similar passion for unearthing literary curios, but comes at it from a different angle — that of the compulsive collector. He gives us a précis of each title but also, more importantly perhaps, the backstory of the precise copy he owns: which shop he found it in, who recommended it, its price, condition and smell, etc. His first edition of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, for instance, which he happened upon at a jumble sale in Sussex came all the way from a Zetland County library. He treasures the Blaenavon Workmen’s Institute stamps that disfigure David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman because “they are like ghosts from the book’s past life”.

Throughout this bibliomemoir, which opens in 1981 at the age of 14, Russell haunts — as he makes a point of putting it — second-hand bookshops in search of volumes that are themselves already haunted and will haunt him in turn. Significantly, he describes a “tale of the supernatural set in a bookshop” by Walter de la Mare as “perfect for a reader like [him]”.

The presiding influence over Russell’s bookish life is Arthur Machen (leading him to the work of his niece, Sylvia Townsend Warner), and some of the drug-fuelled antics of the society dedicated to the Welsh author are recounted here in hilarious detail.

The text is interspersed with black-and-white pictures of the book covers and stylish snapshots of Russell and Rosalie Parker, his partner, with whom he set up Tartarus Press. These images belong to an analogue culture that has all but disappeared, along with the “wonderful world of second-hand bookshops” celebrated here. I hope this little gem will be discovered on dusty shelves by future generations of bibliophiles.

This Year’s Cult Classic

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“This Year’s Cult Classic.” Review of Bad Eminence by James Greer. The Irish Times, 16 July 2022, p. 16.


Bad Eminence, American author James Greer’s third novel, is the kind of book you open at your peril. The title alone (a reference to Milton’s Satan) should be warning aplenty, but it is my duty to report that a Latin phrase, planted in the opening pages, leads — once read — to instant possession by the devil. By the same token, I strongly advise you not to cut out and ingest the large dot containing a highly potent hallucinogenic, however much the narrator enjoins you to do so.

Things are already weird enough as it is with the regular intrusion of “sponsored content”, the small black-and-white photographs reminiscent of W.G. Sebald (who is name-checked several times), the recurrence of swans and characters called Temple, not to mention the growing sense of psychosis and gradual dissolution of all ontological certainty.

Vanessa Salomon — the wisecracking narratrix — is a young Franco-American translator, blessed with tremendous “genetic gifts” and a knack for nihilistic aphorisms. Thanks to her reputation for tackling works deemed untranslatable, she is hired by Not Michel Houellebecq to translate his new novel before it is even written. What France’s most famous author really covets, however, is another copy without an original: Vanessa’s celebrity “bitch twin sister”. Or is it?

The novel reaches a metatextual crescendo when the heroine parses a sentence she has just written: “I shut the lid of the laptop and headed back to bed”. She points out that this can only have been typed before or after the event, reflecting her dream of a book that would inhabit “the spaces between the binary code of our existence”. “Everything,” she declares, in what amounts to a manifesto, “is in the process either of becoming or unbecoming, and it is the task of the artist not to make something new but to make something present”.

Once the rollicking narrative has caught up with itself, the novel implodes in real-time. It becomes increasingly obvious that transgressive, S&M fantasies from the Robbe-Grillet book Vanessa was translating at the beginning have been contaminating the rest of her life, and that her world is now awash with simulacra and doppelgängers.

Hilarious, exhilarating and mind-blowing, Bad Eminence is this year’s cult classic.

Interview with James Greer

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Greer, James. “More Parody Than Satire.” Interview by Andrew Gallix. 3:AM Magazine, 16 July 2022.

3:AM: In Bad Eminence, France’s most famous author, Not Michel Houellebecq (or at least one of them, as there may be two!) asks the narrator-protagonist, Vanessa Salomon, to translate his new novel before he’s even written it. In other words, he wants her to produce a copy without an original. To what extent did Baudrillard’s take on the simulacrum shape your book, and when did you hit upon the idea of the twin (Vanessa claims to have a “bitch twin sister”) as simulacrum?

JG: A Parisian friend once told me that she went to high school with the (now famous) actor Eva Green, and that Eva had a twin sister. Everyone at her school assumed that the twin sister was much more likely to become a famous actor, because she was outgoing and dramatic, whereas Eva was bookish and shy. No idea if that story’s true, but I thought it might make a promising start to . . . something. One of these days I’ll have to read some Baudrillard.

3:AM: Which goes to prove, once again, that you don’t need to have read Baudrillard to be influenced by him!

Not Michel Houellebecq’s impossible demand reflects the primacy of translation — the recurring idea, in the book, that all writing is already a form of translation (of ideas, feelings, the world, into words). As Kafka puts it (in translation!) in The Zürau Aphorisms, “All language is but a poor translation”. Do you share this view to a certain extent?

JG: I don’t know about “poor” — I might substitute the word “failed” or “inadequate” — but I do share his view, and would go further and say that all lived experience is a translation of sense perceptions into stories we tell (ourselves) about ourselves. There are good translations and bad translations, but you always want to read the original when possible. It’s just that it’s almost always not possible.

3:AM: The novel reaches a metatextual crescendo, when Vanessa parses a sentence she has just written: “I shut the lid of the laptop and headed back to bed”. She goes on to point out that this can only have been typed before or after the event. Does this remark reflect her dream of writing a book that would inhabit “the spaces between the binary code of our existence”? Are you also trying to occupy this liminal space?

JG: I don’t think Vanessa is that self-aware, honestly. She strikes me as someone who’s trying to pretend that she’s smarter than she actually is, and throws up a wall of superficial erudition to prevent anyone getting too close. But speaking for myself, yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

3:AM: Once the narrative has caught up with itself, the novel seems to implode in real time as it becomes increasingly clear that Vanessa’s translations have been contaminating the rest of her life: everything and everyone seems to be a copy — her world is awash with doppelgängers and simulacra. It is, in particular, the Robbe-Grillet novel she is translating at the beginning, which is seeping through, so I was wondering what relationship you had with the nouveau romancier’s work?

JG: An uneasy one. I’ve always been a fan of the way Robbe-Grillet and some of the other writers lumped under that clumsy but useful self-designation tried to expand the possibilities of the novel — not always successfully, but still. They tried. When I write films, for example, I have no choice but to adhere to a specific format, which can also be quite liberating in its own way (like trying to write a sonnet, or build a car); but when I set out to write a novel I can’t seem to help plunging ahead like I’ve just been freed from Making Sense jail, which is a real place that exists. I’m less enamored of some of Robbe-Grillet’s specific obsessions (for example, degrading sexual violence), but a book like Dans le labyrinthe was formative for me, almost comically so. I love a good maze. Of the nouveau roman writers, I tend to prefer Nathalie Sarraute. How I came to hit on Souvenirs du triangle d’or as the urtext for Bad Eminence is a thing no longer accessible by my brain. It just felt right at the time, I guess.

L to R James Greer, Vanessa Salomon. Copyright Thomas Early.

3:AM: Please tell us about the black-and-white photographs. They are obviously reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, who is namechecked several times, but is there also a link with Francesca Woodman, whom Vanessa is obsessed with (to the point of living in her former apartment)?

JG: In an ideal world, i.e. one in which money did not exist, the photos would have been in colour. The nod to Sebald is, as you say obvious, and as with the “sponsored content” both parodic and serious, depending on context. If I could compose pictures half as beautifully as Francesca Woodman did, I would absolutely claim a link there, but I can’t, so I won’t. Nonetheless, her work, which seems to exist in the liminal space you referred to earlier, very much resonates with me, and I hope that resonance is to some degree reflected in the text.

3:AM: Even though the novel is hilarious and very playful, it is also the study of a divided self, isn’t it?

JG: One of my selves emphatically agrees with you. Another thinks you’re crazy. Still another wants to sue, for some reason, but don’t worry, I never listen to any of them.

3:AM: In an age of earnest autofiction and misery memoirs, your novel seems audaciously — almost procatively — ludic and self-referential. Did you have the feeling, when writing Bad Eminence, that you were going against the grain?

JG: I knew as it developed tentacles and tangents that Bad Eminence would likely be swimming against what no one ever calls (but should?) the literary tide. That’s always been the case with me, a person who is not particularly good at swimming. Having said that, I do read more or less everything w/r/t contemporary literature, and enjoy quite a bit of what I read. I didn’t set out to write something in opposition to anything else. My brain doesn’t work that way. I wish I could just write something that people enjoy on a large and commercially successful scale, but — this could be my 90s indierock roots showing — I have an unfortunate tendency to sabotage anything that comes across as overly earnest. I think it’s because I am by nature a sentimental fool and I’m scared that people will find that out and make fun of me. As a result, I often end up writing novels that amuse only me, which is the kind of narrowcasting publishers live for.

3:AM: Why is Bad Eminence being released in the UK before the US?

JG: It’s not, in fact, unless something changed and I’m in the dark (not for the first time). The publication date is the same in the US and the UK, it’s just that And Other Stories, who is publishing the book in both countries, is based in the UK. Because I was writing in the voice of a French/British woman who’d been living in NYC for five years, I was very careful to mix in a confusing array of Anglicisms, Americanisms, clunky literal translations from her French brain into English, and a mishmash of different spellings and made-up words. The overall effect, if I’ve done my job, is to make you think the book was published in the UK before the US.

3:AM: Finally, could you please tell us about the “sponsored content”? At first, I thought it was merely satire, but now I’m not so sure!

JG: Singani 63 is a real brand of liquor imported by a real film director named Steven Soderbergh, with whom I have had a long and fruitful working relationship. Any suggestion that I included his brand in my “sponsored content” in exchange for a better deal on my next project with him is a fabrication. Also, not to pick nits, but I think it’s more parody than satire.

Laboratory of Narrative

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Here is my review of Michel Butor’s Selected Essays, Times Literary Supplement, 8 July 2022, p. 25.


Michel Butor has never received anywhere near the level of critical attention in the English-speaking world accorded to his fellow experimenters with the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. His third novel, La Modification, is regarded as a modern classic in his native France, where it won the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 1957 and is regularly chosen as a set text at schools and universities. Even in France, however, few appreciate the full scope of Butor’s oeuvre, which encompasses countless poems, art and literary criticism, travel writing, translations and a libretto, not to mention more than a thousand artist’s books. It is to be hoped that the publication of his Selected Essays, carefully curated by Richard Skinner and elegantly translated by Mathilde Merouani, will kindle greater interest in the work of a true polymath, whose questing spirit — unlike that of some of his fellow nouveaux romanciers — never departed him.

Five of the eight essays compiled here, one of which is actually a 1962 interview with Tel Quel magazine, appear in English for the first time. They all deal with various aspects of the novel, which Butor regarded as the greatest of all literary forms. For him it was, at least initially, a way of overcoming a “personal problem”, enabling him to reconcile the poetry he was then writing at home with the philosophy he was studying at university.

This slim volume hinges on the notion that no account of human behaviour is truly complete without the inclusion of the imaginative and oneiric. Much of reality is apprehended through narratives (such as newspapers or history books) that exist on the “ever unstable border between fact and fiction”. Butor’s grand claim — that the novel is “the laboratory of the narrative”, where the way the world is experienced can be explored and, ultimately, transformed — is argued here most persuasively.

Butor makes light work of heavy themes, eschewing dogma and jargon despite the essays’ phenomenological tenor, in stark contrast with many of his contemporaries. Whether he is analyzing how a fictive locale may reconfigure the space in which a book is read, contending that travelling is the dominant theme of all literature or excavating old objects in the work of Balzac, his often exhilarating insights continue to come across as though he were charting terra incognita.

Behind this ever-inquisitive mind, there is a sense of a growing impatience with the constraints of the novel, even in its experimental mode. In the book’s concluding interview Butor discusses his failure to bridge the gap between poetry and philosophy, which may explain why he did not publish any novels after 1960. (He died in 2016.) After 1960 his fascination with the intersection between writing and the arts would take him beyond the confines of fiction into experiments with hybrid works and the book as object.

The Making of Incarnation

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Here is my review of The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy. The Irish Times, 2 October 2021, p. 15:

Tom McCarthy’s fifth and arguably most ambitious novel brings to mind Theodor Adorno’s definition of art as “magic delivered from the lie of being truth”. The Making of Incarnation is about bodies in space — outer space in the case of the sci-fi blockbuster (Incarnation) that serves as both armature and mise en abyme. Here, the lie of being truth (which another character describes as “[n]aturalist bullshit”) must be perpetuated at all costs.

Ben Briar is flown in from the United States as part of a shadowy project called Degree Zero (a nod to Roland Barthes and his reality effect) to ensure that the film’s script, however fanciful, complies with the basic laws of physics. Herzberg, the art director, expends a great deal of energy convincing this “Realism Tsar” that the inclusion of mundane objects in the unlikeliest of set-ups can effectively “counteract the defamiliarisation”. Much is subsequently made of the CGI rendering of a fork (“your basic IKEA Livnära”) that recurs — comically as well as cosmically — throughout the climactic disintegration of the spacecraft.

Given that Briar works for a consultancy called Two Cultures (vide C. P. Snow), it is hardly surprising that he should view physics as a creative endeavour — “a plunge into the farthest-flung reaches of the imagination”. The unfolding of the plot, as the shoot progresses, is interspersed with complex descriptions of the wind tunnels and motion-capture techniques deployed behind the scenes. These are so meticulously detailed that they take on a hypnotic, almost hallucinatory, quality.

Kinesis moves in mysterious ways: at every corner, the scientific turns out to be underpinned by the poetic — or even the messianic. Pantaray Motion Systems is not only the slightly sinister corporate behemoth providing the cutting-edge technology without which there would be no movie; it also has “a heroic status tinged with traces of the mystical”.

Anthony Garnett, its founder, recalls once considering Norbert Wiener (the originator of cybernetics) as “prophet, messiah and apostle”. There was something in his vision that he thought “he’d left behind with Aeschylus, Catullus, Sappho: a condition best denoted by the old, unscientific label poetry”.

Garnett’s colleague Pilkington — referred to, behind his back, as the “Ancient Mariner” — senses that all machines are “stand-ins for some ultimate machine we’ll never build but nonetheless can’t stop ourselves from trying to”. Tasked with orchestrating an experimental plane crash, he goes looking for the “ur-disaster” — the “totality that hovers above every partial iteration”.

Monica Dean, who is conducting research into Lillian Gilbreth, discovers that the pioneer of factory-floor ergonomics had come to entertain “the possibility of some ‘higher’ or ‘absolute’ movement . . . derived from no source other than itself”. The novel is teeming with such intimations of preordained patterns or underlying algorithms.

In this quest for perfection, the human body is ultimately an obstacle. We are reminded that the French scientist Marey sought to infuse his compatriots with the “energy and dynamism of the locomotive” and that Taylorism was seen by some in the Soviet Union as an opportunity to liberate the worker from “the shackles of his very body”. This rejection of incarnation is (paradoxically) embodied by the film’s high romantic denouement: the two lovers, whose union is impossible, bow out in a blaze of glory, expecting to coincide with themselves — and everything — at the instant of their deaths.

The novel, however, does not end with the blinding light of revelation, but a “blackness neither rays nor traces penetrate”. Besides, there is an error in the code behind the film’s final frame — an invisible blemish only the technician is aware of. It recalls Pilkington’s secret that he alone was responsible for the failure of Project Albatross, a minute miscalculation having led the plane to vanish instead of crashing. He imagines the lost aircraft occupying “an aporia, blind alley, cubby-hole or nook”.

This instant of its disappearance, “cut out from the flow of time” — for ever suspended, deferred — is akin to the sense of dislocation that several characters experience: the feeling of being in two locations at once “without really being in either”; of experiencing the present and the past simultaneously while being at one remove from both.

Is not this liminality the very space of fiction, squatted by the two addicts, who reappear right at the end, lost in their pipe dreams and inevitably conjuring up Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon?

The answer, no doubt, is to be found in Lillian Gilbreth’s Box 808 — the one that allegedly “changes everything”, that may “chisel a Northwest Passage through a stretch of the hitherto theoretical-physically impossible”. The one that is missing, of course, and that everyone — from the protagonist, Pantaray’s Dr Mark Phocan, to the secret services — is looking for.

The truth is out there: Tom McCarthy has worked his magic once again.

Kitchen Sink Gothic

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Here is my review of A Lonely Man by Chris Power and Ghosted: A Love Story by Jenn Ashworth. The London Magazine, 23 August 2021:


In Victorian Hauntings (2002), Julian Wolfreys observes that telling a story always opens up a space through which ‘something other returns’, thereby drawing the conclusion that ‘all stories are, more or less, ghost stories’. Can we infer from this that all writers are, more or less, ghostwriters? Possibly, if A Lonely Man — Chris Power’s thrilling debut novel — is anything to go by.

The implacable plot is set in motion by a seemingly chance encounter in the metafictional setting of an anglophone bookshop. Robert, an expat novelist, and Patrick, a ghostwriter on the run, both reach for the same slim volume at the same time: ‘”Sorry,” they said together, drawing back their arms’. The latter has been hiding out in Berlin, fearing for his life following the suspicious death of Vanyashin, the Russian oligarch, whose memoir he was working on. Robert has little compunction about stealing Patrick’s story to cure a bout of writer’s block and meet a deadline. This is what writers do, he rationalises, rehearsing a familiar line of argument deployed, in recent years, by Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Kristen Roupenian. A Lonely Man is a portrait of the artist as a ghoul: ‘Stories are like coins, Robert thought, passed from one hand to another’.

The monetary simile he employs is itself second-hand, providing a pleasing instance of self-reflexivity as well as a strong dose of dramatic irony. It is lifted from ‘The Zahir’, Borges’s tale of obsession, which concludes with daytime reality in thrall to a disquieting dream world. Robert is likewise consumed by his fixation with Patrick’s story: a ‘shadow-self’ that his wife and children are blissfully unaware of grows inside him while he slowly slips through the looking-glass into some parallel dimension. Prior to the final coup de théâtre, he has the distinct feeling that he is ‘operating within a dream and that the door might open onto anything’ — which it does.

This reference to ‘The Zahir’ fuels the reader’s suspicion that the theft of the story may have incurred some kind of curse — a sentiment enhanced by the intrusion of straightforward Gothic imagery. At the funeral home, the novelist pictures his friend Liam rising from his open coffin. Back in his hotel room, that night, Robert has a drunken vision in which Liam appears in a wardrobe — the setting of his suicide. Declan blames his son’s untimely demise on his accursed bookishness, and particularly his immersion in fiction, which brings us back to Borges: ‘He had a brilliant mind, but it was haunted’. If reading is so dangerous, then what of writing?

Chris Power has a canny eye for the uncanny. A parallel between secret agents and ghosts is established when Robert dismisses Patrick’s fears as paranoid delusions. ‘Spooks and phantoms,’ he scoffs, inadvertently advertising the fact that the former have turned into the latter. Indeed, the spies all seem to have been spirited away from this spy story — back, no doubt, to the fiction from whence they largely sprang. At the very least, they have evanesced into ontological uncertainty, leaving behind two wannabe le Carrés re-enacting Cold War scenarios.

It is never clear who, if anyone, is spying on whom, and if we are in panopticon or peeping Tom territory. Ambiguous networks of gazes allegorise the struggle for narrative mastery at the heart of A Lonely Man (Power’s close third-person voice allowing Robert a semblance of control). In an early scene, the novelist is depicted smoking a cigarette on the balcony. He spots a woman on a treadmill in the building opposite, observing her intermittently and absent-mindedly in between drags, until he realises that she has been staring at him all along. The ‘eerie thrill of secret watching’ — shared by spooks and scribes alike — grows even more salient when he recalls sailing to an island and looking back at his spouse stepping out of their Swedish holiday home: ‘He had planned to tell her about it, but when he got back he found he didn’t want to. It was as if the secret wanted to be kept’. We later learn that Robert is in the habit of switching off the kitchen light, the better to observe his neighbours (‘Berliners rarely drew their curtains’), including the ‘vague phantoms’ that sometimes appear behind the opaque bathroom or toilet windows: ‘He liked to elaborate narratives from the scenes he saw’. On one such occasion, he eventually glances down only to discover a man looking up at his window.

This echo of the cigarette-break episode is just one of many unheimlich doublings, and even treblings, to take place in the book, as though the reproduction of Patrick’s story had unleashed a proliferation of simulacra: there are two hangings, for instance, as well as two homes and two titular lonely men (three, if you count Liam). One of Vanyashin’s anecdotes (which the ghostwriter relays to the novelist) turns out to have been pilfered from another oligarch’s memoir. Robert replicates many of his creator’s biographical characteristics (a Swedish wife and two daughters, a published short-story collection; Prowe — his surname — is even an anagram of Power). The most emblematic scene in this regard — doubling up as a critique of realism’s mimetic project (to which Power’s novel broadly conforms but in a sly, knowing way) — is the disorientating moment, in the funeral home, when Robert has a premonition of the world without him:

…Robert was confused to see, through an archway, another lobby apparently identical to the one he was standing in, as if he were looking into a mirror from which his reflection was impossibly absent. The difference, he realised, with a momentary relief, was that the floor of this duplicate version was covered with a dustsheet.

Note that the relief is only momentary. Robert does indeed undergo a process of erasure that seems to originate in the spectral qualities he projects on to the ghostwriter. Patrick’s spiel about being hounded by hitmen is mere self-aggrandisement, in his view: nobody cares enough about him to want to bump him off. In fact, the novelist becomes convinced that ‘he was the only person who knew Patrick, not just in Berlin but anywhere. That he was someone the world had forgotten’, as though the ghostwriter were a mere figment of his imagination or a Mr Hyde ‘shadow-self’ to his Dr Jekyll. Not to put too fine a point on it, Robert is being haunted by a spectre, whose ghostliness is catching. In a crowded pub he feels, at times, ‘a strange certainty that he couldn’t be seen’. Shortly thereafter, rowdy revellers — laughing and swigging from bottles — just flow past him ‘as if he wasn’t there’:

For an instant he was amid them all. In that moment, and as he stood on the street watching them move away, their voices fading, he felt for the second time that day as if he were a ghost.

Has Robert become an anonymous man of the crowd? Is he fading away — unmaking himself in the making of his work, from which he will be dismissed once completed? Perhaps, but the more pressing question is whether he will ever be allowed to complete it. And has anyone seen Chris Power of late?

Christina Stead’s notion that every love story is a ghost story is particularly pertinent in the case of Jenn Ashworth’s stunning fifth novel. Ghosted: A Love Story is narrated by Laurie Wright, a young woman whose husband disappears — out of the blue, or so it seems — leaving his phone and all his other possessions behind. A campus novel subplot, seen from the perspective of the unseen, proceeds from Laurie’s job as a cleaner at the local university: ‘we called the students “Wankers” and the academics “Staff Wankers”, just to distinguish them from each other, though in practice, there really wasn’t much difference at all’. With (and without) her husband Mark, a night guard at the power station, she lives in a high-rise block located in a ‘slightly down-at-heel area’ of a northern English coastal town — a setting congenial to the conjuring of a kitchen sink Gothic aesthetic. After watching a horror film on television, the couple ponders why ghosts are so often depicted in ‘historical fancy dress’. When Mark remarks that they are also invariably posh (‘You never get them in high-rises either’), Laurie counters: ‘Maybe the place is full of ghosts and we can’t tell because they don’t look any different from us’. T. S. Eliot’s cruel line about the undead swarming across London Bridge springs to mind and, although we are on the other side of the barricades here, Olena — the Polish carer — is as invisible to Laurie as the latter is to her own employers. Perhaps we are all someone else’s ghost.

Specific references to spectres are so numerous as to be almost suspicious. On the very first page, Laurie describes herself as pale complexioned ‘like a ghost’. She soon fantasises about throwing Mark’s clothes out of the window and ‘seeing his jumpers rain downwards like the ghosts of men, jumping’. She acknowledges that living with Mark had frequently felt ‘like living with a ghost’. She describes the time they first met, at a wedding reception: Mark, deep in conversation with a clairvoyant, whose services she will call upon sixteen years later to try to locate him (‘How about PayPal, if that makes things easier? Then we can keep talking’). She recalls the occasion when she mock-vowed to haunt her reluctant Heathcliff should she pass away before him: ‘I wanted Mark to say that he’d haunt me too, and for us to devise some kind of sign or code or system of knocks and bangings that each of us would use to let the one left behind know that the other was still there’. She pictures herself ‘throwing things about like a poltergeist’. She even reads Rebecca in bed and listens to a radio adaptation of Blithe Spirit in the bath (complaining that it was difficult to tell ‘which were the ghosts and which were the real people’). On a far more sinister note, the then unresolved case of a murdered schoolgirl, Connie Fallon, weaves itself into the very fabric of their courtship: ‘one of our earliest private jokes was my pretending to be convinced that he himself was the murderer the police was looking for’. When Mark vanishes, however, Laurie associates him with Connie — whose terrible fate thus haunts their entire relationship — and when she tracks him down, following his second absconsion, it is she who is cast in the role of the revenant: ‘He looked — sorry about this, but I can think of no other phrase — as if he’d seen a ghost, and the colour went right out of him’.

Yet, despite all this, the narrator is loath to mention phantoms when referring to the strange phenomena occurring within her home: ‘you know the word I am attempting not to bring into play here: I would like to be taken seriously’. Lights flicker — a bulb even shatters while she is on the phone to the psychic. A microclimate of ‘persistent coldness’ haunts certain corners of the flat, however warm the weather may be. Water ripples in the bath or toilet bowl. Household items go missing, sometimes reappearing in unlikely locations. An amorphous presence is frequently felt. And then, there is the ‘small room’ with the door that opens of its own accord, which is out of bounds — ‘No-space. Un-space. Behind that door: deleted territory’ — as it is seen as the locus of all the other paranormal activity. Or perhaps for a totally different, but even more harrowing, reason.

Laurie is an unreliable narrator, given to withholding information (from the police, Mark’s mother, the reader, herself), so that one comes to wonder if all this hocus-pocus is not some kind of elaborate displacement activity. When Mark first goes missing, she has the feeling that he has remained close by and is spying on her — very much like Wakefield in Hawthorne’s story — to see how she reacts to his ‘nasty little vanishing trick’. As we have already intimated, it transpires that the trauma of being ghosted only serves to occult a far more traumatic absence — one which Mark’s return can never make up for; indeed one which may make all return impossible. Her husband is both present when absent (‘the flat was still choked with the sense of his absence, the fact of that, and I wanted it gone’) and absent when present (‘I still want you to come back. …You’re on the settee, in my bed, but you’re not here‘).

There is an obvious contradiction between the character’s attempt to control her own story and her consciousness of not being in control of the ‘team of shimmering selves who fought and swirled around inside her’. She seems dimly aware, on occasion, that the haunting may be a by-product of her alcohol abuse and ‘mentally unsettled state’; that her ‘loneliness itself was a hostile presence’ in the flat. Apropos of her father, who suffers from vascular dementia, she tells Olena that it is difficult to ascertain ‘where the illness starts and his personality begins’ — an observation that perfectly applies to her own experience of the paranormal.

In the ‘small room’, which is supposedly haunted and out of bounds, there is a child’s drawing on the wall that reappears however many times it is painted over. Laurie is unsure whether it depicts suicides jumping from a block of flats or angels flying. She spends many a night staring at it, attempting to resolve the enigmatic figures’ indeterminacy ‘into the fact of a story — a story with an ending’ while her husband is engrossed in online conspiracy theories — both seeking solace in grand narratives. This is exactly how she proceeds when Mark disappears. Since the story remains open-ended, she goes looking for the end in the beginning, which is recast as the beginning of the end. In so doing, she becomes fully aware that they had been living apart together, some trauma (unnamed for most of the book) having torn them asunder. This is best exemplified by the times Laurie feigns to be reading in bed, monitoring her husband’s internet activity on her phone by means of a keylogger installed on his computer. On one such occasion, she tries to initiate some intimacy when he finally retires for the night: ‘He wasn’t able or interested and it was as if the man of enthusiasm and passion I had watched post on the forum had remained there in the ether, his lively double, while only the pale shade of that presence had made it back to our bed’. Mark, for his part, was overheard lamenting that Laurie had ‘disappeared on him’ shortly before he disappeared himself, thus making it quite clear that the alienation was reciprocal — that they had both become ghosts to each other.

The novel contains several striking images of the haunting presence of absence. There is the private joke that has become so tired that it is now merely a vague echo of itself, ‘the way the fossil trace of an ammonite pressed into a rock is not ammonite, but only a reminder of one’. At the wedding reception, traces of Laurie’s make-up end up on Mark’s lapel — ‘a little pale impression of my cheek and nose impressed on the material, like the Turin Shroud’. Most importantly, there is the ‘ghostly impression’ of the angels or suicides that keeps resurfacing, like some repetition compulsion, ‘whatever colour we tried and however many coats we applied’. Trauma is akin to the ghostly ‘not-quite shape’ that suddenly materialises on the page-like bedsheet — ‘an outline without an edge’ — making Laurie jump. It is the palimpsest that keeps shining through, disrupting the linear narrative and its quest for meaning and closure.

‘Hi, this is Mark. I’m afraid I’m not here, and this isn’t really me, but a recording of my voice I like to call No-Mark’: one of the most poignant scenes in the novel is when Laurie listens to her missing husband’s voicemail message over and over again until she can hear other sounds behind his words, ‘static or interference on the line, the impressions of the background radiation, relics from the big bang’. She leaves him countless messages until his inbox is full, whereupon she continues to call his number, now leaving unrecorded messages she describes as gaps or absences and refers to as ‘black sound’. She says black sound feels like praying.

According to Freud, writing was ‘in its origin the voice of an absent person’: it is this origin — this original absence — that Jenn Ashworth makes contact with here. Ghosted is a seance disguised as a novel.

The Unknown Writer

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Here is my interview with C. D. Rose for 3:AM Magazine, 30 June 2021.

C. D. Rose is an award-winning short story writer and the author of three palimpsestic books that recall the likes of Calvino, Perec or Borges.

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure from 2014 celebrated the lives of writers who had ‘achieved some measure of literary failure’. Naturally, they all turned out to be fictitious with CD Rose (or some homonym) masquerading as the book’s editor.

Who’s Who When Everyone is Someone Else, which appeared in 2018, revolves around a British academic who, having written a book entitled (what are the odds?) The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure — is invited to deliver a series of ten lectures on lost or forgotten works in a provincial university located somewhere in central Europe. This academic is an authority on Maxim Guyavitch, a cult author so obscure that his very existence is contested.

The Blind Accordionist (Melville House, 2021) is subtitled ‘Nine Stories by Maxim Guyavitch’. It appears to be the long-lost manuscript that the academic was looking for in the previous novel. These nine tales often revolve around their own telling and seem to occupy a liminal space between potentiality and actuality. Beautifully written and exquisitely crafted, Rose’s fables are, by turns, surreal, hilarious, poetic, poignant, allusive and elusive.

So, to begin with, could you talk to us about your interest in ‘Pseudo and Crypto Bibliography’ and, more generally, ‘parafiction’ — a term you use to describe works about fictitious books or supposedly by fictitious authors…

CDR: Pseudobibliography is the study of fake or non-existent books; Cryptobibliography that of hidden or lost books. Parafiction is neither of these, though may have a pint with them from time to time.

Parafiction is a mode of literary enquiry which seeks to examine the truth status claimed by both fictional and non-fictional tropes, strategies and discourses. Unlike metafiction which lays bare its workings, and is ultimately interested in showing itself off, parafiction lies quietly alongside the established tradition, neither true nor false.

Do you feel a bit like an actor when you assume someone else’s identity to write fiction, as you do here with Maxim Guyavitch?

CDR: No disrespect, but I mistrust actors. The process of adopting a different identity in order to write is sometimes described as ‘ventriloquism,’ too, but I’m not sure about that either. When we sit down to write, we all become someone else. (It may, however, simply be that the word reminds me of nothing more than Keith Harris and Orville the Duck, or Rod Hull and Emu.)

Being Guyavitch allowed me to shed the layers of self-criticism, hyper-awareness, judgment, over-editing, over-caution, self-censorship, doubt and worry from beneath which so many of us attempt to write. It’s a good strategy. I’d recommend it.

You even turn yourself into a fictional character of sorts with the fake critical apparatus (the introduction, the afterword and annotated bibliography). This adds an extra layer of fiction. It also means that the book contains its own exegesis. Could you talk to us about these two aspects: the proliferating ontological uncertainty and the mock-scholarship?

CDR: I am a fictional character. Don’t we all make ourselves up? (That might account for the ontological uncertainty.)

The book contains its own exegesis partly in order to pre-emptively fend off any critics. You want to criticise this book? it asks, Too late — many have been there already.

It’s also there, this ‘mock scholarship,’ not in any way to mock scholars (heaven forbid), but because of Eco’s idea of the ‘open work,’ a work which can engender its own multitude of interpretations, responses, offshoots, parodies. The Blind Accordionist already includes a few, with the hope that the reader will create more.

Is Maxim Guyavitch a kind of Unknown Writer like there is an Unknown Soldier?

CDR: Yes, I think that’s exactly who he is.

That said, I’m not sure he can stand in for ‘all’ writers, but only for one particular strand. What could represent all unknown writers? There should be an abstract sculpture somewhere. Not a solitary flame though. Maybe one of those Sarah Lucas overflowing ashtrays.

There are many recurring images and motifs in your new book — the compression of time, railways, card games, cartography, ghosts, doppelgängers, dreams, pears (especially pear brandy), etc. — but the most obvious and most enigmatic one is the eponymous figure of the blind accordionist, which recurs in various guises in all the stories. Where does this figure come from?

CDR: André Kertész’s photograph of a blind accordionist, from around 1916. It’s a haunting, disturbing picture, as many of the best photographs can be. George Szirtes has written a really good poem about it, but I first came across it in Geoff Dyer’s book The Ongoing Moment. Dyer lists many of the other photographers who have taken pictures of blind accordionists, tracing it as a kind of trope, an ongoing homage or response to Kertész. I was interested in how it persists through time, both as a photographic subject, but also simply in the number of blind accordionists there actually are!

More simply, I thought ‘The Blind Accordionist’ would be a good title for a book. So I wrote it. With no blind accordionists in it.

(I like the sound of accordions, too, and a lot of accordion music — though I realise many object!)

You point out that great art — from Petrarch to Cindy Sherman — is often based on a pattern of repetition with minor variations. In Who’s Who, there were references to the Goldberg Variations, for instance. Here, we have the figure of the blind accordionist (which appears in each story but always under a different form), the two almost identical villages, the doppelgängers who are not ‘quite identical’, the warder’s day which is ‘as similar and as different’ as any other, the card game in which ‘each card should have its twin, although the twin card was not necessarily identical’… Why are you fascinated by this pattern?

CDR: It’s a way of putting order onto chaos, structuring the random happenstance of the world. Categorising and listing, while still allowing for difference, change — chance even. I mean, random chaos can be fascinating, thrilling, especially in an artistic context, but it can also be scary. And it’s bloody difficult to turn into fiction.

The Blind Accordionist is a collection of short stories and a novel. It’s both at the same time (like a rabbit-duck), isn’t it?

CDR: Exactly that. It’s a collection of short stories pretending to be a novel pretending to be a collection of short stories.

In the Introduction, you write that all we know about Guyavitch is that nine stories were published under his name between the beginning of the 20th century and the 1930s, but you then go on to mention a tale you have chosen not to include (admittedly on account of its ‘dubious authenticity’ — but still!). Is this missing story a bit like the missing chapter in Perec’s Life A User’s Manual? Is it an act of sabotage, or a dose of potentiality that has escaped actualisation? Is it one of the ‘volitional’ errors you describe as ‘portals of discovery’?

CDR: It’s a sabotage into potentiality, perhaps, both a hole and an escape route. It refuses the closure of the completed volume. There’s still more, out there somewhere. I like to think it will turn up, one day.

In your brilliant Afterword, you conjure up a lineage for Guyavitch — mainly authors from central or eastern Europe — a kind of School of Kafka. Why this attraction to Mitteleuropa?

In the 1970s — when I was a child — short animated TV programmes were sometimes broadcast between the more popular shows. Many of these were Czech or Polish. During the school holidays there was also morning television, where you might see imported European dramas for children, either badly dubbed or with one single voice telling us what was going on, the actors speaking mutedly in their own language. There were often flutes on the soundtrack, and sometimes a zither.

In the 1980s — when I was a teen — central and eastern Europe seemed as distant as the moon. Prague, now a city of mini-breaks and lads-on-tour stag weekends, I knew of then as little more than expressionist shadows and rumours of dissidents. Music might reach us from Berlin, its eastern part occasionally visited by the intrepid who always returned with a story. Few of us knew that Leningrad was St Petersburg. I listened to side two of Low a lot, perhaps too much.

In the 1980s — when I was a student — I read Kafka’s grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics, then moved on to white-spined translations of Kundera, Hrabal, Škvorecký, and Schulz.

Now I am an adult, and I know that some things which happen to you when you are young never go away.

In the bibliography, you feign to quote from David Kingston’s ‘Notes on the Whimsical’ (unpublished — of course!) in which he supposedly lists the mise en abyme as one of the genre’s attributes. It seems to me that the mise en abyme is your work’s guiding principle. The best example, here, is ‘At the Gallery of National Art’, where many of the paintings depict other stories in the book (the two villages, the man who decides to become a bear, etc.)…

CDR: The idea of framing something, then putting that thing in frame, then putting another frame around that thing becomes addictive — it’s similar to the process of repetition and variation mentioned above, and it becomes vertiginous, dizzying. It calls everything about perception and representation into question. I think it’s funny, too.

Your books have an encyclopaedic quality: they are full of literary references as well as cross-references to your own works. But they are also frequently attracted to nothingness: I’m thinking here of the desolate landscape painting which is ‘a picture of nothing, if that is possible’ or the mirror, in another story, that fails to reflect anything (and could well be the aforementioned painting rather than a mirror)… Tell us about this oscillation between everything and nothing.

CDR: The abyme mentioned above is the abyss. The mise en abyme is the process of piling things up on the edge of that abyss, or over it. It’s about amassing plenitude in an attempt to cover the horror of the void, or to avoid staring into the abyss too long. The Neapolitan actor-director Enzo Moscato claims the baroque as a style is based on a hysterical fear of the abyss, thus acknowledging the inseparability of the two. I think there’s a useful generative tension between the minimal and the baroque.

Do you see your three books as a trilogy now?

CDR: In that they are three connected books which all talk about each other, yes. You can read them in any order, mind, and The Blind Accordionist might actually be the best place to start.