Transductions

The image above is a representation of the core of the blogosphere taken from the slightly OCD, slightly bobble-headed but nonetheless ever-intriguing media visualization site: Data Mining. So if you ever wanted to know what mess it is that you’re navigating when you search the net, apparently there you go. If you look closely enough, I believe you can see us, just barely, on the bottom lower left of the maw.

Anyhow, while canoeing through that black fractal heart, I came upon these. First off, Claude Simon’s classic novel of three witnesses each recounting, in discrepant ways, the death of a World World One sniper, The Flanders Road, is out from Oneworld Classics. Their entire catalogue is worth a browse, actually. Next up, philosophy graduate and rising star in the field of speculative realism, Reid Kane Kotlas, has an incredible post on constellations that should not be missed. Just generally, his blog and philosophical work is phenomenal. He and two other worthies of the movement, Nick Srnicek and Anthony Paul Smith, are currently seeking donations to help them cover the cost of travel to a conference they have been invited to speak at in Warwick. If you dig what you see, and can spare some loose change, why not Paypal them a couple of dollars? It will help stimulate radical thought and just be a cool and comradely gesture. Any additional funds received will be donated to the Partners in Health Organization to assist in their aid effort for Haiti.

And speaking of speculative realism, if you’ve heard buzz about it but have had difficulty figuring out the basic propositions behind it, where it starts from and what it signals and who the hell is who, here’s a pretty sweet introduction to the key players by an interested outsider. On the book front again, Leslie Scalapino has a novel coming out from Starcherone, for which the only word that can be found is kickass. So keep an eye out. Also in the kickass category is Dodie Bellamy’s first column at SFMoMA’s blog, Open Space. That heady mix of art and brains demands a chaser and it takes us to over to Toutfait, the Duchamp Studies Online Journal, which is now your destiny in the same way heart surgery was for Bill Clinton. And in a perhaps not unrelated matter, you might also like to check out this black hole simulator at HuffPo, which uses real star data to take you as far as possible within the cosmic zero. Last but not least, after all that negotiating of the inner core, you’ll probably want to hit up your dealer and party. If so, University of Sydney Gender Studies Professor Kane Race’s amazing recent book on the pleasure of drugs, the rules of consumption and the health regimes of policing, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, should be ordered in the moments before your mind becomes its own glowing neon version of the blogosphere’s crackling core.

“Every becoming is a block of coexistence.”
– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292

“Homosexuals have time for everybody.”
– Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant, cited in Powell and Trinidad, page 10, line 94

A small but striking bouquet of words can be found around the internet describing the recent poetic collaboration between D.A. Powell and David Trinidad: a bricolage, a fantasy autobiography, a sort of Everybody’s self-confession, a found poem ghost-written by a plethora of the never-to-be-named and narrated by a singular, plural, famously anonymous self. Strategically assembled out of 300 lines sourced from the ‘tell-all’ memoirs of celebrities, artists, bigwigs, brass, presidents, personalities and even a nineteenth century gun-for-hire, By Myself sets out the first person tale of a star who rises to fame through an array of eras, classes, genders, races, regions, sexualities and styles. This narrator – unnamed and yet eponymous – loves, loses, inhales the highs of stardom, suffers its contradictions, succumbs to the agonies of addiction and finally arrives at a place where he-she finds enough balance, introspection and wisdom to be able to sit down and relate the inspiring tale. It’s a moving, stirring story of heartstrings and how they are pulled.

In an interview with The Southeast Review, Powell explains the angle of composition he and Trinidad decided on for piecing the book together: “We played it like a game of chess, laying down sentences in a way that would produce a singular narrative. We wouldn’t tell each other in advance which books we were using, and the rule was this: once an author was used, he or she was no longer available. So we had to be fairly strategic.” The singular narrative Powell mentions here is the fictional voice that emerges out of the sheer fluidity of the assembled excerpts. Thus, in the very fact of its singularity, it is the most nimble, lattice-like and commandingly intricate aspects of the text. Told in a declarative first person, the lines marshal a harmony behind the symmetry of their repetitious, artfully idiosyncratic “I”; a synchronisation that speaks in itself to the strategies of erasure and alignment that characterise the biographical accounts, firsthand or ghosted, of famous persons. Flowing off of one another like the sentence before were the unprompted forethought to its own, the 300 lines of the text become one even and ruminative voice, the voice, we might say, of the invisible artistry of credible persona itself. In this sense, there is something deeply awry about the 300 reference notes that follow the tale and attach each line of this text to its provenance, in the sense that this meticulous attribution is a continual interruption of the pitch-perfect narratorial flow. When first settling in to the book, I decided beforehand that I would read the text through clean and then go back and forth afterwards attaching each referent to its unmarked quotation. Except at the very first line – taken from Tennessee Williams and which reads: “To put it in two words: disaster struck” – I found myself so fascinated by the parts of the voice that I was drawn line for line to attribute it while I read. It was not until afterward, upon rereading, that I was able to detect the univocal flow, the immaculate sedimentation of one sentence into the next one. The singular narrative, at the level of address, came afterward.

This raises a curiously large point about this tiny text: is the idiosyncrasy of any famous speaker reliant upon a quintessence of resonances that thrill us so profoundly precisely because they normally take place without attribution? Is there actually originality inside charisma or is such allure in fact an effect of a sort of echo chamber of idolisation we hear but do not see? The text itself is, in this way, quite sly in maintaining a shifting field of classes, races, time periods, sexual orientations and genders openly in the voice, without strict standardisation, for, while this would appear to be in itself a type of disruption (and, indeed, would almost inevitably direct that reader who had more restraint than I and managed to wade, say, 3 lines into the book where the first puzzling switch happens, a birthplace change from Alabama to Louisiana, to the references eventually), it is actually a type of plurality that augments – not undercuts – the voice’s sense of comprehensiveness, the sense that it is, indeed, Everybody’s tale: that is, the tale of the tropes attached to the very public tellability of tales in contemporary cultures of fame.

Here’s Powell again in another interview, this time at Sharkforum: “For a long time, we resisted assigning any gender to the narrator. And even once it was assigned, it kept fluctuating. We were delighted to discover that our boy was a crossdresser; we were typical PFLAG parents with a T on the end for ‘Trans.’ We also were proud of his multi-ethnic background. We felt he was far more inclusive in his identity than Hollywood would ever allow. And the more diverse he got, the more we loved him. Or her. ‘Madame Bovary, C’est Moi,’ said Flaubert. To which we would respond, ‘Myself, C’est Nous.’” The appeal here to both PFLAG (with a tagged on T) and Flaubert is intriguing as the cross between a realist prose of self-discovery and the institutions of liberal tolerance in today’s society speaks to the obligation for minorities to achieve acceptance through the construction of narratives of public relatability. To be able to achieve social equity or communicative appeal minorities must talk as though their intimate lives were intimately related to everyone’s. As such, though they may say the words themselves, in a sense, the proud parent of plurality must speak in their place. If Myself, the teller of this tale, is far more inclusive than Hollywood would allow, Powell and Trinidad have the keen sense that this extra-inclusiveness, too, is the grist of a Hollywood tale of triumph over narrow-minded adversity: to wit, see Sigourney Weaver’s recent Golden Globe nomination for her performance in Prayers for Bobby in which the parental transition from unbending bigotry to tragic realisation marks the transformation of queer into son. In this spirit, citing Candice Bergen, Myself says: “I now spoke with just a trace of transatlantic lisp – in a voice that had nothing whatever to do with who I was or where I came from” (10). So it is that the disruptive pattern in the text elaborates the uneasiness in the assembly of this quite inimitable “Myself” even as it prepares us in our re-reading for the grace not only of a smooth but also a lovably diverse voice – the voice not just as distinctive individual but as an interpellative, transitive, feel-good field.

If minority expression is accordingly no straightforward subversion of acculturation in Powell and Trinidad’s book, nonetheless the threading of minority expressions throughout the text should not be thought of, either, as merely a critical comment upon their co-optation. Nor, for that matter, should any one of the 300 sources the poem cites be thought only in terms of a critique of the illusion of idiosyncrasy the text concocts – the boilerplate plot of “a truly remarkable life”. For the voice is not hollow, or empty, a prop exposed to us as a categorical fake. Rather, Myself is quite successfully compelling in its narration of his-her life. In part, this is because the very theme of our narrator’s struggles toward stardom, and then through it, is the theme of trying to break through an enclosure placed upon its desire for a non-correlative sense of self-expression. It is important to note here that this is not a variation on the tired old moral of resistance to the essentialism of identity politics. It is, on the contrary, an endeavour to speak quite essentially and distinctly of difference beyond the dictates of the compulsory three-dimensional humanism that embraces the other not as other but as troubled versions of the same.

What’s so fascinating about By Myself is that Powell and Trinidad extend this incorporation of the same beyond minorities to celebrities in order to suggest it is the malady at the very heart of our fame culture. For all their apparent magnetism, the exceptional icons of our planet are oddly inexpressive, if not outrightly mute. They lack a tale of their own, though they incessantly tell their own tales. Early in the book, citing Akira Kurosawa then Richard Chamberlain, Myself tells us: “I don’t think I was a retarded child, but it is a fact that I was slow. I only know that my thinking went silent, and my sense of self disappeared” (ls.25-26, p.3). In the first quotation, one of the most ingenious practitioners of the cinema is summoned up not at his peak but in the form of a dim, unexemplary child. Far from indications of incipient creativity, some glimmer of the special, there is a slowness that Kurosawa thinks, in retrospect, was not retardation – an inborn impairment – but which is nonetheless a ‘fact’ the later master feels he cannot deny. This scene feeds directly into the comments of former sixties teen idol Richard Chamberlain on the closet, which derive from his memoir in which he would officially come out in his later life. Hence, the thinking he speaks of that went silent, the self that disappeared, is the identity he didn’t become for most of his years. In this movement between Kurosawa – as Japanese, an Easterner, a foreigner, a former enemy – and Chamberlain – the closeted sixties teen heartthrob – the problem of slowness links to silenced thought, a disappeared self, a palsy of cognitively processing one’s identity in a world that has, since, demanded identity as necessity and irrelevancy so as to naturalise and disarm it. For Kurosawa as master director bringing forward the vision of himself as a delayed child, as the far point from which he has had to come; for Chamberlain as a now uncloseted reclaimer of identity lost, yet the author of a memoir that tries to rationalize the idea of a life beyond identity anyway, in the role of himself as actor, adaptation becomes an ambivalent achievement. It is frozen here, looking back over its shoulder, as both men, paused in one autobiographical line each, stare at that thing which their narratives should have definitively gone past by now. They are enraptured by the pathological spectre of their assimilated difference.

Although both an oversentimentalised and much-maligned term in contemporary social settings, identity, for Powell and Trinidad, is to be transvaluated as the facility to communicate the distinctive but circumstantially-entangled way that one is at odds with one’s self. Hence, no line in this work is equivalent to the persona that it derives from and obliquely reflects. The surprise of sentences is a characteristic of this text, a huge part of its brilliance, and it scoops out, from the trash, self-promotion and mawkishness of celebrity biography, an astonishingly poignant poetry. Quoting Milton Berle, Myself writes. “I remember the last thing I did before I left for Hollywood was to stop at the mirror in the hall and stare at my face” (l.112, pp.11-12). Here, the movie mogul – famously renowned for his hefty endowment – looks upon another private part – his face – and it is as though, when reorganized in this text, he needs to see himself one last time, to take in his countenance before he forgets it forever. As G. Gordon Liddy, Myself remarks quite simply: “I was approached in the locker room” (l.79, p. 8). Conspiracy and phobia haemorrhage into defence – “I was approached” – coupled with a certain anxious undertow of vulnerability only the scene of the locker room can supply. Speaking as Eartha Kitt, Myself recalls: “I made a slingshot to kill rattlesnakes or a bird and I would cook them on a hickory wood fire” (l.13, p.2). An icon of the cabaret, renowned for her atypical, sultry voice, as well as her rags-to-riches story, in which she was picked out for stardom by Orson Welles himself, Kitt is considered not through her glamour but through her coarse survival skills, acquired as a poor girl born on a cotton plantation. And, indeed, in her capacity to kill rattlesnakes or a bird, between which a metamorphic equivalence is established, one is drawn to recall her bravery upon meeting with Lady Bird Johnson at the White House in the 60s. Asked what her thoughts were on the Vietnam War, Kitt refused to follow protocol and made the First Lady cry by flatly telling her it was no wonder the young were rebelling and taking pot when they were being sent off to be shot and maimed. In this moment, both bird and snake are cooked on the hickory fire of Kitt’s earthy truth. Spiriting Ronald Reagan, Myself says incisively: “I was in the picture only a few minutes, but it contained a very emotional scene” (l.186, p.18). Later, as Ed McMahon, he-she adds: “I just raised my voice above their music and continued to explain how difficult it was to create an illusion successfully” (l.136, p.14). The delightful one-liners and dazzling insights, retrieved and rearticulated out of the very mouths of the players themselves, turns their public personas into a singular, socially contextual identification that is as unlikely as it is true.

If Powell and Trinidad turn their method of strategic extraction back toward a revitalization of each of their source subjects through the poetry of the single illustrative line, they also shrewdly create a crisis of consciousness for Myself, in being the ghost-written summation of all these superlative worthies. Perhaps one of the most challenging and intriguing moments in the book, a moment that tackles this issue directly, comes when Myself meets William Burroughs. Summoning Jane Pauley, General Norman H. Schwarzkopf, Molly Picon and Gore Vidal, Myself writes:

Bill dressed with a certain flair; he owned many pairs of Frye boots, which he cared for with loving attention. Then he asked if I’d like to see the gold. Beyond that little exchange, however, he offered nothing. Then he moved on to Tangier and made, as it were, his name, not to mention his literary self, with a good deal of help from Brion Gysin, a brilliant creature, who was to suggest to Bill that what he wrote might be magically enhanced by cutting it up and then piecing together the fragments, presumably at random. (ls.216-219, pp.21-22)

On the surface of things, this would appear to be a quite cutting critique of Burroughs. Indeed, to represent Burroughs asking Myself if he-she would like to see the gold, and binding such a revelation-invitation to the militaristic medal reverence of Schwarzkopf, is, undeniably, to level a charge against Burroughs as having wound up but another face of America’s mixture of experimentalism and profit-motive, its transformation of the aesthetics of liberation into the best (and most violent) business in town. Next to this, Molly Picon – a now-all-but forgotten actress in the early twentieth century New York subculture of Yiddish theatre and film, a persona, in other words, of a quite different, non-avant-garde but distinctly populist, underground and just as experimentalist America – becomes the basis for Myself, as an identity in search of itself, to claim that Burroughs, beyond his certain flair, and the gold, offered nothing. But provocative though this criticism may be, it is not quite as straightforward as it may seem. For it is less Burroughs that comes in for a tanning here, when all is said and done, than the cut-up method he appropriated and made famous. To Powell and Trinidad, Burroughs is a mere avatar of the method, which is, originally, exactly what Burroughs set out to be, a mere machine for the text, before he got off course. Gore Vidal’s tart, gossipy reminiscences are brought in here precisely to frame the cut-up method through a requisite degree of elegant scepticism about the practice, not as a product of the man but as a reputation-maker for the man. Brought to the fore here is the magical enhancement not only of the writing but of the persona (‘not to mention his literary self’) which was created “by cutting it up and then piecing together the fragments, presumably at random”. The cut-up method, Powell and Trinidad are suggesting, is itself the very heart of the American tradition of identity formation – a thing of style and traction, like Burroughs fictional Frye boots, which are the product of the Frye Company, the oldest continuously operated shoe company in the United States, and renowned particularly for the unique harness boot that they originally designed for use in the U.S. Cavalry. The problem, then, for Myself, as a composite of the cut-ups of so many others, is that this bricolage of respliced bits and pieces is no more than the pre-dammed reservoir of charisma in celebrity culture and the very thing that turns fame – the apogee of exceptionality – into a kind of mediocrity and anonymity. So, right on the heels of his-her encounter with Burroughs, conjuring a far more unusual set of real-life referents – Charles Manson, David Brainerd and Shirley Temple Black – Myself reveals: “I spent the next several days in a kind of trance. I think, time and all its gay amusements and cruel disappointments never appeared so inconsiderable to me before. Stardom, at best, is a tricky status” (ls.220-222, p.22). Here, the violent psychosis of the cult leader and the extreme self-privations and mental immiserations of a colonial missionary to Native Americans, who was obsessed unto death with the paralysing thought of the fate-to-come for their unsalvaged souls, unite as the Scylla and Charybdis of stardom, a state which as Temple wisely notes, having grown up in it, is, unquestionably, a status but a tricky one, addictive and destructive, deceptive and slippery, a frenetic tap dance.

Over and against this crisis of the identity-image for Myself, in which self-definition and self-transformation are but bipolar bumper cars bounding off of one another, and in which the scramble to patch together ever updated configurations of originality from the cut-up resources of culture ends up as variations upon the same old instrumental self-promotion and non-experimentalist mentality, Powell and Trinidad imply that it is a dislocation of context in context that is the means to turn the cut-up method into a durable identity and to turn overidentification into perversity. So it is that Myself is most engaging and disarming when discussing its highly promiscuous sex life. Referencing Bertrand Russell, Carroll Baker, Tony Randall, Marvin Liebman and John Kander and Fred Ebb, Myself recalls: “It must not be supposed that all of my time was consumed in despair and intellectual effort. Let’s just say that I didn’t let another moment of my prime year sexual years slip by unfulfilled. It was open house at Groucho’s every Sunday. We all locked arms, and sang Andrew Sisters songs. Improvisational exercises like that can be terrifying but they eventually give you a theatrical looseness” (ls.149-153, pp.15-16). From Russell’s insistence upon an unapologetically proletarian sensuality that always accompanied the classical intellectuality he is most often recalled for (he was one of the first public figures in England to advocate sex education, access to contraception, sex outside of marriage, divorce and decriminalisation of same-sexuality); to Carroll Baker’s resolution to be not only a sex symbol but to be a sexually-active self; to Tony Randall’s observation on social life turned saucy quip; to gay conservative Marvin Liebman’s heady moment of private gay camaraderie; to composing and lyric-writing duo, Kander and Ebb’s, culminating comment on the scariness of falling back on your own resources but the pride in the existential suppleness it provides, what emerges here is a theme of a histrionic wantonness and impiety as a way to escape from the scene with one’s self. And histrionic it has to be, for a self-conscious theatricality is the only way to loosen one’s self up and start to groove with desire. Indeed, as Myself adds at another point, calling on the powerhouse double act of Marlon Brando and Ann Baxter: “Acting, not prostitution, is the oldest profession in the world. None of us, Marilyn Monroe included, none of us could wait to get to work.” (ls.172-173, p.17) Alongside promiscuity, the witty humour in this segment is another technique for achieving the dislocation of context in context that Powell and Trinidad advocate. Humour abounds across this narrative, turning statements inside out, making them mean the opposite of what they mean and, in becoming so opposite, being all the more precise and perceptive. To stick with the theme of sex, Myself confides in us of his-her early escapades, conjuring Jimmy Carter, Preston Sturges, Celene Dion, Lillian Roth and Louis L’Amour: “I was a popular companion even when quite young, because of my willingness to climb high into trees. Suddenly I saw two poplar trees about ten feet apart immediately in front of us! Reason enough to feel weak in the knees. My knees trembled, but I said with bravado, ‘Send them up’. Sex is an ordeal, or it is a rape, or an athletic endeavour.” (ls.157-161, p.16) Hilarious in this is not only the step-by-step subversion of each individual statement but also the artificialisation of nature (the trees) into the sexual blur of wood and welcome by women and men and men and men and women and women all conflated in this libidinal exchange. And this is not even to mention the deft recasting of L’Amour’s misogynistic proclamation as an emancipatory masochistic manifesto.

But it is not only promiscuity (which relies on a certain confidence, whether actual or virtual, literal of metaphorical) and humour (which depends on a particular deftness, wit and keenness of timing) that are offered up as the only ways of dislocating context in context. Powell and Trinidad are not prescriptive in the sense of demanding only one type of extroversional path toward contextual decontextualization. For this reason, struggle is offered as another stratagem of dislocation. “When I recovered, I remember thinking it was essential to get myself back into shape; this was the moment to be fitter than ever before,” Myself says, citing Julie Andrews. Then immediately follows this line from the autobiography of Christine Jorgensen: “There is a Chinese proverb that says, ‘The longest journey must begin with the first step’.” (ls.285-286, pp.27-28). And, at the very conclusion of the book, the tenderness and togetherness of a domestic life is also shown to be a practice of dislocation too. For Powell and Trinidad, the idea of home is a thing far more complex than a simple matter of routine or habit. Bringing together Doris Day, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, Myself consequently observes: “And loyalty – I have never found in a human being loyalty that is comparable to a dog’s loyalty. The night Byron arrived, Gertrude and I alternately kept him in our laps and when it was time to go to bed Basket could not be found. That is a natural thing, perhaps I am not even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.” (ls., 298-200, p.29) Doris Day’s gruff surmise that loyalty can only be found in her pet speaks to the difficulty of connection and the unusual ways it may be realised: at odds with humanity, Day manages to find a certain fulfilment in the anti-human embrace of another species. And in the scene that follows, petting their new dog, Gertrude and Alice (and Myself) find that the dog’s basket has gone missing – like all identities, the dog is in its new home and, in being so, its owners discover its home has been misplaced. That, as Stein says, is a natural thing. A self is not necessarily the self that’s seen even if what is seen in its place seems familiar. And a Myself that can find fondness in its properties lives not just for but in the day.

As a last point, it is important to note that Myself’s fictional identity comes into its own, at the last, as queer in its very act of drawing together and reinventing so many of its compatriots and proxies and even what would be, if it were real, its bitterly sworn enemies. At the outset of this piece, I cited a line from the book that is taken from Quentin Crisp: “Homosexuals have time for everybody.” What becomes clear by the end of this text is that Myself achieves the identity of queerness by virtue of a radical hospitality and sociality toward all. Becoming-queer, in the eyes of Trinidad and Powell, is to become immoderately compassionate to everyone, to treat all with a sympathy that is not some artificial and vaguely condescending sibling of pity or vapid niceness but which is an act of universal commitment – which is to say, promiscuous in itself, for how could one be committed universally otherwise? – a commitment to the radical poetic labour of giving time to everyone. And yet does such a summons mean we cannot choose between things? No. It should not be thought for a moment that, ultimately, in giving time to everyone that everyone must, thereby, be approved of. The quite trenchant critiques that appear in this book show that Powell and Trinidad are not afraid to make their judgments. But the giving of time offers a perspective that takes into account, in others, the same operations of limitation, desire, poignancy and self-discrepancy one wishes were acknowledged in one’s self – though on the terms set by the others’ own lives, in their own co-ordinates. In this way, Myself’s memoir is less the autobiography of a character than the autobiography of an attitude that is minoritarian and multitudinal, individual and collective. It is the very possibility of this entanglement within identity and the ethicalness of the ensuring struggle to remain free from being frozen into just another case of the exceptional instance, just another subject for a celebrity bio, that Powell and Trinidad propose is the side of the self that, in everybody, if it should ever break through, breaks through as a coming out of their queer.

First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.

“Weiss . . . took soul-searching to its darkest depths. He is remarkably open . . . searching and piercing.” — The Complete Review

“What makes Georg Letham so fascinating is not that he is a murderer, but that he knows this and is still plagued with a compulsion to contribute to humanity . . . He kills for money, but when stripped of the need for money and forced to live, he becomes more of a human being.” — Salonica

“I wonder why Weiss isn’t better known here. A doctor as well as a writer, he knew about the body as well as the heart, and you can trust him when he describes how each can act on the other.” — Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

“Ernst Weiss is in fact one of the few writers who may justly be compared to Franz Kafka . . . This is easily one of the most interesting books I have come across in years . . . One is filled with impressions, stimulated, gripped by images, characters, and episodes that are strangely real but also unforgettably fashioned. –And, incidentally, it’s all very Austrian.” — Thomas Mann

Excerpt in PDF

Reviews by Monica Carter and Joshua Cohen

Published by Archipelago Books