Ángel Bonomini - Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient.

 

Ángel Bonomini, The Novices of Lerna, Trans. by Jordan Landsman, 2024

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English readers for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient.

The collection's central novella follows Ramón Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. After he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body, Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other "novices" subject to the same undisclosed project--all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school's dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one...

An overlooked master of Argentine fantastic literature, Ángel Bonomini garnered praise among peers and contemporaries like Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, before slipping mysteriously into obscurity. Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini was forty-three years old in 1972 when he published The Novices of Lerna, the first of four books of short stories he released before his death at age sixty-four.

These surreal stories reckon with identity, perception, and existence.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini—a contemporary of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, and Jorge Luis Borges—has never been translated into English before. Much like his peers, Bonomini reckoned with both grand philosophical questions and the foibles of individual behavior. The title novella, which takes up much of this volume, focuses on an academic summoned to a strange institute of higher learning where all his fellow scholars—though hailing from different nations—look exactly alike. The men are given a series of rules that seem designed to further eradicate their individual identities, and by the time an epidemic begins thinning their ranks, it’s not clear if it’s an ironic coincidence or part of some plan. In the stories that follow, there’s a similar ambiguity, sometimes elevated to a metafictional level. After “The Model” appears to end, the story’s narrator chimes in to tell readers, “I have only been truthful about one thing.” The identities of characters in “The Bengal Tiger,” which opens with a series of potentially unrelated sentences about a woman and a tiger, blur as the story continues, eventually transforming the narrative into a dreamlike triangle in which a man, a woman, and a tiger alternate roles of love, death, and betrayal. In “Aromatic Herbs,” the narrator moves the story in and out of dreams, including one that ends with his own death. These tales are often heady, abounding with unlikely revelations and sudden moments of violence. Their arrival in English, translated by Landsman, is a welcome development.

A beguiling blend of the cerebral and the visceral. - Kirkus

Argentinian writer Bonomini (1929–1994) makes a noteworthy English-language debut with this entrancing collection. After Ramón Beltra, the Argentine narrator of the title novella, accepts an enigmatic invitation to an illustrious fellowship in the Swiss mountain town of Lerna, he travels abroad for the first time (“Visiting Europe is something that every Argentine keeps in reserve as an unquestionable inheritance; to visit is almost a disappointment”), only to discover that every fellowship recipient looks identical to him. When some of these “novices,” as they’re called, fall ill from a mysterious epidemic, they begin to consider whether they are not there to study but to be studied. The narrator of “The Martyr” pines for his former lover who left her dog behind, and the story takes a dark turn as he considers what it might take to see her again. With “The C.C.C,” Bonomini creates a world of parallel universes and replicas in the story of two aging cousins whose lives appear to be entirely unremarkable. Tricky but never gimmicky, this will appeal to admirers of Borges. - Publishers Weekly

Argentinian writer Bonomini (1929–1994) makes a noteworthy English-language debut with this entrancing collection. After Ramón Beltra, the Argentine narrator of the title novella, accepts an enigmatic invitation to an illustrious fellowship in the Swiss mountain town of Lerna, he travels abroad for the first time (“Visiting Europe is something that every Argentine keeps in reserve as an unquestionable inheritance; to visit is almost a disappointment”), only to discover that every fellowship recipient looks identical to him. When some of these “novices,” as they’re called, fall ill from a mysterious epidemic, they begin to consider whether they are not there to study but to be studied. The narrator of “The Martyr” pines for his former lover who left her dog behind, and the story takes a dark turn as he considers what it might take to see her again. With “The C.C.C,” Bonomini creates a world of parallel universes and replicas in the story of two aging cousins whose lives appear to be entirely unremarkable. Tricky but never gimmicky, this will appeal to admirers of Borges. - Publishers Weekly

Ángel Bonomini is one of those extraordinary literary figures who—despite having been lauded for his singular, masterful inventions—has somehow fallen into oblivion. In addition to being a cultural critic and prolific translator, the poems and stories published throughout Argentina in his lifetime represented a vital contribution to the nation’s phenomenon of fantastic narrative. While he remained largely unknown to international readers in his lifetime, such work earned him multiple distinguished accomplishments in his home country—including two Premio Konex awards and personal accolades from Jorge Luis Borges. In 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Bonomini passed away, and sadly, his writing seemed to disappear with him.

Now, in The Novices of Lerna, Jordan Landsman has captured the author’s wistful and pensive voice in a stirring collection of sixteen previously untranslated stories, spreading the magic to a new generation of readers. With candles melted “as if light had been slit from their veins,” theories “woven like black thread in the dead of night,” and people “like books with transparent pages where the lines don’t match up,” Bonomini glides vividly and lyrically into worlds where time warps, people live and die and live again, doppelgängers are plentiful, sentences disappear into amorphous paragraphs, and Buenos Aires isn’t quite the same urban sprawl that one might see in Argentina. While the pieces in this collection have no crossover in plot or character, some subterranean power connects them, with favored symbols and images appearing and reappearing—figs, trees, fires, death, and the landscape of the city.

In the titular story, which takes up the first fifty-three pages of the book, the protagonist Ramón Beltra is invited to participate in a mysterious fellowship program at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. On his journey there, he briefly falls in love with a flight attendant, and while this love lasts for no longer than two pages, it serves as the emotional center for Beltra—and the reader—to hold onto when the trip soon unravels. The rules of Lerna are strange, with one being that the fellows are not allowed to distinguish themselves through their clothing, and this takes an absurdist turn when Beltra meets the other fellows, finding that they are all perfectly identical to himself. Commenting on this phenomenon, Beltra notes: “When a group wears the same uniform and its members are also physically identical, more than just equal and depersonalized, individuals are almost invisible.” Soon, the identical fellows begin to suspect that something unusual, even sinister, is happening to them; they fall victim to a mass epidemic, which wipes them out one by one.

Through this plot of the double, Bonomini takes the classic trope of the evil twin and turns it into a social commentary on finding oneself in a world of rigid, suffering homogeneity. Like Borges’ “Borges and I,” Bonomini splits character, wonderfully losing track of the narrator as a singular identity, and the off-kilter plot is complemented by the labyrinthine structure of the university: concentric circles, numbered apartments, an ominous forest, coffered ceilings, uncanny repetitions. Beltra confides: “I didn’t want to get lost like a rat in this maze, which was complex despite its seeming simplicity.” It is as apt a description for the edifice as it is for the narrative, which reads as if standing in a room of mirrors.

Of the collection, “The Bengal Tiger” is perhaps the most experimental; every line seems to contradict the one before it, as Bonomini subverts narrative structure in order to portray something ambiguous about the act of storytelling and fictional realities. The first paragraph begins with: “A woman is dancing and a scream is heard,” and ends with: “A dance screams up the woman that’s tigering.” A tiger eats the woman, but much of the material reality of this event, whether the animal is a physical entity or some representation of her husband or herself, is left unclear. Bonomini concludes this confounding text by stating: “Mankind will have isolated instants just as they have isolated atoms,” implying that the tale is a shattering of one into various contradictory narratives—a nuclear fission of a story. Jumping through time with no real beginning or end, it loops around itself in an ouroboros of love and betrayal, with the tiger activating endless transformations: “Every time it blinks, [it] extinguishes reality for an instant.” The shift of perspective lending different angles to reality is something that Bonomini masterfully captures. As he writes in another story: “Maybe it’s just time, pure time, that makes us see the same things as if they were different.”

There are moments, throughout the collection, where Bonomini grounds the reader in realism; while each story launches the reader into a land of speculative adventure, the metaphysical riddles occur amidst an underlying feeling of relative mundanity. The characters sit at cafes, in apartments, in bed. A man watches a woman at a private fashion show, a seemingly normal event until the clothing eventually reveals an almost infinite series of changes, resulting in a culmination of shows that take nearly a lifetime to watch. Toeing the line between magical realism and lyric, the author remains in conversation with postmodernists of his generation while crafting an utterly distinct voice: one in which Jordan Landsman translates with grace. As grand as the narratives are in theoretical thought, almost all consist of zoomed-in moments during everyday life, and it is in this smallness that the wildest of experiences, and the largest of questions, can feel entirely real.

In telling these tales, Bonomini tends to smudge the line between poetry and prose. “The Singer” is a string of words dragged across four pages, consisting of a single sentence. In this long surge of breathless recollection, the narrator learns of the death of a singer, reveals the powers eventually given those who revealed the news of the death, considers the ambiguity of what it means for an artist to die, and philosophizes on the malleability of memory as radios play the still-vivid voice of a deceased singer—how the music “swept through the house and my house was everyone’s house and listen these are not empty words for good reason it was buenosaires everything that happened happened there even the fig tree and the jasmines.” People emerge, dressed as the singer still, denying death so easily, as if “everything had been a dream and one day he’d return to tell us about the hospital where he’d stayed where they’d healed his burns and fortunately his face was untouched by flames.”

The most revealing (though, in typical Bonomini style, it is also obscured) piece of the collection is perhaps “Theories,” where the protagonist, an unnamed cousin of the character, Jacinta, is overwhelmed by the infinity of theories. While the narrator holds back from ever disclosing these theories—let alone what they pertain to overall—it is made known that they concern figs and melon seeds and hair. The theories are woven in darkness, very difficult to see and describe, but one can surmise their contents through a moment of clarity: “when you’re dreaming, the world you’re dreaming in turns into the place you’re dreaming about,” and when you awake, “everything disappears, because dreams are like theories made of thread.”

It is a testament to this collection’s dizzying, wandering nature that the reader is left to consider: what if this story is true? In that sliver of time it takes to gloss over the small black ink of the justified paragraphs and flip through the thin paper pages, who’s to say that the places you visited didn’t briefly come to life? The narrator questions the theoretical nature of theories, extending an interrogation toward any solid fact. Bonomini’s language dances across the page, manipulating stories in a way that both plays with and subverts typical plot structures. At times, words disappear into narrative, like brushstrokes hiding in a painting. At other times, they surface to the front of the page: the words themselves shining in the spotlight.

The final story, “Index Card,” is a short, melancholy account of an unrecognized, unappreciated writer and “his sole and fervent admirer.” Like this character, Bonomini’s musings have fallen through the cracks of time, meeting the same fate. As such, this translated collection represents a resounding archeological project, resurfacing the writing of a forgotten writer whose work is as powerful and unique as that of his celebrated contemporaries. It is a ghost of a book that haunts and perplexes, enticing each reader in with its mastery of language and craft. - Jordan Spector

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2024/05/09/room-of-mirrors-on-angel-bonominis-the-novices-of-lerna/

The Novices of Lerna collects the longer title story and fifteen shorter ones, Ángel Bonomini's first collection of fiction, published in 1972.

'The Novices of Lerna' is narrated by Argentine Ramón Beltra. A recent law school graduate, age twenty-four, he is surprised to receive an offer for a six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. The fellowship itself sounds almost too good to be true, beginning with the amount of money involved; it also sounds like a great opportunity -- and would be a chance to see a bit of the world. Nevertheless, Beltra isn't entirely comfortable with this offer from afar -- not least because: "the tone aroused my suspicion due to how cloying, cautious, and bland it was". Still, it's just too great an opportunity to pass up.

Puzzlingly and disturbingly, while they don't ask for much additional information in making the arrangements, they do require: "a frankly disconcerting report of my physical characteristics". The seven-page report he has to fill out includes measurements: "so detailed and varied that someone could have easily reproduced my body down to the millimeter" .....

The University of Lerna is a small institution, generally with some two hundred students in residence:

But every five years, the university went into recess for a year and the students abandoned the premises while the majority of the professors traveled to other centers of study. Only a few teachers remained at Lerna and continued their research linked to the old House: Theology, Mathematics, and Law. This was a recess year and the university had invited twenty-four professionals from different parts of the world.

Beltra is one of the twenty-four and, upon his arrival, comes to understand exactly what quality earned him his spot there. On the one hand, the two dozen 'novices' are: "surrounded by luxury and attended to like kings", on the other ... they find themselves in a pretty creepy situation. And there are rules to follow -- not exactly onerous ("Avoid introductions when meeting with two or more fellows", or: don't offer anyone alcohol or tobacco (though anyone who wants to consume either is perfectly free to)), but certainly complicating social interaction. And the objective of this experiment was "kept completely secret" by the university:

Everyone was allowed to consider, judge, assess, and interpret the fact in any way they pleased, but the university reserved the right not to communicate the objective of the "project" to any individual fellow or group.

Beltra settles in and he and his fellow novices go about life there more or less normally -- even as the situation is hardly normal. And, ultimately, things do not go well. It's an interesting social-philosophical exercise Bonomini plays out here; with the physical as a starting point, it nevertheless is above all metaphysical, addressing questions of identity and the individual.

'The Novices of Lerna' reminds of the works of Borges and Bioy Casares, and not just because of the Argentine connection, and Bonomini was surely influenced by these writers, as is also suggested by the similarly philosophical-speculative stories that complete the collection.

These stories include 'The Model', which begins with a brief 'Introduction'-section before getting to 'The Facts' -- with an explanatory 'Note' appended to it, which begins: "I have only been truthful about one thing" ..... The brief 'Index Card' summarizes the life and career(s) of Joachin Despines, who published six books of poetry which don't get the attention and acclaim he feels they deserve; he reïnvents himself as 'Paul Beranger', dedicating himself to praising: "France's greatest poet, Joachin Despines", and achieves great success as a critic -- yet without achieving his actual goal. 'The Report' is that of a revolutionary leader who has just successfully overthrown the previous government and is explaining the new governmental theory his regime means to implement -- reactionary as much as revolutionary ("The path of the people is a backward path that goes forward, in a time that comes from the future and will end in the past") --, a clever spin on the claims and promises of revolution.

It's a neat little mix of stories -- though apparently only a fairly small selection of Bonomini's writing. Cleverly imagined, Bonomini spins fascinating philosophical and theoretical ideas out in his tales; fortunately, too, he's a talented writer and the stories -- in a variety of styles -- read very well as well.

With practically nothing of his work previously available in English, it's good to see this collection of his fiction; hopefully, more will follow. - M. A. Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/argentina/bonominia.htm

Ludwig Feuerbach, the 19th century German philosopher best remembered as an intellectual bridge between Hegel and Marx, once posited an anthropological explanation for belief in God. In Feuerbach’s conception, the divine served as a great mirror, allowing humanity to abstract self-reflection and come to a greater understanding of its own nature—divine love, wisdom, and creation being in reality human love, wisdom, and creation. True or not for God, this framework can be adapted to explain the power of non-realist fiction: in projecting our lives beyond our worldly preconceptions, we gain the abstraction necessary for analysis of our own reality. Sometimes, only a mirror can reveal.

So it is with Ramón Beltra, narrator of the titular story in The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini (originally published in Argentina in 1972 and now translated into English by Jordan Landsman), which occupies about a third of the collection.

An Argentine law graduate who eschews professional ambition in favor of wine, women, and spirited conversation, Beltra is irritated to receive a letter offering a generous fellowship at a Swiss university, which his mentor all but forces him to accept. He resigns himself to enjoying the associated travel and conducts a brief love affair with a flight attendant, Sandra, en route. This relationship will later become a frequent touchstone in Beltra’s thoughts, a weight it bears a little awkwardly given the brevity of Sandra’s original mention.

Upon reaching Lerna, Beltra discovers he is one of twenty-four “novices,” all of whom are physically identical, down to their uniform blue jumpsuits.

In Beltra’s dealings with his duplicates, he is confronted with twenty-three reflections of himself:

It was as if we were a single person reflected fully in each fragment of a shattered mirror. I imagined we all formed part of a single being captured in each moment of a grotesque contortion. I thought of another mirror, mobile and perverse, that with arbitrary skill would suddenly reproduce the many profiles of a man, invent for him innumerable hands, or give a simultaneous version of his face as it passed through pain and fear, stupor and happiness, love and hate, delirium and mockery.

At first, Beltra flinches against this recognition. He finds in the other novices a multitude of faults, most seriously their manner in following the bizarre rules set by the institution’s cryptic experiment, and at times he experiences a kind of horror in seeing his own visage so externalized. Only when the men begin disappearing, falling to an inexplicable illness, does this relationship fundamentally shift. As Beltra comes to resolve his feelings towards his duplicates, his own sense of self and purpose in action deepen.

While the story is slow to start—beginning with the details of Beltra’s prior life and the exacting photographs and measurements required in advance of his departure for the fellowship—it picks up considerably once Beltra arrives in Lerna, the psychological tension building to a haunting catharsis.

The remainder of the stories in the collection return again and again to the paradox of individuality, the tension of observation, the image of mirrors. “The C.C.C.” finds two cousins falling into a mysterious chain of identical cafes. In the profound isolation of “By the Word,” a passion of the self is spoken into being. And throughout the collection, death is given many faces: it is a portal (“The Martyr”), an indulgence (“Figs and Jasmines”), a mutation (“Index Card”); it contains all deaths (“The Singer”).

“The Report” delivers a thematic manifesto, as a revolutionary junta declares that time flows in reverse, human senses function as mirrors, and God is the consequence of reality. All must reject Aristotelian logic and remake society into a world of poets that runs from Apocalypse to Genesis until “darkness shall come and God shall live in the Glory man hath created for Him.” It is Feuerbach turned inside out.

Like the God of Feuerbach, the mirror house of Bonomini’s collection throws up a multiplicity of reflections—not always flattering, but always revelatory.

In “The Model,” a writer’s gaze transforms one woman into many in endless fictional fashion shows, culminating in fantastical melodrama. With a metatextuality that suggests the influence of Borges (Bonomini’s more famous compatriot, known for his own nested stories), the piece ends with a lengthy note by its “author” dispelling his telling of events and instead revealing a grisly view of the connection between love and hate. The contrast is well-done, but, taken with the symbolic treatment of Sandra in the collection’s title story and the inclusion of another piece, “Enemies,” in which a man finds his lover too beautiful to behold, the story exemplifies the object role that women often serve for Bonomini’s masculine narrators—frequently that of mirrors, possessing depth only when viewed by another.

Across the stories, Bonomini experiments in style and form. Here, tenses shift; there, punctuation is eschewed. This occasionally feels uneven, as in “The Fire,” in which the voyeuristic perspective of an arsonist comes off a little muddled. More often, however, Bonomini’s style is lively, seamlessly building to psychic resonance.

Boldest of these experiments is “The Bengal Tiger.” Bonomini shatters every line into kaleidoscopic possibility, telling a story of a woman, a man, and a tiger in relentless permutation—each eating and being eaten, imprisoning and being imprisoned, seeing and being seen—and all beheld by the eye of a great world-mirror. It’s a stylistic leap, but one Bonomini performs masterfully.

The collection’s most compelling writing comes in “Aromatic Herbs,” in which a dreamer is trapped in a looping heaven or hell of his own making. Currents of language mesmerize as he relives the same deadly journey with his phantom beloved again and again, a litany of remembered herbs serving as countdown to disaster.

Like the God of Feuerbach, the mirror house of Bonomini’s collection throws up a multiplicity of reflections—not always flattering, but always revelatory. What did its creator see, standing in its center? Three decades after his death, I find myself wandering its halls, and the light still catches. - Will McMahon

https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2024/04/29/apparitions-of-the-self-review-of-angel-bonominis-the-novices-of-lerna/

Alvin Lu - Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him

 

Alvin Lu, The Hell Screens. Camphor Press,

2019

Cheng-Ming, a Taiwanese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one; he's searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city. Things get complicated when the fetid island atmosphere begins to melt his contact lenses and his worsening sight paradoxically opens up the teeming world of ghosts and chimeras that surround him. Vengeful and anonymous spirits commandeer Cheng-Ming's sight, so that he cannot distinguish past from present, himself from another. Images from modern and colonial Taiwan – an island of restless spirits – assail Cheng-Ming even as they captivate the reader.

“Written with precise elegance, and populated by ghosts, mediums, and criminals, Alvin Lu’s The Hell Screens is surrealist noir set in a shadow version of Taipei that exposes the spirits and superstitions of Taiwan’s complex past lurking beneath its modern cityscapes. Alvin Lu has a singular imagination accompanied by the gift of enviably gorgeous prose. “Haunting” is the right word for this work—encountering The Hell Screens again, I realize I have been carrying the voice and images of this astounding novel in my mind as ghostly dream fragments for the last two decades.”— Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island

At one point in this uncanny novel, the narrator, Ch ng-ming, describes his literal absorption into a Buddhist temple mural: "Particles of dispersed light seeped into my pores so that I became indistinguishable from them. The more I looked, the more I found myself enclosed in the mural's world." Enclosure in an unreal world is the threat that hangs over all of modern-day Taipei, at least as Ch ng-ming lives it. Lu's debut novel is divided between two notebooks, the first recording 19 days during which Ch ng-ming, a Chinese-American, investigates a master criminal named K. who is on the loose in the city; the other, much shorter, is by K. himself. The quest for K. leads Ch ng-ming to interview Sylvia, a school girl who claims to have been K.'s lover. Sylvia, a fortune teller, says she and K. committed double suicide, except that the pills didn't kill her. Fatty, a ghost-obsessed filmmaker, is making a documentary about Wang, an exorcist who is supposedly driving the spirits from the apartment building in which Ch ng-ming lives. Ch ng-ming learns from Fatty that Sylvia is herself a vampiric ghost. After K. is discovered using a vacant apartment in Ch ng-ming's building, the narrative veers into a rapid dematerialization of reality. Fatty is murdered, and the police use Wang to make a sort of extrasensory investigation, implicating Sylvia. Although sometimes stylistically overburdened, the novel is a hypnotic venture into the uncertain reality of liminal existences. Sophisticated readers on the lookout for fresh literary talent will relish Lu's ambitious debut. —Publishers Weekly

“Will appeal to anyone who loves the cat-and-mouse games of Nabokov, the playful elegance of Borges or the rarefied dreamscapes of Calvino.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Magical realism doesn’t capture the character of this poetic and intelligent novel: its blurring of current events and myth is more subtle, more realistically grounded.” — Steve Tomasula, Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Anyone with experience in a Chinese community will be struck by how apt yet original Lu's observations are, of the ways in which Chinese culture interweaves spiritual and material beings.”—South China Morning Post

A contact lens dipped in tea stands in for Proust’s mnemonic madeleine in this agreeably deranged first novel, by a young California critic and teacher of film technique.

That association leaps naturally to mind as we follow the serpentine peregrinations of Cheng-Ming, a Chinese-American student living in Taipei, whose interest in the “world” of ghosts and spirits unsettles his own psyche just as a typhoon is approaching Taipei. Declaring himself a “scholar of the strange,” Cheng-Ming, who resides in a supposedly haunted apartment building, begins his own informal investigation into the case of “K,” a notorious rapist-murderer who airily eludes and teases the police (and who, the reader begins to suspect, may be the importunate Cheng-Ming’s criminal alter ego). Complications quickly multiply, in an R-rated Through the Looking Glass that involves Lu’s adventurous protagonist with an adipose “amateur documentarian” who may or may not be seeing things himself, the fortune-teller who performs the abovementioned ablution with Cheng-Ming’s contact, a forgotten filmmaker, a reclusive painter, and a clinically depressed medium, among others. Meanwhile, house pets mysteriously disappear and snakes slither through city streets, K’s body count piles up, and our hero narrowly escapes becoming the groom in a shotgun “spirit-marriage.” It seems churlish to insist on knowing what all this paranoiac splendor adds up to, but there are probably clues in a Buddhist parable about a cannibalistic ghost that appears to teach “that identity is an illusion.” It’s certainly an impudent parody of noir fiction, and perhaps also an allegorical swipe at a culture whose fervent traditionalism also accommodates healthy doses of superstition (“Because we live here, drowning in these myths, we attribute everything to spirits”).

More than a little precious, but quite likably stylish and amusing. And—not that this wouldn’t have already occurred to Alvin Lu—it might make a rather good movie. - Kirkus Reviews

Solvej Balle - in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th. Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

 

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume

(Book I), Trans. by Barbara J. Haveland 

2024

Utterly riveting, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) is the grand opening of her speculative fiction septology, winner of the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize (Scandinavia’s most important literary award) for being “a masterpiece of its time.”

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume

(Book II). Trans. by Barbara J. Haveland, 2024

 

Tara Selter’s epic journey through November 18th continues in Book II of the masterly On the Calculation of Volume from one of Scandinavia’s most beloved writers.

The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.

Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.

And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.” She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place.

Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion―taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages―a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.

Tim Shaner enlists an imaginary curriculum based in real readings. Its canon is a forgery, but aren’t all canons forgeries? In I Hate Fiction, our narrator is provoked by what they’re reading: Thomas Bernhard, Lyn Hejinian, Kathy Acker; but also whatever’s on television, at the store, the baby’s crying, the phone is ringing

 

Tim Shaner, I Hate Fiction, Spuyten Duyvil,

2018

Tim Shaner’s poet’s novel is a page-turner! He carries all the addictive qualities of wringing the world through poetry with prose, a sense of absolute frankness at work. Shaner aims at our culture’s many irritable limbs, yet he brings the poets alive, weaving them and waving hello with them from inside the deep muscle of the book. You are going to love this! - CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

In I Hate Fiction a character named Tim Shaner is working on a piece of fiction in the style of Thomas Bernhard to avoid working on his dissertation. If by working on it, we mean thinking a lot about it. And thinking about other things too. The neighbor’s jeep, what he knows about who in the Buffalo Poetics Program. Rob Greiner, that sort of stuff. Poets write the darndest novels. And this one is funny, irreverent, and meta. - Juliana Spahr, author of That Night the Wolf Came

For we who admit our love of splendid artifice, Tim Shaner’s I Hate Fiction arrives just in time. I Hate Fiction enlists an imaginary curriculum based in real readings. Its canon is a forgery, but aren’t all canons forgeries? In I Hate Fiction, our narrator is provoked by what they’re reading: Thomas Bernhard, Lyn Hejinian, Kathy Acker; but also whatever’s on television, at the store, the baby’s crying, the phone is ringing, and do not neglect whatever is brewing over at the porter’s lodge. This is a fierce, funny, and totally fictional book whose polemic gestures towards what we might actually find ourselves believing in. I can’t see how this book doesn’t win the National Book Award a few months after its release. I loved it. - Brandon Brown, author of The Good Life and Top 40

Tim Shaner, Noch Ein at the Stein: A poetic essay

on beer, conversation, and hippycrits. Spuyten

Duyvil, 2021

Here’s why I LOVE this book to death: I’m here at the Stein and I’m not a regular but I’ve somehow managed to snag myself a stool at the bar and there’s this middle-aged guy, this character, this quintessential loafer, this self-mocking “poet (brewer)” musing, pontificating, philosophizing, conversing with his shoulder buddies. And I’m just following the conversation as it meanders from the communist horizon to hippycrits to books and neoliberalism and art and zebrafish and death and taxes and what men want and women, too, and all that jazz (he loves jazz). And he’s playing with words, he’s definitely got his buzz on. He’s dropping names like loose change and there’s a wild cast of characters sometimes here in the bar—Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, William Burroughs, Liz Taylor, George Harrison…—and he’s telling stories, making things up, making excuses, making things meta. Seriously, this book is wickedly funny… and damn, it’s serious. So I’m still here at the bar at the Stein and I can’t leave yet, I’m always wanting just another wee one, one more Shaner, Noch Ein at the Stein. - Karen McPherson, author of Skein of Light and co-editor of Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature

At the Stein almost every soul can become a shoulder-buddy. Brush shoulders then, be pertinent. Belong. Bring your best remembered books, dances, jams. Bring conundrums and pesky syllogisms. Bring loves renewed or dreamed or left at the subway platform. Make note. Bring your hope-with-disillusion. Whether wizened or supple, the Stein servers-and-preservers, all sharpen the wort of Shaner’s human moment like the bold hops for which Northwest ales are known. Our summers grow hotter. So have a gulp. Listen, and counter. Some drink to remember, Tim Shaner is one of that sum. - Tim Whitsel, author of We Say Ourselves and Wishmeal

In Noch Ein at the Stein, Tim Shaner captures the essential elements of why the Stein is my favorite bar in America. The beer community, the stories, the very human social contact & interaction, and, above all, the celebration of beer—I have experienced all these and more at "the Stein," even meeting a poet of note. Noch Ein is a must read for all those who love bar life and life itself. It is even more poignant during these Covid times when that sense of "Communitas" has been taken away. - Hal Hermanson, KLCC Brewfest Operations/Brewer's Lounge, Underwriting, & fellow “Steinian”

Tim Shaner, Picture X, 2014

Poetry. Tim Shaner's PICTURE X is a journey through the "poethics" of nature writing in a time marked by the catastrophes of war and impending environmental collapse. Rather than heed Thoreau's admonishment to leave the domesticated world behind on one's walks through the Wild, Shaner does the opposite, bringing the schizophrenic chatter of postmodernity into the built environment of the park, in this case Spencer Butte, a wooded park at the southern tip of Eugene, Oregon. Here, the poet refuses to yield entirely to what Thoreau calls the "subtle magnetism of Nature" in place of confronting the political realities traditionally buried by the picturesque.

"In Tim Shaner's PICTURE X, a poet from 'back east,' floored by the natural beauty of the west, confesses his desire to enter into its majesty without tripping over the undergrowth of clichéd naturalism. Irresistibly drawn into description by the manifold shapeliness of the environment, he registers his resistance through a series of startling, mimetic mindscapes. Many hilarious and/or catastrophic moments ensue. It's a wild ride! 'These trees / you know / they're so / lazy — / they just / stand there...' Who can blame them?"—Kit Robinson

"Bemused, bewildered, bedeviled, these poems are imbued with the everyday charm of companionability. Shaner mixes close observations of the social, natural, and linguistic, offering, along the way, philosophical reflections on working, living, and becoming a being being."—Charles Bernstein

Ben Lieberman - a novel in the tradition of the nouveau roman and in the tradition of no novel at all. A prison guard at a provincial military brig is compelled to investigate the death of a prisoner he was charged with escorting. At every step, he is harried by the prison's commandant, Major Carruthers, a bureaucrat with his own set of problems, and a coterie of hooligans, small-town grifters, barracks-bound drunks, and of course the fuzz.

 

Ben Lieberman, Filthy Synechdoche, Corona Samizdat, 2022

Filthy Synecdoche is a novel in the tradition of the nouveau roman and in the tradition of no novel at all. A prison guard at a provincial military brig is compelled to investigate the death of a prisoner he was charged with escorting. At every step, he is harried by the prison's commandant, Major Carruthers, a bureaucrat with his own set of problems, and a coterie of hooligans, small-town grifters, barracks-bound drunks, and of course the fuzz. The novel assembles a series of set pieces not at all resembling the life of the author, who was indeed in a military organization not unlike the one portrayed in the story; regrettably (or perhaps not), the author has passed on, and has fulfilled that theoretical challenge to the reader at no cost to them or their loved ones.

Bori Praper - A cast of hilariously eccentric characters get sucked into a maelstrom of ridiculous events: can they stumble blindly out of a complex and terminally dangerous conspiracy with their hides intact – and save the world while they're at it? Finnegan Frotz, an anonymous, bitter and extraordinarily pale black musician, lyricist and compulsive cynic of German-Scottish origin, flies from Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, to Slovenia

Bori Praper, Cynicism Management. River Boat Books, 2013

A satirical tour through contemporary Europe, from the Orkney Islands, to airport toilets, Slovenia, and, well, either Africa or the Middle East, for two plots are misaligned in the manner that our dystopian modernity manages quite easily. If you have a tattoo on your ass, you might be of more interest than you ever wanted to be as a musician. Ironically, the music is actually produced, laced throughout the novel, and is available through some mysterious processes younger people than I will have no difficulty navigating. That must make this meta-publishing. The plot of the novel is thoroughly senseless, yet easy to follow, as it amounts to a satire involving recognizable 21st century humans being manipulated by opaque forces, and generally running about attempting to avoid senseless annihilation. It is not history, but neither, unfortunately, is it fantasy. There is indeed an evil corporation called Omnipile, and that alone should sell the book to any remaining thinking primates. The virtual need to compare the book to John Kennedy O’Toole’s suicide not is prevented by the insistent repetition of Bob Dylan sardonic comment after meeting Columbus: I just said good luck.

A cast of hilariously eccentric characters get sucked into a maelstrom of ridiculous events: can they stumble blindly out of a complex and terminally dangerous conspiracy with their hides intact – and save the world while they're at it? Finnegan Frotz, an anonymous, bitter and extraordinarily pale black musician, lyricist and compulsive cynic of German-Scottish origin, flies from Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, to Slovenia, a small country to the northeast of Italy. Upon his arrival he joins Amalia Winegirl, songstress and occasional fling, and her half-brother Randy, bass player and herb aficionado. Together they form a band called Cynicism Management and pump all their efforts into creating what can only be described as a collection of smash hit singles in odd time signatures. However, prying eyes notice Finnegan at the airport. Something has been etched into his skin, and this catches the wrong kind of attention. Unbeknownst - at first, at least - to any of its members, Finnegan's band finds itself in the middle of a complex international conspiracy involving a malevolent corporation and a couple of executives with a diabolical plan. Add a colourful crowd of peculiar characters, an ad hoc group of female undercover agents, a voluptuous Portuguese nymphomaniac, a few bearded mujahideen, a sexy case of Stockholm syndrome, an online computer game, a slightly out-of-place but horny U.S. marine, a swarm of nosy cockroaches, and Bear in Underwear to the mix... And get ready for a roller-coaster of entangled plot lines, bizarre dialogues and ridiculous incidents, culminating in a shocking revelation. Please note that this novel is adult, poignant satire. As such it contains explicit language, sex scenes, politically incorrect depictions, and may be offensive to the more irritable readers, particularly those who hold the values of the American (or Slovenian) Dream paramount. This is the second edition of the novel, containing many improvements and formatting changes. The novel also includes links to free music by the fictional musicians appearing in the story - to the actual soundtrack for this literary work.

Bori Praper, Pendulum Pet. 2016

Pendulum Pet is a romp through the vicissitudes of a gregarious advanced culture with too much time, information and technology on its hands. Paranoia is placed and misplaced, the devious succeed through manipulations of those who gaze in wonder at the mundane like chimps on acid, or fail when the truly bizarre and unthinkable inadvertently stand in their way. Civilizations clash, as they will, when Metaore, a transnational mining corporation headed by CEO Budd Dimples, purchases a field behind Boris and Beeba’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Tavern, a cult concert venue and meeting place of an eclectic collection of feckless artists, in order to undertake a remarkable experiment: drilling a geopunctural borehole to heal the Earth. Budd has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and taken a sudden turn toward esoteric wisdom, much encouraged by his healer and sex therapist Ashtara Wolf. Bogomyr Yadvig, one of the more outré of the regulars, lives in a tent nearby with Rex the tavern hound – his idea of communing with Greek Cynics in preparation for an upcoming performance piece. He has cause to lose sleep and accumulate suspicion that the corporation has nefarious unstated ends in mind, particularly when he has his Roswell moment, if that is indeed what it is. The corporate endeavour comes to a sudden halt when their drill runs into an impenetrable barrier, leading to mutually unfortunate and potentially combustible discoveries, along with stunning truths about parallel evolution and devolution. Yes, the world of the techno-information age has gone mad and survival may very well depend on the whims of a pendulum pet. Please note that this novel is adult, poignant satire. As such it contains explicit language, sex scenes, politically incorrect depictions, and may be offensive to the more irritable readers. Even though the work is part of a series, the story is self-contained and can be read independently of the other Cynicism Management Series novels. It also includes links to free music by the fictional musicians appearing in the story - to the actual soundtrack for this literary work.

Bori Praper is a Slovenian musician, writer and translator, living in the Canary Islands. Currently he focuses predominantly on his slightly belated literary efforts (Bori published his first novel in English at the tender age of 36) as well as on "Cynicism Management", his progressive / alternative rock band; "Ray Kosmick", his psychedelic rock / indietronica / soundtracks alter ego; and a few shorter-term side projects.

Bori's debut novel "Cynicism Management", a satire with elements of sci-fi/cyberpunk, was published in 2013 by a small U.K. e-book publisher. In 2015, Bori decided to hop on the indie author train, so he published the updated 2nd edition of "Cynicism Management". In March 2016, he published "Pendulum Pet", his second novel. In 2019, the publisher River Boat Books saw fit to include Bori's debut novel Cynicism Management: A Rock & Roll Fable in its list of new releases for the summer/autumn of 2019.

Bori is currently collaborating with Rick Harsch on his "communal" novel titled The Assassination of Olof Palme. He is also writing Dog Days, the third book in the Cynicism Management series, as well as composing music for it.

Klabund - This hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state can be seen as both a late entry into the Decadent pantheon and a striking example of Expressionist fiction

 

Klabund, Spook. Trans. by Jonah Lubin.

Snuggly Books, 2023

“Klabund” was the pseudonym employed by Alfred Henschke (1890-1928), who wrote, from January to April 1921, “during the fever of an illness,” the novel Spook, which is here presented for the first time in ­English, in a translation by Jonah Lubin.

This hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state can be seen as both a late entry into the Decadent pantheon and a striking example of Expressionist fiction. A haunting and harrowing tale, which seems to have been composed at least in part under the effects of morphine, Spook is, in its own troubled way, a glorious book, and a gorgeous poem of madness.

Alfred Henschke (1890-1928). Born in Crossen, Poland, he studied in Germany and Switzerland, before abandoning these activities, in 1912, to become a poet. He published numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and plays, including Moreau (1916), Der Neger (1920), and Die Nachtwandler (1920). He died in Davos of pneumonia exacerbated by tuberculosis, which he had had since he was sixteen.

Natalie Clifford Barney - one of the great classics of modernism, this highly experimental tour de force, in which Barney reinterprets the stream of consciousness techniques James Joyce had used in Ulysses in her own highly original style, is a strange story of possession and fourth-dimensional materialism-and is, in fact, a glorious labyrinth of visions and emotions.

 

Natalie Clifford Barney, The One Who is Legion.

Snuggly Books, 2023

https://www.nataliecliffordbarney.com/

"For years I have been haunted by the idea that I should orchestrate those inner voices which sometimes speak to us in unison, and so compose a novel, not so much with the people about us, as with those within ourselves, for have we not several selves and cannot a story arise from their conflicts and harmonies?"

Thus wrote Natalie Clifford Barney in her author's note to The One Who Is Legion, a novel which she published privately in London in 1930 in an edition of only 560 copies.

The book, which received scant notice at the time of its publication and has since been all but forgotten, is at once an occult work of genius and an early example of androgynous literature. Here brought forth in a new edition that should secure its place as one of the great classics of modernism, this highly experimental tour de force, in which Barney reinterprets the stream of consciousness techniques James Joyce had used in Ulysses in her own highly original style, is a strange story of possession and fourth-dimensional materialism-and is, in fact, a glorious labyrinth of visions and emotions.

Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876 and who died in Paris in 1972 at the age of 95, was a legendary figure in France but almost unknown in her native land. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Lettres à l’Amazone, she appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs. For over sixty years her house in Paris provided the setting for an international salon frequented by many of the leading writers, artists, diplomats and intellectuals of the century, including Gertrude Stein, Sacha Guitry, Paul Valéry, Baron de Rothschild, Harold Acton, Janet Flanner, Bernard Berenson, Romaine Brooks, Colette, Gide, Cocteau, Eugène Jolas and Ezra Pound. She herself was a writer, but her notoriety stems even more from her being unquestionably the leading lesbian of her time.

I had first heard about Natalie Barney when I was writing a book about the Americans in Paris. At that time the magazine Adam devoted an issue to Natalie Barney containing selections from her work and commentaries by me members of her circle. But what impressed me more was the remark made by Janet Flanner in declining to contribute to Adam: “Miss Barney is a perfect example of an enchanting person not to write about.” I am still puzzling over that remark, wondering if I may have taken it in the wrong sense. At the time I took it as a warning that this enchanting person wanted to be left in peace. As it turned out, Natalie Barney did not take this view at all. Eight years after, when I finally met her, she kept exclaiming, “Oh, why didn’t you come before?” and “Why have you waited so long to come?”

There she was, this extraordinary survival from another era, this fabled creature, once a legendary beauty who defied convention, now ancient and shrunken, wrapped in a pale blue dressing gown to match her pale blue eyes and very fine white hair. She looked like a carefully wrapped doll in that expensive hotel drawing room (she had been living in the Hotel Meurice as an invalid for the past two years, though her faithful housekeeper Berthe still lived at her old home at 20 rue Jacob) with its vases of tall expensive flowers—not at all the setting in which she had lived her life—but there was still a spark of animation behind the vague look in her eyes.

She was not very good at answering questions but quite lucid in asking them and particularly acute in questioning me about my private life. When she learned that I was married and had children she exclaimed, “Why, then your career is finished!”

She didn’t say much about the crucial period in her life, about what made her decide to live in Paris and to live the way she did. But she did say several times, “It was very dangerous then.” Of her intimates she mentioned only Romaine Brooks who had died in Nice the previous December. Romaine was her oldest friend, and she felt her death most keenly.

She repeated several little anecdotes or remarks about Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and George Antheil. Disconcertingly she kept asking me if I knew them, if I’d been in Paris then, what had happened to them and others, most of them dead. Her mind wandered, repeating itself like a broken record.

She said she went for walks around the quartier every night with Gertrude Stein and her dog. This must have been after 1937, when Gertrude Stein moved to the rue Christine, quite close to the rue Jacob. They used to talk about family quarrels, and Gertrude always said, Never mind, families always quarreled, that was what consanguinity was all about. Evidently Alice Toklas didn’t accompany them on these walks, for her memories of Miss Toklas were vague (“What’s her name? What’s become of her?”), while she clearly remembered walking the dog and spoke of Gertrude as a good friend. When the dog died, it didn’t seem to bother Gertrude. She simply got a new one and gave it the same name.

Ezra Pound she remembered in the company of Olga Rudge—his protegée, she explained, a violinist. She remembered playing tennis with Pound, so this must have been in the early twenties when he lived in Paris. Pound brought other poets to call. She kept trying to recall a remark, with three adjectives in crescendo, something like: “Ezra Pound was arrogant, outrageous and unspeakable.” But she couldn’t get the adjectives straight. I gathered that her intention was not to criticize Pound, whom she liked, but to fix him in a phrase.

George Antheil she remembered as a tiny little man, like a monkey, with a tiny little wife; she wondered if they had ever had any children. She also remembered Virgil Thomson and the man who lived with him, though she couldn’t remember his name. Thornton Wilder continued to come and call on her. Julien Green she did not like, finding him too strait-laced and puritanical.

Most of the time she preferred to speak English, but she kept testing my French. I had the impression that she expressed herself most deftly in French, though she was totally bilingual. Her English had a nineteenth century flavor about it, reminding me of the way my grandmother spoke.

After two and a half hours Natalie Barney was still going strong, and I had to excuse myself, for I was overdue for a dinner invitation, never having expected the interview to last more than a half hour. That was the last I saw of Natalie Barney, for I left Paris two days later, and the following winter she died. - George Wickes

https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3870/a-natalie-barney-garland-george-wickes

Kelly Krumrie - Girls go blind, do math, wage hunger strikes, weigh themselves, take field trips, do more math, eat or don’t eat, crochet, sprawl, swim, imagine electricity, wink, fail to understand the meaning of a wink, take photos of each other, and think

 

Kelly Krumrie, Math Class. Calamari Archive,

2022

"Somewhere in the gap between correct answers and questions that can’t be formulated, girls are learning math. They aspire to seeing without taking notes. Girls go blind, do math, wage hunger strikes, weigh themselves, take field trips, do more math, eat or don’t eat, crochet, sprawl, swim, imagine electricity, wink, fail to understand the meaning of a wink, take photos of each other, and think. Everything is being measured and tracked, yet something mysterious remains, flickering, at the edge of what can be analyzed, known, or even registered in symbol systems. It isn’t yet clear what’s been lost. Math Class is meditative, fascinating, unnerving, a precisely rendered dream of a book, a wondrous gem reflecting mysteries and meanings wherever it goes." —Stephen Beachy

"Kelly Krumrie's Math Class makes mathematical thinking tender, charming, full of longing, and strange. This book reminded me of things I love—Georges Perec's writing, Amina Cain's, Guillevic's Geometries—but reading it was also something fresh and new."—Danielle Dutton

"If I didn't know Kelly Krumrie wrote Math Class, I would guess it was a phenomenological reduction of Madeline fan fiction co-authored by Raymond Queneau and Judy Blume in a parallel universe. Or an elaborate story problem from a geometry textbook détourning Lives of the Saints. What are the girls learning in Math Class? That the body is unsolvable. That God and Euclid never answer their questions. That adolescence has happened and is about to happen but is never that which is happening. Krumrie's language proceeds via precise abstractions and marvelous mundanities, creating infinite new locations for the experience of anything at all." —Joanna Ruocco

"Math Class is a taut imbrication of storytelling and philosophical investigation thronged with a cohabiting sisterhood, at a place called St. Agatha’s, where they are engaged in reflections on perception; bodily dissolutions and repairs; and the poiesis of logical operations of mind. Nothing abstract is alien to them. The institution is no passive setting of study, but instead a kind of aporia. How are you, a counselor asks a student. "I’m— basically hollow, or a plane on which to graph something, the sound of a shell on the beach (your own blood), a machine, a piston, my arms oars, my mouth a nest, my chest a drum for turning concrete." Interleaved throughout this elegant speculative fiction are drawings that recall the recessive and delicate geometrics of Paul Klee. These subtle sketches chart a course for the story’s alterity, glimmering with conjecture and truth-seeking." —Miranda Mellis

"The teenage girls in Kelly Krumrie's Math Class could well be aspiring saints or geometers, with their transfigurative arcs and extremities, keen diagramming skills, shared visions, and acute bodily suffering. Can one chart an intricate web of friendships or unravel the track of a catastrophe? Adolescence is a vexed condition fraught with metamorphoses both terrible and holy, but these girls know how to plot the coordinates of their finite struggles and watch over one another with a sagacity that's as intimate and precise as the hand-drawn grid of a note passed secretly at the back of a crowded classroom."—Pamela Lu

More than two decades ago, in an issue of the popular magazine Science, American writer David Foster Wallace published an influential essay entitled “Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama.” While the essay ostensibly functioned as a review of two novels,[1] the writer leveraged the opportunity to engage in a more profound critique of several math-related issues. After outlining mathematics’ seemingly recent surge in popularity in book, film, and theatrical form, Wallace essentially asked: What (if any) is the relationship between mathematics and narrative prose? He also wondered how densely abstract but aesthetically beautiful mathematical ideas can be rendered understandable, engaging, and perhaps inspiring to the non-mathematician.

The problem, as Wallace saw it, was that a plethora of narratives have about as much to do with mathematics as parsley has to do with a restaurant meal: essentially decorative and ultimately not very satisfying. (In this model, mathematical insight is reduced to a character writing furiously on the chalkboard or inventing fictional pseudo-mathematical ideas that don’t actually make much sense.) On the other end, there are any number—no pun intended—of beautiful mathematical concepts: transfinite numbers, the Riemann Hypothesis, the poetry inherent in Euclid’s Elements—and mathematically-framed formal literary constraints can produce remarkable results (here’s looking at you, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes). What Wallace sketched out was, in some respects, a two-dimensional problem. But somewhere between mathematics as melodramatic caricature and migraine-inducing combinatorial, what about a third way? Mathematics as epistemological, somatic, an affective site. It is precisely in this gap that Kelly Krumrie’s poignant debut, Math Class, enters and proliferates.

Math Class operates as a series of twenty-six interlocking vignettes or speculative fictions. Think Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street crossed with Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star (the work of Amina Cain and Kristin Keane also come to mind). There’s a quantum or even fractal layering between the vignettes, toggling between a micro-scale where you can practically smell the dust bunnies in the school library and a wider, occasionally oneiric, perspectivism of the characters or environs. Added to that are various mathematical sketches interspersed throughout the book: coordinate grids, matrices, topology, physics problems. It’s almost as if, at times, reading can be fused with wandering through an art gallery.

The book centers on a group of precocious teenage girls at St. Agatha’s, a Catholic school—we meet characters such as Tessa, Carolina, Ana, Lucy, and Thea—but the emotional and formal vortex of that group is Jo. Ten of the twenty-six vignettes in the book feature Jo in the title and her significance is evident from the very start with the opening piece, “Jo as a circuit.” In the character of Jo, Krumrie deftly gives the book a focal point with a character who, in a myriad of ways, collapses any distinctions between mind and body (and time and place), where thought is embodied and the body is imbued with “mechanical ghosts”:

What is this current, what is it. Its course through her body is selective and thorough. It’s electric and careful. The current is light—electricity—and its bones are her bones. Her hairs stand on end.

We learn that “Jo is a machine”—in some sense a cyborg as the result of a serious injury—as she’s being fitted for “new limbs [that] are a fleshy gray and suction onto her old limbs’ tapered ends,” but Jo herself chooses to reflect upon the nature of electricity, why she might have become a human instead of an insect, and how an engineer would calculate blood circulation for maximum efficiency. Rather than offering the reader an opening narrative trafficking in sentimentality or self-pity, Krumrie shrewdly takes the reader into the layered future-past immanence of Jo’s perspective, one in which Jo “assumes she is—or is not—a substance, or that she is—or is not—a form of energy.”

If the book opens by situating the reader within the immanence of Jo, the next vignette “Outside,” immediately pans back to a detailed description of St. Agatha’s exterior and the immediate environs. “Physical” then shifts back to the body—in this case, the physical examination the girls are about to undergo at the hands of the school nurse: “Their guessing is either to start a conversation about perceptions of their bodies or to keep themselves busy while they wait in line.” Thus, just in the first three pieces in the book, Krumrie presents reading as a kind of physics: Given three points in space, calculate a body’s (or narrative’s) true position. Whether we’re enveloped in Jo’s perspective, hovering drone-like above and around St. Agatha’s grounds, or flitting amongst idle chatter in an act of waiting, we are narrative particles on the move. This shifting of narrative grounds is a strategy deployed throughout the book.

One of the longer pieces in the book, “Jo in the Frame of Formal Opens,” orbits around Tessa describing her synesthesia—seeing shapes and objects when people speak—to Jo having visions of light transformed into a man who spoke in another frequency akin to “a transmission pouring in and out of rows of satellites; later “two women materialized” in front of Jo and were enveloped in particles followed with “a hum of insects.” The narrative continues to oscillate, and pivot into a new trajectory off of a detail. No sooner does Jo ponder the concept of circularity—“If she were a circle, her movements would be pure, infinitely symmetrical”—than she is reminded that “[n]othing in nature is perfectly circular,” and the earlier “hum of insects” springboards into the derailing of a train: “it’s not the sound of crickets she hears but the clicking of gears, or the ticking of a clock, something mechanical, metal against metal.”

The powerful dream-like strata and substrata of “Jo in the Frame of Formal Opens” is contrasted with the flatly descriptive style of “Story Problem,” the subsequent vignette, which is written like a mathematical word problem. The tension aggregates as it explains the derailing of a train. We expect with the word-problem format to find a question and solve for something, and it appears—somewhat obliquely—near the end: “The one she’d been in?” The implied answer to the question—was this the train that excised portions of two of Jo’s limbs?—ends up buried, literally and metaphorically, by the form.

Two short pieces, “Attendance” and “Hallway,” showcase Krumrie’s talent for varying registers and work almost like tracking shots. In “Attendance,” we follow Caroline collecting attendance slips à la the opening of Good Fellas’ famed “Copa Shot.” We learn Jo’s been absent for weeks since her injury—and Jo is similarly absent in a spate of the vignettes that follow. Caroline’s ambition is on display as she hopes for a letter of recommendation from Sister Clare and observes that “Today there’s a percentage of students absent that’s easy to calculate—an even portion of the student body.” “Hallway” shifts perspective downward as we follow a wheel along the hallway of the school.

“Jo considers water’s fractions” ripples out from within the narrative, a kind of parabolic crest. Jo hears voices and crickets chirping, and registers them as “an echo, a vessel for o.” And while Jo might be having a Thoreau-esque Walden moment, her poetics are more cyborg than pure ecology:

If the hands are an echo, what calls them first? Or one hand is and the other its mirrored match? Two shells, infinite waves, this place.

Slink forward. Copper wire under water. Jo the animal, Jo an extraterrestrial. Eye fiber. Mirror water. Faces lean over closed eyes.

Two other pieces titled with Jo were particularly touching for me. First, “Jo’s pencil is the extremity of a line,” which extends from Euclid’s famous definition for points and reminded me of Big Thief’s song “Not,” which gains momentum through negation and psychological after-image:

With her head on her shoulder, her arm’s the line, or the invisible thought in it, or the information from the teacher she’s supposed to record—not her neighbor’s rustling paper, not the rain sounds (though they’re there), not the sounds in the hall either. Don’t think about the windows or the desk’s material, but this material, a circle and its parts.

Secondly, “Jo is in above her exterior” has a powerful economy to it, like H.D. or William Carlos Williams at their best: “Voices on her. Voices on the frame and in it. . . . An echo lets her know she’s intact.”

A pair of vignettes bear the eponymous “Math Class”: one approximately a third of the way into the book, and the other acts as the conclusion. Both of them concern the transformation of the body. In the first “Math Class,” Tessa is taking notes on dilation and reflection symmetry and imagines the girls “as if they’re trapped in Maria’s diagram: in a math problem of their own creation,” as if a kind of calculus-as-frame-tale. In the second iteration of “Math Class,” the narrator conceives of the transfinite as indefinite replication and wonders: “How can they imagine the abstraction process that yields them? In the abstraction, what is retained as the content of the concept, and what is that from which the abstraction is made?” In a sense, this echoes the question David Foster Wallace posed more than two decades ago. The narrator’s answer, however, is equal parts poetry and mystery: “On the board I draw a fraction whose denominator is a cipher . . . The seat next to me is vacant, a pure being without measure.”

This, in turn, echoes an early segment from the vignette, “Seeing:”

What does it mean to be in the world? Is it having a body? Using it? Is it about response or engagement, leaving evidence of yourself? . . . But she meant something else—to have no location, to have no containing body at all.

And that is a key issue in the book––the epistemological and somatic act of being. Mathematical considerations, references, and revelations are abundant in the book, but readers can be equally at home in references to Giordano Bruno or Gertrude Stein. You don’t need to be a mathematician to access the narratives or be affected by the characters—anymore than you don’t need to be a composer to enjoy music. Krumrie’s absorbing debut, Math Class, is to some degree a bildungsroman, though the characters are already extraordinarily intelligent and self-aware; growth tends to take the form of addition through subtraction—the loss of limbs, eyesight, weight, certainty; and time is multi-dimensional and nonlinear, perhaps even circular or circuitous. Characters like Lucy, Tessa, Ana, and others are certainly not lacking, but Jo is the centrifugal force of the book, which may account for why her character made the strongest and deepest impression on me. Jo’s thinking may be causal, but the connections are not obvious and in the sections where Jo is absent, much like her friends, I found myself waiting for her return. When she does return to school, she faces new—and entirely practical—difficulties, like learning how to navigate space with prosthetics. Her proposed solutions, much like Krumrie’s book as a whole, are singular and distinctive: “Her locker combination is out of reach. What if she transformed into the mechanism itself?”

Mark Tardi is a writer, translator, and lecturer on faculty at the University of Łódź. He is a recipient of a 2022 Fellowship in Literary Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive, 2017). Recent work and translations have appeared in Czas Kultury, LIT, Interim, Text Matters, The Scores, Denver Quarterly, The Millions, Circumference, La Piccioletta Barca, Berlin Quarterly, Notre Dame Review and in Italian translation, Rossocorpolingua. His translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021.

[1] Those two novels were The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt, and Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture by Aposotolos Doxiadis. Wallace didn’t have anything complimentary to say about either of them, and Doxiadis apparently neither forgave nor forgot Wallace’s largely negative review of his novel. With Ben Mazur, Doxiadis co-edited a Wallace-esque doorstopper of a collection of essays on the relationship between mathematics narrative called Circles Disturbed, and in the nearly 600 pages of essays, there is not so much as a single reference to one David Foster Wallace. Given the subject matter, it’s surprising, to say the least. Jonathan Franzen is mentioned, however. - Mark Tardi

https://www.full-stop.net/2022/09/21/reviews/marktardi/math-class-kelly-krumrie/

Excerpts and reviews:

—interview w/ Mark Mayer in Full Stop: part i + part ii

—in conversation w/ Jeff Alessandrelli in The Adroit Journal

—review by Mark Tardi in Full Stop

—"Jo considers water’s fractions," in Sleepingfish 2020+

—"Interview / Hydroelectric," in Blazing Stadium 8

—"Physical," in Your Impossible Voice 23

—"The Frame of Formal Opens," in Entropy

—"Circuit," in Sleepingfish 13