Jane Unrue - To be alive requires that we build a catalogue of like-like images and stolen words and phrases, things we can put to use

Jane Unrue, Love Hotel, New Directions, 2015.

Working on behalf of a cunning and mysterious couple, a woman embarks on a haunting search for a stranger (a child? somebody’s lover? a ghost?), undertaking a perplexing, dangerous, and apparently timeless journey that originates on a secluded country estate and leads deep into the center of the city. Love Hotel explores a heartbreaking and nightmarish world of unrelenting excess, impossible convergences, undeniable urges, and inexorable loss. Jane Unrue’s writing, beautifully cunning and mysterious, twists and turns and lures the reader on with an erotic magnetism of its own. 

A mysterious couple invites a woman to visit their estate. Soon after meeting the pair, the woman, the central narrator in “Love Hotel,’’ finds herself slipping “into a halfway dreaming state in which I walked inside a tunnel,” which is a bit of the way most readers of this novel are likely to feel on check-in. Perhaps the couple recognized what a subtle and sensitive character they’d just met: “Clearly they could see in me what others had not seen in me/that in me all impressions feelings touches multiply.” The couple repeat their invitation. This time our narrator stays for several nights. She awakens in the manor house “with a feeling of foreboding.” Indeed, a sense of menace shadows all the narrators and presences inside this mesmerizing new novel by Jane Unrue.

That sense of threat — sexual, physical, psychological — is heightened by at least two parallel stories unfolding alongside, or perhaps it’s better to say inside, the primary narrative of the visitor. Another involves a wealthy woman who takes in a suicidal seamstress. The seamstress has a son raised inside the harsh circumstances of her life. Among the boy’s pastimes were imagining himself a spider, “hanging from a thread’s length down a wall.” Eventually the boy grows up: “If we should try imagining the raw intensity of the feelings of that child/a man now,” Unrue writes, leaving the sentence unfinished, fraught with foreboding. After all, someone is missing, bodies have been sighted — or dreamed, and off our narrator goes to the “Love Hotel’’ in search of an unnamed someone.
A third story, unscrolled in italicized bursts embedded in the other stories, seems to be about a farmer who watches his sons turning into wolves, and worse. The anxiety created by these grim unfoldings is further exacerbated by the book’s bold and deliberately intricate style, composed as it often is of fragments, interrupted sentences occasionally broken into lines, as in a poem.
In fact, Unrue, whose previous books include poetry, stories, a novella, and the haunting short novel “Life of a Star’’ — deftly undercuts our desire for the security and definitiveness of genre. To experience the luxurious power of “Love Hotel,’’ the reader must himself become a bit of a somnambulist, surrendering to its circular movements and recursively broken narratives without hoping for the usual consolations of fiction: recognizable characters with familiar psychological profiles and problems. Life isn’t quite as obvious as that, Unrue seems to say.
The poet and Dante translator Laurence Binyon once observed that “slowness is beauty.” With its fragments and elipses, “Love Hotel” is determined to force us off the tracks of the bullet train that is everyday reading in our post-haste society. Here the mystery isn’t confined to figuring out who done it. The novel instead asks a more profound and murkier question: What exactly do we think happened? 

Every time I thought I’d solved the mystery, I found myself confounded by a change in the pattern. Foiling our desire for clarity and closure, Unrue nevertheless continually provokes our curiosity. It may be that the figure in this carpet will be no more traceable than that of Henry James’s Vereker, whose intensions were describable only between “lovers supremely united.”
Gorgeous passages abound: “I began to see collected pictures fused together into overlays that covered up the real life versions of the world.” Here the erotic mixes with the creepy, laced with a potent but never directly expressed emotional undercurrent: “I heard their robes fall off. They then began to offer themselves to me/ a mouth /a breast / . . . I felt an insect somewhere on me.” With its singular music and evocative images, the book recalls Susan Sontag’s plea for “an erotics of art” in place of mere interpretation. I’m not sure I can tell you what happens inside Jane Unrue’s “Love Hotel,’’ but I urge you to book your room early. - Askold Melnyczuk

  A sense of open menace also lurks throughout Love Hotel, the latest work from Jane Unrue, though its direction and intent might be the most unknown as yet. Compared to the two examples above, the terrain of Love Hotel is more skeletal, fragmentary, subject to shake. Here, the narration frequently interrupts itself even in mid-sentence or during a gesture left incomplete. Like the structure of the looping hallways and staircases in Alain Resnais's iconic maze-film, Last Year at Marienbad , the very architecture of the world continues to mutate alongside any understanding of itself, as well as in the logic of the narrator, a nameless woman whom we are left to follow through uncertain darkness as if haunting her ourselves, from just behind.

And yet it is primarily this very mutating structure that lends the book its most pressing sense of suspense and eerie charm. There's so much white space between the paragraphs, the pages, often leaving a single sentence or a word free, like a trail. I can't help but think of the text of a video game, the way you move through it searching for what will speak next, what colors will emerge, what direction you will be led in. However, if there is a game here, it's more like a corrupted version of middle hours of The Shining than anything with thr undead or guns.

The narrator is looking for something, or someone—we seem to know that much at least, even if we are not sure exactly what or who—in a hotel that seems to disintegrate at will, eventually rolling over into open landscapes, other houses. The narrator's understanding of the world multiplies, too, often seeming to shift between several perspectives contained within the same body, all of which bleed together, drown each other out. She seems primarily to be consumed with fulfilling a task for a couple whose presence also mutates: Sometimes they seem to want her to become impregnated for them, other times to be a sexual companion, and yet other times to function as a kind of errand-person, meant to wander from room to room waiting to be given meaning.

One page just reads: "I stuck the key into the" and ends without even punctuation, leaving you to move forward onto the next page, describing the architecture of a room. "402 / It was a double with an ivory eyelet canopy on top with ruffle around the bottom both in dusty pink coordinated loosely with the carpet more directly with the walls all painted in the same pink color." Like the rest of the world around it, the grammar mutates, as does the layout. And yet we sense that there is meaning behind a phrase or shape of space.

And, as continuously unfurling and unraveling as the plot is, it is magnetic in the way it draws you through from page to page. The landscape of the text itself is as alive and cryptic as the world it describes (or fails to describe): Jagged edges to the broken paragraphs climb down through single words stacked into columns sometimes in all caps and sometimes italics, ornate descriptions clipped off in mid-sentence, questions asked and immediately discarded. Inherent to it all is the sense of sacred unknowing of the narrator, a sense of unshakable conviction to keep throwing one's self forward within some faceless sorrow. Overall here is an actual experience, on paper, one charged with so sharp a sense of mystery you could probably keep reading the book over and again, finding new narrow areas to worm through, vivify, obsess with, open. - Blake Butler 

A mysterious and frequently beautiful short novel by Unrue (Writing/Harvard; Life of a Star, 2010, etc.) pulls the reader into a sequence of heady, surreal vignettes that add up to more of a sensual experience than a coherent story.

A woman wanders through a strange  hotel and an unnamed city, searching for a man or a child—in this novel, details and time are both often elusive—on behalf of a seductive and sinister couple who live on a luxurious estate. Hints of back story and plot come through, but the novel seems to be less about the pull of story and more about the power of atmosphere, feeling, and how perfectly chosen, lavishly described details can make the reader flesh out an enormous world in the space between them. “I was recalling information so ornately,” the woman says, and she does, remembering and describing in images that are full of color, texture and sensation. The voice of the novel comes from inside her head, with sentences that are often disjointed and rhythmically uncomfortable, jumping from thought to memory without concern for linear storyline or traditional structure. Some pages are empty except for a few words, transforming the turn of a page into a noticeable rhythmic event. Everything could exist in either a dream or a nightmare, and certain vignettes push the novel into the realm of the fantastical with snippets of other stories that feel like fairy tales. A man searches for his wife in a forest, unaware that the trees move of their own volition. A man watches his sons turn into wolves and murder a couple.
For the most part, the surreal and tenuously connected pieces of this novel build an intriguing and intense narrative of feeling, even if the story itself remains unclear. - Kirkus Reviews

In this minimal and evocative new novel by Unrue (Life of a Star), an unnamed female narrator is asked by a wealthy and mysterious couple to locate a missing person. The search carries her from the couple's rural country mansion to a city hotel known for its sexual encounters. The book is evasive, and peeling back one layer reveals another. Dramatic perspective shifts, poetic structure, and an absence of commas dent the distinction between interior and exterior, imagined and real. "A week/I think/It's hard to say. No depth. No clear perspective. No free space. /before I met them I had started having problems with my/Previously/But this had been my pattern for as long as/sleep." The encroachment of one idea into another's space reflects the narrator's "limited fragmented" mental state. While there are moments when the text comes together to provide clear insight, the inherent obfuscation of writing often interferes. The novel is deliberately constructed to disorient and challenge, demanding that readers infer relevance and join the narrator's search for meaning. Because the story acts as a venue to showcase an innovative writing style, the book feels a bit unsubstantive and lacking in characterization and plot, but it is a clever piece of writing.  - Publishers Weekly 

“Information,” writes Walter Benjamin, is “incompatible with the spirit of storytelling.” For Benjamin, “half the art” of telling a story lies in learning not to tell the news; narrative should suppress reportage, achieving instead “an amplitude that information lacks.” Another name for this “amplitude” might be what Flannery O’Connor calls “mystery”— fiction’s capacity, as she puts it, “to penetrate the concrete world” of everyday facts, revealing “the image of ultimate reality.” What she means is that reading allows us to face away from the world, and, in so doing, see through it. We read because we want to be somewhere else, but the best books make us realize that “elsewhere” is where we already are. So, writing can turn toward or away from the known and the knowable, aiming at either information or mystery. One direction reports, reproduces, represents; the other points elsewhere, bringing the unprecedented into presence.

At every turn, Jane Unrue’s writing interferes with the flow of information—repressing, erasing, and reshaping it, aiding the amplification of mystery. Her new novel, Love Hotel, goes even further in this regard than its predecessors: the short story collection Atlassed, and the novellas Dear Mr. Erker, The House, and Life of a Star. Put simply, it’s almost impossible to ascertain what this book is “about.” On the surface, it seems to concern an unnamed narrator (apparently a prostitute) absorbed in a search for what may be a man, a child, or a ghost—his identity, like hers, is profoundly uncertain. Her journey takes her from a haunted mansion owned by her employers, or clients (a creepily seductive couple, seemingly capable of controlling her mind) to the titular hotel. This transient space is at once spectral and subtly erotic—populated by “fleeting shadows” who tellingly “go for just one night.” It’s what the anthropologist Marc Augé would call a “non-place”—a location defined by oblivion, where we forget who we are, and can’t come to rest. Within this indistinct world, some sort of sexual assignation occurs—although its significance, like so much else, is unclear.
That lack of clarity is important: trying to paraphrase the book’s “plot” fails to capture its formal and stylistic strangeness. Really, reading Love Hotel is less like following a storyline and more like looking up at an unknown constellation—a new and nameless arrangement of language. The opening sentences set the stage for this unsettling experience:
Immediately striking was the silence
no faint music
low lighting inducing a feeling of
One morning a man and his wife were working in the hay.
I felt none of what I had imagined feeling before I left my apartment
building
none of what I felt when I got on the train.

Line breaks like these run through much of the book, like faults or fractures, jolting us forward from word to word, page to page. Again and again, abrupt transitions scramble our concentration, stopping us from catching up with ourselves, or settling in one place. Like Unrue’s narrator, we’re constantly shuttled between situations, with no control over our speed or trajectory (notably, locomotion in Love Hotel tends to depend on trains, taxis, and elevators: Unrue’s “I” never drives; she’s passively driven.) The novel’s fragmented sentences feel like the ruins or remnants of earlier structures, broken apart as if by tectonic motion. If this is a book about transience, its language is likewise in transit—folding and turning and interrupting itself, evading cohesion or explanation.
Throughout all of this, incongruous phrases crystallize briefly, only to vanish, unfinished: “One morning a man and his wife were working in the hay.” The effect isn’t unlike an analogue radio, picking up snatches of speech before phasing back to white noise. In contrast to the urban milieu through which the narrator moves, these snippets hint at rural stories, heavy with folkloric menace: an enchanted forest which swallows wayward travellers; a man whose sons transform into murderous wolves. Another intertwined tale recalls the wrongful death of a child, whom we are told “was meant to be alive.” These echoes and traces may or may not relate to an “apparition” haunting the country estate of the couple who plan the narrator’s journey. “That’s how it’s creeping into there,” one of them tells her, gesturing at the cracks in a tattered painting: “he meant of course the evil in the air.”
Indeed, the essence of Unrue’s novel lies not in the plot, but “in the air”—in a particular kind of atmospheric pressure or density. Before an ambiguous sex scene, the narrator is instructed to “impart […] the information that if hands approach, you will collapse into an aura that will take the form of mist.” Something similar could be said of the book itself: its meaning evaporates upon approach, leaving only an afterimage—like the memory of being touched, or a photograph of a ghost. Later on, the narrator reflects that “I felt the background penetrate the foreground.” Likewise, reading this novel means feeling the foreground fall away; being penetrated; losing our bearings. In this respect, that cracked painting reflects the book’s structure: its “angles” and “shapes” are “composed against a background” which, we are told, is “clouded, as if to suggest eternity.” Foreground and background, angles and clouds: Unrue’s peculiar brilliance lies in the way she brings narrative content into collision with something deeper—something which seeps through its cracks, intangible and eternal.
According to Ricardo Piglia, the history of short fiction involves a continual tension between the surface text and “the secret story”—an undercurrent “constructed out of what is not said; out of implication and allusion.” Love Hotel secretly speaks of myths and folktales and ghosts; its subtext is, as the narrator says, “a story of events occurring in a time behind this time.” As readers, our impulse is to disentangle this secret story, to “trace it back,” as the narrator says, to “where it started from.” However, like her, we fail to do so, only becoming more entangled. Whatever lies behind Love Hotel can’t be reduced to meaningful information. Nor can its implicit “narrative” quite be resolved: if Unrue hints at a haunting caused by wrongful death, the novel never suggests that this wrong has been righted. We want to find a pathway through the woods, a thread to help us make sense of the text. Instead we’re thrust further into a thickening mystery.
So, Unrue’s narrator can’t turn back to the source of the story, nor can she bring it to a resolution: hers is a motion of incomprehension. Throughout the novel, her unthinking, unknowing movements resemble those of someone in a hypnotic fugue. She drifts through the city, and through the unlit rooms of the hotel, “as if acting in accordance with the orders of an unknown mechanism, operating from an unidentifiable location.” A literal reading of her movements might rely on the novel’s allusions to mind control: her enigmatic employers mention being able to “insert […] thoughts straight into you”—another kind of penetration. A more metaphorical interpretation would be to say that she moves in step with an unconscious time signature—what we might call the time of desire. To desire something is to succumb to a distinctive kind of motion. Desire is mesmeric and magnetic; it always draws us unthinkingly forward. In this respect, it’s often in conflict with memory, which it erases or falsifies into myth. This sense of restless, forgetful “towardness” suffuses the novel, although its ultimate object remains unknown.
Ultimately, this motion gives rise to a purified form of attention: an absolute state of orientation, which points toward something just out of sight. On one level, this manifests as an obsession with loci and coordinates: descriptions of the country house capitalize the names of particular places (“the STAIRCASE led us back into the STUDY,” and so on) while the hotel’s fixtures and furniture are italicized (“I will pray to bed to floors to windows even to my walls to be delivered.”) The emphasis brought to bear on these objects is such that they hint at something behind or beyond them: “upon the surfaces,” the narrator notes, “I made out traces of a presence.” But the novel’s knowledge of the connection between the seen and the unseen—between what O’Connor calls “the concrete world” and its invisible outside or underside—is best captured by a description of classical statuary:
I stepped through the doorway to the stately hall of statues Roman
Greek an elevated grand arrangement of cracked heroes
chipped
their bodies turned in different directions
heads
the ones that had them
angled differently
the faces pointed at a variety of spots well in the distance of that
limited although eternally unknowable majestic city. Their gaze was
collective
fixed as by coordinated effort on a set of points beyond those parchment tinted walls. Effect of having eyeholes rather than real eyes I told myself. Their expressions possessing vacancy as well as depth each searing cold stone look was trained upon a destination far too distant formless timeless for the living seeing person even to envisage.

The passage recalls both the disturbingly “eyeless” taxi driver who transports the narrator to the couple’s estate, and her encounter with a portrait whose “eyes appeared to gaze into the eyes of someone something just behind the painter.” Each of these sights could be said to express what she calls “patterns of anticipation”—where anticipation, much like desire, is largely defined by the absence of information. Of course, describing this absence gets us no closer to an account of what Unrue’s mysterious book is “about.” But maybe it helps us to formulate what it feels like to read it. So, here goes: reading Love Hotel feels like tracing someone’s gaze as they stare at something you can’t see. Or like feeling someone or something moving behind you, and turning to find nothing there. That tracing, that turning, that feeling marks the way art draws us into its mystery: the clocks stop, the world falls away, and suddenly, somehow, something appears. - David Winters

Jane Unrue’s Love Hotel, we know by way of its dust jacket, is a novel, a roman, a romance. It is also a poem where the stanzas are pages: with broken lines, cinematic cuts, intensified phrasing, wavering intuitions. And it is a play or screenplay with slug lines: NURSERY, STONE STEPS, NIGHT WE MET. Yet it is resolutely counter to the spirit of the book to render it whole. It is meant to be traced, I think, by the body or hand of the mind. “In place of a hermeneutics,” Susan Sontag admonished us, “we need an erotics of art.” I know of few contemporary novels that justify this sentiment more than Love Hotel.
A love hotel is a place with love in it because it is a place where love is brought and made, where fantasies are fulfilled and delayed, dissolved and explored. Only the exploration of love is done at love’s mercy, in the sense that it transports us through memory and space. The same could be said for Unrue’s novel. The love hotel of the title is one among many spaces its lines explore: an elevator, a lobby, a set of keys, seen, again, on the dust jacket, take us through a labyrinth of ecstatic impressions, some fearful, all within the bounds of the erotic. What I mean is that the flicker that enters your body when you read the words “love hotel” frames the spirit of the book.
If so far I have made Love Hotel sound incomprehensible, it isn’t. It’s more like the state of being you might encounter during (or after) a fulfilling, or overfilling, sexual experience. In that sense, the book is filtered through the prism of the body of its protagonist, a woman of uncertain age, and it begins, more or less, like this:
When I got to that hotel however I stepped down into the patio protected by a wall of textured brick. A flagstone walkway curved around a bed of flowers.
Filled with dread I tried to keep from seeing
hearing
There is someone in my room I repeated into the tiny opening in the frosted glass window of the reception desk.
I mean to say I tried so hard to keep from being seen.
New key in hand I took the elevator up.
Only, in Love Hotel, unlike other novels, the body and mind are not unlinked. Sitting across from a woman on a train, the speaker falls asleep; she dreams of a tiny, birdlike child brought to her on a plate. She finds herself on a verandah. In a city museum. She returns to work at a mansion for a couple with sexual, perhaps insidious, intent. The novel is flush with scenes of Proustian transposition, though her ekstasis (and yours) isn’t necessarily caused by a madeleine. She is just as readily transported by the touch of metal or a frightful moment or the lingering dread of an unsettling question. The speaker’s body is the talisman of Love Hotel. In one of many sexualized, often disquieting encounters with the couple in the mansion, the speaker rebels:
Clearly they could see in me what others had not seen in me
that in me all impressions feelings touches multiply
Followed by:
Take hold of me.
Although the novel at first seems French — I platitudinously thought of Resnais’ Je t’aime je t’aime, the nouveau roman, and the poetic realist films of Gremillon and Carné — the above lines more likely update the eroticism of Poe or Whitman. “I contain multitudes” is kindred to the “impressions feelings” that multiply within her when she is touched. But all of this betrays the truth that Love Hotel is less written than enacted through the body of its speaker. It glides between genres too elegantly and too bodily to be the work of a single mind (or body). But somehow it is.
One of Love Hotel’s genres is the playfully erotic, although such moments are held in suspended animation — you can sense them coming in ripples of fictional time. “Curtains drawn,” pages later, becomes:
He got on top of me. Then she. Beginning here I saw an atmosphere within the darkness start to glow as if it were illuminated by the borrowed light that burned within their bodies leaking through their eyes that shone like balls thrown in the air above me kept aloft by so much heavy breathing. Panting. Moans were helpful in identifying who was who but truly there was no detective work to do in there.
His
Hers
Hands
Bodies
Voices
They played out in a scene of jealousy.
“No detective work to do in there,” the speaker playfully enjoinders among the breathing bodies. In Love Hotel, what is detective work but interpretation? Sontag reminded us that novels, especially those that willfully cling to old forms, will remain “prone to assault by interpretation.” Not this one. - Jonathan Sturgeon

Jane Unrue, Life of a Star, Burning Deck, 2010.

“An actress of sorts, a woman recalls her childhood, longs for her absent lover, imagines traveling overseas, and wanders through gardens and galleries of art. Hers is a life meticulously lived, a carefully crafted and rehearsed engagement with a real and imagined world; a search for love and meaning that has left her, in the end, alone. Unrue’s intricate and intriguing sentences — now one word, now comprising whole paragraphs and interrupting one another — manage to fuse detachment and emotion, heartbreak and humor.”

“Artifice is at the heart of Jane Unrue's latest novella, a sequence of short, poetic reflections by an unnamed, lovelorn protagonist. This is not to say that the narrative lacks heart; if anything, this compact tour de force interrogates the truism that art can be either heartfelt or cerebral. The narrator has a passion for theatricality. Her ruminations are peppered with stage directions: " 'You’re right,’ I said (chin tuck), ‘I haven’t told you much about myself’ (syllabic lateral movement of the head on much about myself)." Her episodic memories of lost love share a similar staged quality, as much preoccupied with props as the dramatic action itself: “How I had waited for a moment when the setting and the lighting indicated we had finally found our scene, the scent of roses as if atomized through tiny tubing woven through the fence.” Behind the stagecraft, however, Unrue’s protagonist seems to search for an authenticity that she fails to find in the intimacies we take for granted. Provocatively, Unrue inverts the dichotomy of being on versus off the stage. If the narrator of Life of a Star feels like she is acting her way through life, it’s because so much of it is played out through assigned roles (child, woman, artist). By foregrounding narrative artifice, Unrue suggests new possibilities—both personal and aesthetic—such artifice obscures. The narrator’s comically surreal tryst on a cruise ship, and her memories of her actress mother, are among the most evocative sequences in a narrative that reveals emotional truths rather than evades them.” - Pedro Ponce

“I wish I had a better story for you,” confides the unnamed narrator a third of the way into Jane Unrue’s new miniaturist novel, though there’s hardly cause for so modest a claim. With just over one hundred pages, some of them hosting no more than a wee phrase or the clarion burst of a sentence, and most of them giving out well shy of the bottom margins, the novel, though slender, is emotionally thorough, dense but not crammed, and unnoisily original in the bloodbeat and quiver of its prose.
Unrue writes intricate, ribbony sentences that often reel themselves into the safeholds of eccentrically stacked, unindented paragraphs as lyrically loaded as Joseph Cornell boxes. Sometimes these gracile ribbons get snipped short of tidying grammatical resolution; the narrator, we learn, is in fact something of a mean whiz with a scissors and a knife.
Nearing (or already well submerged in) the loneliness and lovelessness of early middle age, she’s the daughter of a washed-up actress, and though not officially an actress herself, she has discovered the only certain way to insert herself acutely into experience: to regard every instant as an opportunity for performance, for representing herself rather than entirely being herself (and whatever further self-discovery that might finally require). So confused is her life with theatricality that rain falls “as if it had been yanked from buckets poised on rafters up above,” and stage directions are tucked into her thoughts, slipcased between parentheses—“(Full-body modesty)”; “(Mild eyebrow tip)”; “(single-handed heart-grip).” “Since there is artificiality in mere utterance,” she’s convinced she “must live the words.”
But life, as she practices the living of it, amounts to casting herself into an ever-narrowing repertoire of melancholy enactments unfolding mostly in the galleries of a museum (through which, profusely ruffled and garbed in preposterous layerings of underskirts and other costumic outlandishments, she kills hour after hour skulking coquettishly, hoping to pry one or another man loose from an alarmed wife) and by the fountain in a public garden, where she suffers little more than half a dozen rendezvous with, one gathers, her only lover ever, a worldly man who is apparently married (it’s a furtive, futureless courtship). From these outings she returns, unconsoled, to the ticktock isolations of her rented room, where she spinsterishly busies herself with embroidering a bumblebee onto a pillowcase (her goal, fittingly enough, to arrest the buzzy wingbeats into a stitchy stillness) and broods over her rooming-house childhood, during which the arrival of an alluring slip of a girl with dollhouse manners and a goshing vocabulary left her feeling upstaged, driving her to rages of violent jealousy. Her mother admonishingly declared, of all things, “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling with these histrionics.”
But the narrator is scarcely one for foolery. Three-quarters of the way through her account, she brashly encapsulates the desperate program of her life in a dizzying, self-aggrandizing, one-sentence manifesto: “The one who stimulates attraction to herself by molding her complexities to meet a given situation and by demonstrating, at the same time, the effect her having on the situation has upon her own self, wins.” By now, though, she has been rehearsing herself further and further away from the heart-quickening enmeshments of life and deeper into claustral despair. Small wonder, then, that images of graves and buried girls figure so tormentingly in her imagination; it’s as if she wishes to be pulled alive from the burial pit of her part-playing self.
Inviting itself to be read as a phantom refinement of the celebrity-autobiography genre, Life of a Star, direly melodic and winsomely elliptical, belongs in that rich vein of contemporary fiction that forgoes narrative overrun, overmuchness of dialogue, and reportorial sprawl, and instead dispenses itself in slivery, pivotal declarations and gleaming summation. It’s a novel cored to the climactics, the crucialities—and it’s entirely a perfection.” — Gary Lutz


“In Jane Unrue’s third novella an unnamed woman visits galleries, fountains, and piers, and observes the underweight litany of her existence. This is a book to be read all at once with a long evening spreading ahead, in order to best note the slow, dexterous rising of tension, the avid portrayal, and the bare yet startling language. Unrue punctuates the unnamed woman’s thoughts (they occur while she does her needlework, visits the museum’s garden, and wanders in a city where she seemingly has no acquaintances) with muted intensity. Unrue’s sentences are as calm as they are discerning, often running against one another and interrupting in humor and emotion:
'The color of my eyes is something people might not well recall. And though petite, at times I seem
Look how her––!
wonderfully, oddly
She’s not one little bit––!'
Mine is a woman’s face, though something of the child hides back behind the surface of my veering eyes.
Prose vignettes - at times one line takes up a whole page - read like private journal entries, and reveal a woman who is either on the verge of a crisis or has barely survived one. With time we learn the woman is a kind of actress - a failed actress, a closeted actress, a successful actress are all strong possibilities. The woman bitterly recollects a carefree girl from her youth who ended up acting (“I was diminished by her”) and the memory of this girl is followed by a taunting line from an adult, which appears in quotes and occupies a page: “Child, have you ever aspired to perform upon the stage?” These and other tidbits make it clear that once upon a time the woman had wanted to be an actress, and that now she is not (or never was). In fact, the ambiguities regarding the narrator’s occupation and her general background serve to highlight the incandescent and disturbing tension Unrue has created in the narration throughout the book:
'I pick the scissors up. A sparkling vision fills my head, those long-gone Christmas Eves and other nights-before when I would feel the glittering gaze of someone peeking in to see if I was just pretending to be asleep or if I really was asleep. I clip it, thread it, knot it at the end, and tell myself I wonder if I’m acting now.'
We are in limbo, just like the narrator. We find grounding in the woman’s memories of her childhood and of the conversations she once had with her lover. The conversations appear to us snipped, but they are beguiling. The woman and her lover converse on the nature of isolation, their relationship, and sex. That was the woman’s past.
In the present, the woman stares into the eyes of the subjects of Renaissance paintings, she plays a femme-fatale role (self-cast) at a gallery in the museum, and also hires herself for a part she wrote for herself. This last role is a “straightforward though deeply layered story” about a woman who lives in a one-room flat above her mother’s defunct flower shop. The woman acts out the role in a voyage, on a boat deck. Wearing an evening gown and donning a sea-pearl evening clutch, the woman concentrates on her manner and poise. The woman plays the role, rehearsing the execution in grueling and intensive practice sessions, so that “I, please God, might not convey to those around me evidence of jealousy, resentment, malice, desperation, anything.” Life of a Star reads as though Marina Abramovic or Allan Kaprow truly succeeded in erasing the lines between art and life - but the result is disturbing. Akin to the hair-rising fear we feel from looking down an abyss, we look upon the nameless woman playing her voyage role, reacting to the passangers on the boat as if her fellow actors, and we wonder how far she will be able to go without finally stepping into insanity:
'Soft blonde hair, her dress black taffeta, a beaded coral cardigan around her shoulders, she moved gracefully, so pretty, and he uttered something to her that I could not understand before I heard him tell her clearly, rather loudly, that he’d screw her (she had downward eyes) until she’s bleed (soft face; not shocked). Then suddenly she ran away.'
The mother-character in me wept for daughter’s bitter disappointment as the father in me shrank in weakness to confront that bastard piece of shit, while she, the woman that I really was
It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.'
Unrue strikes on a narrative drama that is interspersed with ordinary epiphanies, which reveal a life richly lived, but underscored by a quiet, masterful tension. The woman’s triangular connections with the world and her self (when the self she knows is slipping) are utterly intriguing. This is a portrait of a woman entering art and losing herself in it, increasingly unable to find the center of her own emotions. Life of a Star is a book for theorists, art lovers, academics, but mostly general readers who are both grateful and uneasy to find a writer who experiments with blurring the line of art and life.” - Ingrid Rojas Contreras

“Jane Unrue creates a truly riveting novel that brings new perspective on the woman’s search for love, and so much more. “Life of a Star” is a top pick for literary fiction collections.” —Midwest Book Review

“A woman, alone, embroiders a bumble bee onto a pillowcase and, while doing so, she recalls the first play she ever saw, how she once terrified a young rival into leaving town, how she seduced the married man by a public fountain. Life of a Star by Jane Unrue is the story of a woman embroidering her life. The unnamed female narrator reveals to the reader that, though she was never a professional actress, acting has deeply influenced her. As a child she constantly noted the way others were perceived and, in doing so, learned how to control the ways in which she was perceived. Her remembrances are peppered with stage directions, such as in an argument with her mother: “And I hate (looked:sink) you (mirror) too! (Floor.)” Her mother was a professional actress, but the narrator uses the craft of acting as a lifestyle choice rather than a profession. Instead of making money off her acting skills, she makes relationships.
The most emotional recollections are those surrounding an unnamed ex-lover, a married man. These moments, as all moments in the book, are recalled out-of-order, but the encounters with the lover are differentiated in that they are numbered in chronological order: “Encounter number four. ‘You’re right,’ I said, (chin tuck), ‘I haven’t told you much about myself’ (syllabic lateral movement of the head on much about myself).” The narrator uses the same self-employed stage directions with the man she loves and she did with her mother, constantly manipulating the distance between herself and the other through this carefully constructed artifice.
The novel unfolds as a series of disjointed thoughts, images, scenes, and memories. The book is 112 pages long, but may be read in a single sitting. No scene lasts for more than a page and a half, and an entire page may contain only a single sentence:
“It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.”
“New needle. (Bigger eye.)”
“Black satin thread emerges through a tiny hole: beginnings of a body.”
When multiple sentences do appear on the same page the language goes to the opposite extreme, becoming complex and lyrical: “Retracing all your steps along the corridor of trees, to search for an escape look up and see if you can find a dirty-looking star above this dead-eyes image of a garden conjured as if just to keep you from returning to the woman underneath you in your bed and telling her that it was only sadness for the many losses in your life, the many tragedies you’ve see, that caused your gaze to wander toward the wall.” It becomes difficult to get your bearings in a sentence such as that, especially in the middle of a story that is being told unchronologically by an unreliable narrator. It becomes essential, then, to approach the novel as you would a poem, to untether yourself from the presumptions of narrative and allow the sentences to grab you and pull you along like a riptide.
When the narrator decides she wants to close her self-created dramatic distance she finds herself unable to do so, commenting “it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves.” Having practiced fake emotion so well for so long, she has robbed herself of the ability to show genuine emotion in a genuine moment. This touches on an even greater question: is it possible to react genuinely once you’ve peered behind the curtain and seen the power of staged drama?
Ultimately, the narrator discovers through her musing both that she desires emotional intimacy and that she absolutely cannot have it. And even as she recalls her life to the faceless reader, she ponders the question, “I wonder if I’m acting now.”” – Dana Norris

“Anxiety suffuses much of Life of a Star, Jane Unrue’s lapidary bloodletting, and much of it is borne from the narrator’s bemoaning of language’s limitations, memory’s imprecision, romance’s sudden changes, and the seeming impossibility of love. The novella, composed of luminous, evocative fragments, is much like a mosaic wall, albeit a ruined one, missing patches of tiles, where the viewer must fill in the necessary blanks. Incredibly perceptive and imaginative, the unnamed narrator elliptically relays her brief moment in the limelight, her strained “encounters” with a lover, her attempted suicide, and her difficulties with finding a language to seam the mangled threads of her life together into some kind of whole:
'No matter how I try to focus motivation, limiting associations, drilling each part of a sentence individually, not too emphatically, it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves. For instance, any recollection of a figure standing next to me is so unbearably entwined within the lifting of my hands as if to block the morning light out, that I’m left to pick through words and objects, moments of remembrance, for the slightest hint of anything that I can even begin to recognize as someone close enough to reach.'
It’s a despair familiar to any writer who, continually exploring the vast resources of language, still finds him- or herself incapable of generating the proper vocabulary, syntax, and narratological framework to encompass the baffling complexity of psychological and emotional experience, of pain in all its forms. Emotionally off-kilter, the narrator isn’t satisfied with what she sees, feels, and thinks unless her experiences are given some kind of form or contained in a concrete way. She’s utterly self-conscious and spilling over with doubt: “It seems I have no feelings I can call my own.” Finding “artificiality in mere words,” she feels she must “live words.” Wandering naked in an idyllic scene, she distances herself from her surroundings by wondering how to contain it, capture it, control it: “It was the kind of scene to paint on onion skin, and then to wrap around a lantern, turn it slowly, see the bridge slide into view and out, and my naked body coming, going too.” Oscillating in time, the narrative also sometimes shatters into incomplete sentences, mirroring the narrator’s own fractured perception of both her past and present. And many of these fragments are intruded upon by other voices:
'The color of my eyes is something people might not well recall. And though petite, at times
I seem
Look how her—!
Wonderfully, oddly
She’s not even one little bit—!'
Unrue’s performance is quite arresting, here. Her poetic renderings of consciousness are expertly handled: she carefully maps her narrator’s vacillations and her confused outlook on life; and she harnesses the flotsam and jetsam of external things: the observations and judgments from other people she’s collected over the course of her troubled life. The narrator, embroidering, sewing, and stitching in the midst of her reveries is, at times, overwhelmed by her fanciful surroundings and the gravity of her personal history. Her own expressive inventorying serves as a way of bringing sense to the senselessness in her life: “To be alive requires that we build a catalogue of like-like images and stolen words and phrases, things we can put to use.”
Immersed in these wrenching scenes, where Unrue’s melancholic lyricism overflows, it’s easy to feel like her narrator who, after reminiscing about kissing her lover says, “This was a moment when the image and the words collide, the kind of moment people live for.” At one point, the narrator, embroidering, compiles a wish list of all the things she needs for her craft. This list could also serve as the best summation of how this novella was put together for it, too, is a “catalogue of patterns, stitches, backgrounds, combinations and suggestions, useful bits and pieces, images.” Unrue’s imaginative precision gives way to indeterminacy, clarity to tentativeness, cohesion to dislocation. The events and images in this world are delivered in a sensuous prose that harkens back to Carole Maso, another accomplished master whose prose belies great intelligence, insight, and a willingness to submit to the seductive power of the sentence. Think of Life of a Star, then, as an illuminated viewfinder, one where parallax, ambiguity, blur, and discontinuity may impede immediate recognition, but one which still impresses through the sheer power of its startling imagery and commanding poetics, its accretion of clues and repetitions. In the end, all of the fragmentary, floating images in Life of a Star finally cohere into an enigmatic portrait of a burned out visionary, an object lesson on the fleetingness of desire, of the perpetuity of pain, on the doubtful, but nevertheless worthwhile, possibility that language may bring meaning to life, or, at the very least, help one to endure its vicissitudes.” - John Madera

“arrived the other day courtesy of Waldrop generosity.
I started it tonight and read to page 62, just over half the little novel.
It's quite good.
I was already a fan of Jane Unrue.
Googling her just now, she seems to be a well-kept secret.
For now.
But that situation cannot last when one writes as well as she does.
Jane Unrue reminds me in an odd way of Jane Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart).
They both write subtle novels composed of almost ectoplasmic prose.
In a weird way, it's like an inheritance of the Jamesian thing (the supernatural James anyway).
But they conveniently clean up his ridiculously Byzantine grammar and tool sentences and paragraphs of much more palatable length.
They keep that Jamesian mystery inherent in grammar itself, but they get rid of the Jamesian sprawl.
I suppose Mendelsohn's vampire novel is a bit slight, but I liked it. She was sort of the literary belwether on that, as vampire erotic lit broke shortly after her first novel along those lines.
But the Amelia Earhart novel was wonderful.
I listed Unrue's book House on my shortlist of "The Ten (or was it Twelve?) Books by Burning Deck Press You Should Own."
This one is about strange-fitting clothes of the erotic.
Also, it is about the torturously well-fitting clothes of jealousy.
Jealousy's ridiculous sartorial splendor.
And the wreckage that follows.
As usual, Unrue shows us that a straight line or direct stare is always the longest distance between two points we are trying to use to reperer in any real investigation of the world.
(Sorry, Kaplan's novel uses the French verb on every other page and now it's stuck in my head!)
Unrue's prose is deliciously Lobachevskian like that.
The irreal is found, as ever, to be more convincing. At least when it comes to that strange creature we call narrative.
She writes very well.
I see I have missed a novel, Atlassed, which came out in 2005, which I will need to hunt down.
And I see she published a novella in the swan song of 3rd Bed, Vincent Standley's wonderful magazine (of which I was happy to be a part on more than one occasion).
I probably actually have that somewhere in this house or the old one.
I'll try to review this when I finish it.
I can already recommend it.
Stylistically, it's that delightful mix of novelistic innovation and unapologetic anachronism--that thing so many contemporary French novelists (yes, P.O.L!) do so well.
P.S. Love Keith Waldrop's cover art for this!” - Willliam Keckler

“Reading Jane Unrue’s novel Life of a Star is similar to the experience of entering a quiet room and seeing the broken shards of a glass figurine lying on the floor and though when seeing the wreckage one is not familiar with what the shards once composed while intact, the essence has not changed—the figurine exists broken, it’s brokenness animated to high art.
The novel is made up of brief sections no more than two pages long. The unnamed female narrator at the center shifts back and forth between childhood and adulthood, between angst and agony, between galleries of art, the sewing of a bumble-bee pillowcase, lovelorn encounters and an early envy for a little girl “…far more likely to dazzle than” she could ever be. She hasn’t always been alone, but she is now.
What does this narrator want? Certainly the title is a wry play on words. The narrator is in an incredible amount of pain. She is a star only in her own multitudinous mind that announces stage directions for her to enact like “(Full body modesty.)” “(Eyes wide.)” “(Repeat for other side; wrist up.)” Her best performances, solo of course, are not attended:
That night, all husbands, wives, long gone, the water was so quiet underneath the little bridge, dark foliage all around, a moon up high, and I was wearing nothing on my body or my head. It was the kind of scene to paint on onion skin, and then to wrap around a lantern, turn it slowly, see the bridge slide into view and out, my naked body coming, going too. p. 94
The “naked body coming, going too” might be the sine qua non of this entire endeavor. The narrator and her stories can’t keep still. She searches, spins and hams her way into a container impervious to other people. Escape, even from such agonies as lovers sleeping with others can never be commensurate with the self-flagellation in its wake:
…I lay there on my bed and wished I had not tried to lift you off my floor and bring you back into the bed…” Don’t tell me that you love me,” you said. He’s already gone, I thought, my gaze up at the ceiling flooded as if by a bucket full of liquid silver pouring down into my eyes and in my mouth. p.71
The last sentence is a Lynchian dissolve, a rainbow shimmer and ungluing of sense that stomps any snaky sentimentality and keeps loss lyrically stifling.
One may wonder what sense this journey into dark sludge has—where is the uplift, where lies redemption? but Unrue has gone into the well many scribblers have spelunked. As in Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, there are mystical childhood encounters, the changing galleries and gardens the narrator wanders through, the bumblebee pillowcase (reminiscent of the mother’s lace), and the concern with how to make prose sing (to be seen shortly). Each also concerns singular narrators who want to be more than they’ve become, but first they must struggle to see the world. Unrue (like Rilke’s directive from the Sonnets to Orpheus) “dances the orange” through a fine needlework of phraseology that takes what is melodrama and heightens it, producing not so much the life of a star, but the scrawl of a poet planting and detonating verbs, adverbs and nouns into sinuous strobes of sound:
No matter how I try to focus motivation, limiting associations, drilling each part of a sentence individually, not too emphatically, it’s always stumped me why so many of my very most tender and authentic memories are tangled up with over-practiced words and stiff, exaggerated moves. For instance, any recollection of a figure standing next to me is so unbearably entwined within the lifting of my hands as if to block the morning light out, that I’m left to pick through words and objects, moments of remembrance, for the slightest hint of anything that I can even begin to recognize as someone close enough to reach. P.104
Her text is the toil that separates her. The narrator is conscious of other ways to communicate but the struggle carries both the singe of the past and the problem of the future. Is there understanding? Is there a way to see truth and breathe into the pain? Unrue’s narrator does plenteous breathwork and the result is a tidy but by no means lean novel wherein the cries to stay private get choked by a willowy wordsmith, a shooting star—shot and fallen.” – Greg Gerke
Jane Unrue, Atlassed, Triple Press, 2005.

“Where does one go after Joyce? This fiction shows the possibility of a way beyond his shadow. Or the possibility of the nutrition that can grow from it. A collection of fictions in Unrue's precise, evocative style with section such as:"Looking Sideways" and "Hands Emerging Out of a Black Background." Perfectbound, with an elegant cover designed by Deron Bauman.”

“Somewhat on the Joyelle McSweeney page maybe, Unrue creates these worlds that exist nowhere but in her books, like little mirrored halls that go on forever, and new new new language mashes, I loved this, 'The Snarl is on the Mask' is one of my new favorite stories.” – Blake Butler

“Jane Unrue's Atlassed has many of the characteristics of a short story sequence, but its carefully composed language recalls the prose poetry of Fred Wah or perhaps Lyn Hejinian. In a sense, Unrue reproduces the peripatetic urban roaming of Paterson or Leaves of Grass—except that the stomping grounds of her metropolitan flaneur is not the city, but the human body itself. The book is composed of a series of prose vignettes, some that are more or less narrative, and others that are more like stylistic improvisations, or prose poems that read like grab-bags of linguistic synergy. The result is both a mapping and an erotics of the body, as indicated by the evocative chapter headings (eg. "Brow and Chin Variations," or "Topmost Portion of the Forehead, a Common Omission"). These headings supply in large part the "unity" of this book, which attempts to nominally fasten these evocative if not necessarily transparent prose pieces to a conceptual map of the body which though present, hovers just beyond our comprehension.
At first, the separate chapters seem thrown together, ill-fitting lyric improvisations, voiced by different speakers on different topics. By the end of the book, what unites these pieces becomes much clearer—a kind of aesthetics of dissection, a discomposition of the elements of the body and a re-rendering of the human form as mosaic. This is elegantly expressed in a phrase that I read as a sort of mission statement for the book, from a section titled "A Neatly Folded Pile of Clothes" (a title at once evocative and ironic):
That same day I'd seen a temporary residence designed by different architects to occupy a plot of land devoted to the exhibition of new works of art. Each architect had been assigned a portion of the residence; they brought their portions in by truck, then everything got put together. That the pieces did not fit and that the residence looked unappealing was, I guessed, supposed to be the beauty of it. (134, emphasis added)
Perhaps this in part explains the continual linkage between love and violence in Atlassed, since one of the questions this book repeatedly asks is whether there is "any sort of line dividing deep-felt pleasure from the icy horror of a white-hot violent encounter?" (110). And this is in a sense, the exact experience of reading Atlassed; it is full of sequences that are at once erotic and horrifying, others that are evocative and enigmatic. Moreover, Atlassed always creates the sense that a greater conceptual unity exists, and that we are doomed to desire it forever. In "Table, Heart, Breasts, Kidneys," Unrue suggests that even a family on a road trip may feel an unrequited desire for a map, to render the events of their life, their stubborn anomie in the face of absolutism, easier to comprehend:
A sense of loss like nothing ever known is passed from family member on to family member in the car, each person holding fast to something: steering wheel, a seatbelt buckle, handle on a door. A slippery drop of rain has hit the windshield, and the father conjures up an image of two massive feet of stone adhered for centuries to the ground. (119)
The family knows that "mapping" is an impossibility, and that any attempt at its broad, totalizing vision will result in an image that is incomplete, disorienting. Unrue goes on to say that
This miracle, this nightmare, this at once so terrifying and enchanting scenic drive—it winds from left to right across the outer portion of the mighty granite wall, diminishing the sense of trust felt by the mother and the children toward the car, the tires, and the ability of the man behind the wheel to keep the car from swerving suddenly and plowing through the railings in the road. (119)
In the end, the book is a sort of revelation in reverse—Unrue brings the veil of language between the reader and the illusion of realism, suggesting dark and frightening possibilities beyond our ken that are at the same time exhilarating. Like the "leafy vines" in "Passion (Asleep)," Atlassed "rocks you in the manner of the darkest pleasures you have yet encountered" (155). Reading Atlassed is at times mystifying; but in the end, its alchemic blend of imminent horror with immanent revelation and its apocalyptic mixture of mystery and desire, create a dark and evocative beauty that is both enigmatic and enlightening.” - Gunnar Benediktsson
Jane Unrue, The House, Burning Deck, 2000.

“A woman wanders from room to room, or ventures outside, and throughout the ensuring procession of locations, ruminations, or dreams, is transported into the past, or to a love affair, or a marriage, or into the future, or to an ending, perhaps her own."

“Jane Unrue's extraordinary prose unfolds within the confines of a mythological house: I used to walk when the moonlight was just enough to make the metallic structural elements (the rest of the house as if missing) appear to be coming at me from all sides. 'I know those door frames and window frames are not really coming at me,' I remember saying, 'but it sure does look as if they are.' In restless, suspended sentences that seem to push closure beyond the horizon, a woman wanders from room to room or ventures outside.”

"Quietly plumbing the intimacies of architecture, landscape, and domesticity, Jane Unrue's debut, The House, develops a muted intensity through serial blocks of meditative prose... Displaying the influence of writers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Bachelard, Charles Olson and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Unrue successfully forges an evocative approach that could be seen as metacubist in its dizzying, varied takes of the familiar world." - Publishers Weekly

Adam Levin reminds us that discovering you might be the messiah would be both a holy and hilarious thing: 'War and Peace' in middle school

Adam Levin, The Instructions, McSweeney's, 2010.

"Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending four days later with the Events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Ejected from three Jewish day schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity. The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Combining the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace, Adam Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy—a novel that is muscular and rollicking, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic, and unforgettable."


"This novel is beautiful and warm-hearted, yet at the same time terrifying and may betray you as you turn any page. Here is a book that will haunt your thoughts long after you've closed its covers and will have you longing to discuss just exactly what happened. Adam Levin will be compared to literary wunderkinds of days gone by, but do not be fooled: he is a standalone original, and the bona fide next big thing." — Jamil Zaidi

"The Instructions is brilliant. A virtuoso literary performance that is wildly entertaining from beginning to end (page 1 to page 1024). It is ambitious, provocative, touching, hilarious and sad. The experience of reading this novel is exhilarating and extremely powerful." —Ed Conklin

"The Instructions is a sizzling fire-cracker of a book. Readers beware: you will not be able to put this book down, you will not be able to get ten-year old Gurion Maccabee's fevered voice out of your head, and you will not be able to read anything else for like six months without thinking back to this book. The Instructions is a thrilling hurricane of an epic—1,000 pages that takes places over a mere four days—and it will chew you up and spit you out and you will be better for it." — Rachel Meier

"The Instructions inverts the world; the deeply human concerns—love, war, religion, power, morality—are recast in a junior high setting. But these issues are by no means lessened in Levin's novel—on the contrary, the reader becomes more acutely aware, perhaps even less jaded, by the weird juxtaposition. Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee (budding Hebrew messiah and revolutionary) is devastatingly romantic, wise, innocent, conniving, pugilistic, and intensely funny. His family, friends and enemies, and teachers (who are sometimes a bit of both) are all fully realized. Stories run like filigree through The Instructions, adding to the Epicness, but Levin always brings us back to Gurion and his conflicts and machinations... Yes, The Instructions is a Big Fat Book, the kind you kill vicious marsupials with, prop a door, or block a bullet; it can intimidate, and perhaps cause a wrist injury, but as may not be the case with other BFBs, this sprawling novel is a delightful reward; diving into it feels like an indulgence, and the inappropriate-laughter-on-public-transit moments feel like revenge upon a bland, workaday world. I love books like this: just the right amount of clever & inventiveness; compelling narratives; a questing and questioning nature; how it expands the emotional range with which one interacts with literature. There's so much to say about The Instructions, and it's hard to know where to stop. I could be succinct and say, 'This is War and Peace in middle school, filtered through Roth, Bellow, and Scheherazade', but I think I just threw up in my mouth a little." — Vlad Verano

"The Instructions is brilliant: genuinely funny, genuinely compelling. It's unique and intriguing. I find myself wanting to tell people about it every day. I haven't loved a book this much since I discovered Gary Shteyngart, lo those many years ago." — Catherine Weller

"I know what it’s like to believe a thing that lots of people think is crazy to believe. In my case, it is that there is a God, that that God has a Son, and that that Son died and then, three days later, wasn’t dead anymore. It is the craziest thing that I believe wholeheartedly.
I mention this, because it shapes how I come at a book like Adam Levin’s The Instructions. That isn’t to say that you have to be religious or even to believe in God to enjoy it. You don’t. But it made me empathize with Gurion Macabee (a boy who may or may not be the messiah) all the more. This is the story of a boy who struggles to know what it is he’s meant to do and who it is he’s meant to be. A boy who feels a high degree of confidence that he is the messiah, but a willingness to admit that he can’t really know until he knows. You know?
It’s that kind of struggle, a knowing unknowing, that make faith the exciting adventure that it is. I’m pretty sure I’m right… but what if I’m wrong? I have to live into the truth of what I believe in order to discover whether it is true, but what if I give my whole life to that truth only to discover it’s a lie? This is the risk of faith. To watch that risk play out in the life and mind of a twelve-year-old boy is a marvelous and sometimes frightening thing.
And kudos go to Adam Levin for delving so deftly into the heart and mind of a twelve-year-old boy. Levin captures the thoughts patterns, the voice patterns, the confidences and lack of confidence. Twelve is an age that is wrought with insecurities and yet an age when our sense of what is right and true can be unshakable. An age when we’re never more sure of our own righteousness, even if we aren’t always sure that we’re right. This is what Gurion wrestles with and we wrestle along with him.
The Instructions is brilliant for a lot of reasons; the main one being that Levin leaves room for us to draw our own conclusions. No two readers will feel exactly the same way about this story and its protagonist. Some won’t agree at all. Some will dismiss Macabee as misguided, others will find that more difficult to do. Some will simply call him “crazy.” others will be reminded of the “crazy” things they themselves believe. Hopefully, all will be challenged to think and to feel and to wonder.
And, if this sounds like a story so epic as to be daunting (the 1000+ pages may feel daunting as well), it is also worth mentioning that The Instructions is funny. Sometimes it’s wry and sometimes ridiculous. Sometimes the chuckle comes with an ache and sometimes a guffaw bursts through.
This, again, is why The Instructions is brilliant. Levin reminds us that discovering you might be the messiah would be both a holy and hilarious thing. By doing so, even his moments of irreverence are imbued with a kind of reverence. It makes for a powerful story, one I am confident that you will enjoy." - Kester Smith

"If The Anarchist's Cookbook provided recipes for potent literature, Adam Levin's The Instructions would be in there, a feast for the Che Guevara shirt–wearing, pissy, lovestruck kid in all of us. Yet Levin's massive novel—his first, on which he spent around a decade working—is assembled with stock-shelf ingredients.
Among them: the rebellion parable of Animal Farm, with after-school detention monitors replacing Orwell's dictatorial barnyard traif. Fistfuls of Robert Cormier's bittersweet Chocolate War dystopia and the poetic pidgin of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Dashes of Philip Roth and pinches of Vonnegut, both of whose works are directly referenced. The entire thing is finished with a glaze of Joseph Campbell and served by Dave Eggers (published by McSweeney's, it basically is). Essential to The Instructions' success is the careful moderation Levin took with his influences. They're not distracting.
The novel is a "scripture" written by the Judaism-obsessed, prodigal, possibly messianic 10-year-old Gurion Maccabee, who has skipped almost as many grades as the schools he's been kicked out of for fighting. Gurion, waiting to see his principal after yet another fight, meets and falls in love with a pretty classmate. It's the first step of a hysterical, heartfelt journey of self-discovery, perpetually foreshadowed by an inevitable climax: the adolescent-lead revolution against the Powers That Be (mainly, the public school system). Each half of The Instructions is devoted to two different days, with the occasional flashback or historical aside, the writing catching the way kids slowly watch the world tick forward. Yet the thousand-page youth-in-revolt epic flies by.
The result? A book that moves beyond completely transparent influences to reach its own distinct, new, great height. Finding out whether or not Gurion is the messiah pales to watching Levin earn him his rightful place alongside Holden Caulfield, Harry Potter, Pony Boy, and every other classically young, angry character who's fought to change his or her world, whether or not they succeeded." - Kamer Foster

Anders Nilsen - Random cruelty, futility, ennui, and an implied assault on human complacency are the order of the day

Anders Nilsen, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, Fantagraphics Books, 2009.

“Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes takes up where the artist’s first volume, Monologues for the Coming Plague, left off. Like Coming Plague, Density of Black Holes is a creatively experimental laboratory, comprising a collection of free flowing stream-of-consciousness gags, strips, and drawings that slowly coalesce into an unexpectedly compelling and complex narrative. The hints of story that came together in Coming Plague are extrapolated and expanded upon and grow to incorporate some of Nilsen's other outré strips from the anthology MOME, two of which are reprinted here in expanded form. The book is an audacious investigation into the rhythms of storytelling, the blurring of media, and an exercise in reconciling contrasts. It is playful, provocative and serious all at once — another tour de force by Anders Nilsen, impeccably and uniquely designed, in monochrome and full color.”

“The scribble-headed guy returns from Monologues for the Coming Plague (2006) and eventually interacts with a faceless guy who, first seen solo, immediately discards hair, collar, and the under-the-shirt pillow that initially made him look tubby. “I’m not me,” he says, “I’m someone else. I’m just masquerading as me.” A clean-up guy comes in, vacuums up faceless’ castoffs, and leaves. Faceless talks about a credit-card statement, watching reality shows, his psychologist and masseuse, going on Oprah, a note from his mother, getting locked in the bathroom by burglars, and digging a tunnel to a neighbor’s apartment with a soap dish. He digs in his pockets for the note. But, “Wait. This cartoon should have ended pages and pages ago.” He calls scribble-head for an explanation. There are 360 more pages of this, 31 of them mounting faceless on full-color aerial photos and maps. Other characters drop in, sometimes taking over for pages. The note is never completely forgotten. The only famous artworks that fascinate like Nilsen’s stream-of-consciousness, existential farces are Samuel Beckett’s absurdist comedies.” – Booklist

“Anders Nilsen's comics have the rare power to generate queasy laughter... Random cruelty, futility, ennui, and an implied assault on human complacency are the order of the day. When Nilsen wants you to feel his boredom, or taunt you for your own, he's merciless... Nilsen is a relentlessly interesting comics creator. ...I'm looking forward to his next performance in the wasteland.” - Byron Kerman

“Anders Nilsen has placed himself alongside other young comic luminaries like Kevin Huizenga and Sammy Harkham... His beautiful meditations on grief and life after loss, have made his name one that readers can rely on for work that in not only good but also meaningful... definitely one of the more rewarding reading experiences of this very young year.” - Bryan Hood

“Anders Nilsen is a weird dude… [Monologues] help[s] cement his odd sensibilities and fantastic art… It’s a wild, gorgeous sketched ride from one of the more prominent members of the graphic novel elite.” - Jason Schueppert

“Anders Nilsen’s deceptively ordinary drawings are used here at first to depict the common theme of isolation, loneliness, dejection and alienation—all in a seemingly unremarkable narrative set of light pencil drawings and straightforward narrative device…the book stops talking with words, and shows pure graphic simplicity the degradation of the human soul….a progression of grotesque images which convey the impossible maze of our own minds.” - Dig Comics

“With critically acclaimed books like Dogs and Water and The End, Anders Nilsen has placed himself alongside other young comic luminaries like Kevin Huizenga and Sammy Harkham. His beautiful meditations on grief and life after loss, have made his name one that readers can rely on for work that is not only good but also meaningful. His latest book from Fantagraphics, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, proves that the artist’s reputation is well deserved.
A direct follow up to 2006’s Monologues for the Coming Plague, Black Holes features a series of stream-of-consciousness stories about―well―everything. Unlike his more focused recent work, Nilsen tackles a variety of subjects including: lost notes, media consumption, mysterious conspiracies, killer robots, and even finds time to answer critics of the first book (in a nice tongue-in-cheek manner). The immediate rush of stories and quick transitions feels like a mishmash at first, but Nilsen deftly maneuvers between each subject creating a unified narrative. What initially seems haphazard, gradually reveals itself to be contemplative and philosophical.
One thing that will stop some from giving Black Holes the attention it deserves is the sometimes crude artwork. Nilsen’s book looks nothing like the beautiful and detailed work seen in his comic series, Big Questions, or his entry in the latest issue of Kramers Ergot. Instead the artwork looks like the kind of quickly dashed off drawings found in the margins of a high school notebook, but it is actually much more sophisticated than that. While it may not dazzle, the art carries the story forward in a way that more intricate artwork would not. The art and text compliment each other perfectly, creating an idea that is easily absorbed before moving onto the next image. There are also some breathtaking images throughout the book. The simplicity of Nilsen’s figures work well pasted over full color nature photos and map images, giving those pages an far reaching feel not present in the rest of the book. The subtle coloring is also noteworthy. While it is easy to over look at first, but Nilsen utilizes line color to great effect. Each section has its own color, a move that segments the book in a way that only strengthens its narrative flow.
As some of the characters in its very pages state, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes may initially come off as a long art experiment, but it really is more that that. Nilsen has crafted a thought provoking book that begs to be reread. With each reading, more things show themselves, illustrating the book’s complexity. Its not the most accessible comic, but Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes is definitely one of the more rewarding reading experiences of this very young year.” - Bryan Hood

“It's an interesting exercise to try to wrap one's head around Anders Nilsen's MONOLOGUES FOR CALCULATING THE DENSITY OF BLACK HOLES, which is apparently the second in a series. Nilsen is well known for his exacting work in his BIG QUESTIONS series, which is one of the few comics I read these days that has a lot of stippling to go along with its other detail. DOGS AND WATER was another book with opaque themes and a painstaking line that demanded a high level of scrutiny from its readers to tease out its meaning. That's why it caught many readers off guard when he started submitting scratched-out, stick-figure comics for MOME and for his first Fantagraphics book, MONOLOGUES FOR THE COMING PLAGUE. A number of readers were frankly baffled or even angered by that comic, given its bulging page count and slapped-off drawings. Those readers will likely want to avoid BLACK HOLES, since the style is the same.
So what is Nilsen's goal here? Like many artists whose masterwork takes years to complete, it seems as though Nilsen wanted to spend time on a project that was utterly different from his other work. Thus, the MONOLOGUES: spare and scratchy where his other work was detailed; loose and spontaneous where his other work was considered; and funny where his other work was melancholy. It's interesting to see the many influences that inform MONOLOGUES; there's a bit of absurdists like Ionesco, elements of Tom Stoppard's wit and philosophical musings, stream of consciousness dada in the style of Tristan Tzara, and oblique New Yorker type gags with the scratchy looseness of James Thurber and Saul Steinberg. Clocking in at over 400 pages, what MONOLOGUES winds up most of all as is a really good shaggy dog joke.
We meet a man who tells us about his day, where an increasingly absurd number of weird events has happened to him. He goes on Oprah, gets kidnapped by the CIA, and has all of his possessions shrink to nothing--or so he tells us. The central idea behind the book is "I'm not me", so he's able to talk about these events as though they were happening to someone else. We then meet the man in charge of his fate, with a scribbled-out head. The fact that Nilsen does not correct his scribbles is obviously quite deliberate: the omnipotent creator makes mistakes, but the characters are forced to deal with them. Immediacy and spontaneity are what he's going for above all else, not pausing to correct because he's quickly changing a punchline.
It's a risky approach because even comics with loose & scratchy art rarely include errors, and it's a big reason why so many readers have reacted so viscerally against these books. I actually see the scratch-outs as part of the joke: it's a form of erasure, leaving behind meaning even though we can't see the meaning. We can't see it as readers or know Nilsen's intent before he scratched out a word. Of course, we can only guess at what he really means even when we do see the words, which is part of the point. The spontaneity of the page makes for a deconstructive reading experience, where Nilsen forces the reader to break down each image and word.
Nilsen mockingly addresses his critics in the middle of the book, one of many tangents and side-trips in the book. Nilsen jokes that the drawing isn't crude--it took him his whole life to learn how to draw this badly, after drawing well for so many years. When the criticism is brought to his attention that he isn't funny, he simply replies "Fuck you. I don't think you are funny either." When another person notes that it's "random and incoherent", he smirks (with his blank-faced character), "Ah, my audience is finally beginning to understand me." These strips are random after a fashion, given the level of improvisation seen here, but it's not automatic writing. There are definitely story and concept threads that bind the book together.
One of the monologues is about a god-like figure looking over his creation and doubting his own decisions, while wearing handcuffs. The existence or non-existence of such concepts as god, empirical proof, knowledge and even doubt itself is discussed and then immediately lightened by a gag or an attack by killer robots. At its heart, this is a book about doubt and the ways in which it is punished and discouraged. Certitude even about doubt comes under fire in this book, as Nilsen mocks nihilism as much as he does the smugness of scientists. Nilsen lampoons science and faith alike, goes off on a tangent where he posits absurd fights ("who do you think would win--cows or pigs?"), and later has a bunch of single-page gags about masked burglars. The answers to profound philosophical questions are often solved by consulting a calculator, while the search for a note from his mother seems to be crucial to the ontological foundation for the main character. My favorite thing in the book are his absurd floorplans, where the rooms are labeled with people and things along with places (like salt pork, or machine guns).
An important note about the book is that it needs to be read in as close as one sitting as possible. There are recurring jokes as well as admonitions to pay attention to the main plot, even if nothing seemed to be happening. While there are plenty of gags, it's the shaggy dog nature of the book that form's the book's foundation, stringing the reader along as characters talk to us about what seems to be nonsense, until the end. Reading the book in smaller chunks robs the reader of that immersive experience and blunts the overall effectiveness of the joke. A second reading of the book helps remove some of that initial confusion, even allowing one to understand the bigger picture while taking in the small details a bit more closely.
MONOLOGUES FOR CALCULATING THE DENSITY OF BLACK HOLES is a lark that allows Nilsen to ask a few fundamental questions without taking it all very seriously. It's best read quickly at first, never lingering too long on a particular image (again, a deliberate move by Nilsen). Instead, one should pay attention to the rhythm of the dialogue (and monologues) as it builds and gets crazier and crazier. The experience is akin to going to a small theater with bare walls, watching an absurdist play unfold. Even the pages where the character's backgrounds are mountains or maps feel like an overhead projector clumsily creating a background instead of a more organically constructed scene. We're thrust directly into the experience with no warning or context. It's best not to have any expectations; even the author chides his assistant for claiming that the book will all make sense in the end. While there is a conclusion of sorts to the narrative, it's really just another series of blackout gags as the main character drowns himself in paper in search of the one note that will ground him in reality and gets cleaned up in a quite literal manner. It's one of a surprising number of visual gags in this comic, as Nilsen isn't just shoving words down our throats but instead uses images as the workhorse for many of his jokes. Nilsen may have been trained in art school, but he has always had the instincts of a cartoonist and appreciation for the entire depth and breadth of its history. In this book, those instincts play out in an unorthodox fashion.” - Rob Clough

“Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes is the second in what will eventually be a trilogy, as you noted at your blog. Did you set out wanting to create a trilogy when you embarked on Monologues for the Coming Plague?
- When I started the first book I just thought I was doing some experiments in my sketchbook. Playing around. But once I had finished the material that comprises the first book I had started to see the potential for a more expanded form–the narrative had started to come together, characters develop, etc. I started thinking about it as a trilogy then.
In lettering the stories, you cross out text at certain points.What freedom do you enjoy by approaching these books as improvisational sketchbooks?
- Just the ability to get the ideas and the progress of the narrative down quickly. It’s a way to get ideas out before your internal critic can get ahold of them. Of course, sometimes they end up being stupid or go off in unproductive directions. So there is editing that happens. I want the end result to be readable and engaging. But preserving some of the untidiness of the process–the scribbled out bits–makes it clear (hopefully) that the process is in some way improvisational.
And why did you scratch out some text–while doing the freedom of information style black box on other excised text? One of the recurring characters has a scratched out face–did you ever consider giving the character a blacked out box for a face?
- The difference is in where the decision happens…on the page or in photoshop after the page is scanned in. And I like the randomness and variety of the difference.
Throughout the book you utilize maps and large landscape photos as backgrounds for certain scenes. Where did you find these photos, and what motivated you to use them in such a manner? Were those pages some of the hardest to produce in the book?
- Yeah, prepress-wise those pages are somewhat more complicated to make happen. To get the lines crisp on the color background. Many of the photographs are ones I took myself. Others I find. I collect old postcards or other imagery of landscapes. I’m drawn to the genre–the fine lines between a boring image and a majestic one, and how the way we interpret them changes over time. Also the arbitrary ways the character in the foreground may interact with what’s going on behind him, the symbolism that’s created and undermined at the same time.
Could you have done this book in black and white–and if not, given the minimalism of several pages, why do you opt to do those pages in color?
- I’m interested in separating the sections visually, and also just making them a little more visually interesting. Again, by doing the changes in color between sections you are cuing the reader that there is some change in content. There may or may not actually be any, but it sets up an expectation. Which is fun to manipulate.
Given your affinity for stream-of-consciousness work, what creators that pursue work in a similar vein seem to inform your approach, if anyone?
- The person I keep going back to is Chester Brown in Ed the Happy Clown. It’s really great to see his mind working and his ambition expanding over the course of that story. Someone introduced me to David Shrigley‘s work after MFTCP came out and I really like the surprising, improvisational nature of his stuff.
At a weighty 400+ plus pages, was there anything you edited out for space? Granted there is intentionally limited editing on this book, but did you edit yourself or have someone edit it for you?
- I edited it. I had a few people look at it and give me feedback. There was a lot of material that didn’t make it in, there was also stuff added after a couple of re-readings. I did a significant re-write after the book was already solicited at 400 pages and ended up adding a bunch of stuff, and having to squeeze it in. This book has a lot more two, three and four panel pages than the first one, partly because of that. The flexibility of not having a panel structure is helpful.
Do you expect the average reader to get the gist of your message on a first read–or is Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes a work that you think demands that the consumer read it multiple times to get the full impact of your work?
- I don’t know. I suppose I would hope with most of my work that people are compelled, because they are interested enough, to reread it, and that they find something they didn’t see before that makes it worth the effort. But if someone finds it to be confusing nonesense and decides to throw it into the swimming pool that’s okay, too. Probably some of it won’t make sense until the story is wrapped up in the third book.
With two books in the trilogy under your belt, have you developed an affinity for certain characters more than others?
- I like them all. I think I’ve gotten slightly less interested in the guy with the face, the guy looking for a job. Which is a problem because I think he’s sort of important.” – Interview with Tim O'Shea
Anders Nilsen, Monologues for the Coming Plague, Fantagraphics Books, 2006.

“Monologues for the Coming Plague is the longest and most ambitious work to date by Anders Nilsen, the talented young cartoonist who has appeared in a variety of prominent comics anthologies over the past few years as well as in his own self-published comic, Big Questions, and has emerged as one of the most critically acclaimed cartoonists of his generation.
In 2003 Nilsen went on a signing tour with several other artists for the book Kramer's Ergot 4. The enthusiasm of his fellow artists for drawing in their sketchbooks proved infectious, and he decided to employ the same spontaneous method for a finished book.
"I've always worked in sketchbooks," said Nilsen, but I had lost the habit and my way of working had become very slow and deliberate. While waiting in the airport in New York, after the tour, I found myself absorbed in a series of one panel gags about a woman feeding a bird, brainstorming captions and watching ideas follow."
Taking a cue from the school of Automatic Writing, an aesthetic mode championed by Andre Breton at the beginning of the 19th century that became the foundation of the Surrealist Movement, Nilsen began work on Monologues for the Coming Plague. The process is born out of a stream of consciousness followed by limited editing and rearranging.
The book ranges playfully from riffs on the gag cartoon to paranoid soliloquies of a surrealistic apocalypse, with references to contemporary politics, pop culture, and religion, plays on language, and sequential abstractions. Stories intertwine, branch off, dead end and double back. These are experimental, absurdist art comics, but the book is a page-turner, and some of it is laugh-out-loud funny. Reading it is not so much like reading comics as it is watching the artist make connections between ideas, find patterns, and set down the story as it happens. It's a tour de force, beautifully and uniquely packaged, in black and white and color, by one of the most fascinating new cartoonists of the decade.”

“The latest offering by the author of the award-winning Dogs and Water is a long series of drawings—almost scribbles—simple enough to be stuck on Post-it notes. Don't let this fool you; these almost-doodles make a deeply funny and moving book. Whether it's a scribble-headed guy spouting poetry or a woman having a conversation with the bird she's feeding, the short, goofy captions provide a spectrum of nuanced and subtle social commentary. Nilsen goes on quiet feet where few pundits go. Topics include terrorism, semiotics, the eight-fold path and Tide laundry detergent, the last two combined. "Nothing ever happens here, yet the impending cataclysm is always right around the corner," says scribble-head. Later he pulls a dinosaur from his pocket, which eventually dismembers him. The bird and the woman also contribute to the discourse, ending with her final "Do you want the terrorist to win?" Nilsen takes the banal catchphrases of contemporary culture and strings them together like a master DJ. Pushing back the boundaries of comic art a second time, the results are hilarious, whimsical and heartbreakingly real.” - Publishers Weekly
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“Nilsen's rite-of-passage parable Dogs and Water (2005) obtained its power and mystery from austerity: no panel frames, and characters rendered with just enough detail to avoid cartooniness. This book is sketchier; indeed, it consists of sketchbook extracts; the lion's share, from one sketchbook, appears on gray stock, the rest on white. The principal figures are abstract humans, a bird, a dog, and a dinosaur. Backdrops, when present, are vestigial. So are the plots. A bird and a woman tossing crumbs discuss their relationship. Two men, one of whose heads is drawn as a big scribble, talk about semiotics and travel to Pittsburgh. Regular-head and a dog talk about the former's job search. Scribble-head tells us about being exiled, it seems from heaven, then counsels regular-head to shoot the Buddha if he sees him on the road. Regular-head does, gets sent up, escapes, and wreaks vengeance. Back to scribble-head musing, and eventually to him counseling the regular-head some more. Piquantly reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's existential absurdist theater, Nilsen's work is not as sad, perhaps.” - Ray Olson

“The latest offering by the author of the award-winning Dogs and Water is a long series of drawings almost scribbles simple enough to be stuck on Post-it notes. Don't let this fool you; these almost-doodles make a deeply funny and moving book. Whether it's a scribble-headed guy spouting poetry or a woman having a conversation with the bird she's feeding, the short, goofy captions provide a spectrum of nuanced and subtle social commentary. Nilsen goes on quiet feet where few pundits go. Topics include terrorism, semiotics, the eight-fold path and Tide laundry detergent, the last two combined. "Nothing ever happens here, yet the impending cataclysm is always right around the corner," says scribble-head. Later he pulls a dinosaur from his pocket, which eventually dismembers him. The bird and the woman also contribute to the discourse, ending with her final "Do you want the terrorist to win?" Nilsen takes the banal catchphrases of contemporary culture and strings them together like a master DJ. Pushing back the boundaries of comic art a second time, the results are hilarious, whimsical and heartbreakingly real.” - Publishers Weekly

“Monologues for the Coming Plague - I'll be damned if I can tell you what to make of Anders Nilsen's comics. There are times, such as a lot of his stuff in Mome - when I find myself staring at it incomprehendingly and flip past it hoping something "better" - read, "more comprehensible" - is next. I can remember standing in The Beguiling last year and being a bit stunned to hear Christopher Butcher tell me he thinks Nilsen's stuff is genius. Respecting Butcher's opinion as I did (and do), I figured I was just being dense and missing the forest for the trees, and besides, the specific book Butcher was talking about (Dogs and Water), I still have not read.
I did read the next issue of Nilsen's Big Questions that came out after that conversation, though, and if I understood not everything I read (BQ is an ongoing narrative, apparently much of it from the point of view of birds, which Nilsen seems to adore drawing), at least I came away from it with a respect for Nilsen's aesthetic sensibility -- spare, gentle, bewildering.
"Bewildering" is a good word for Monologues for the Coming Plague, which from the outside seems deliberately designed to look like something you'd be assigned to read in your sophomore Literature class. "Deliberate design" is a concept I thought about a lot while reading Monologues -- did Nilsen deliberately design the book so the spine must be cracked while reading it? A note at the end confirms Nilsen had a deliberate purpose in using two different paper stocks over the course of the book. He seems to think a lot about design and the tactile nature of reading a book, which, while common in artcomix (at least the ones I like), is always an added pleasure, given how little thought goes into the presentation and quality of most entertainment, from movies and music to comics, books and everything else.
What about the comics? Sloppy, strange, mannered, elegant, brilliant? I'm not altogether convinced you couldn't have drawn any picture in the book. And yet, you haven't, and Nilsen has, and there's an undeniable net effect akin to awe. Awe that his brain works in this way, awe that Fantagraphics finds this worth publishing, awe that I enjoyed it all the way through. Awe, perhaps, that I don't ever enjoy reading Nilsen's stuff as much I think I should, but always more than I think I will.
Nilsen raises big questions about narrative, art, philosophy ("Yeah, I have a philosophy, but I'm not sure what it is.") and existence. He doesn't seem to answer any of them in his comics, but I hope one of his punchlines here will also describe this review for you:
"Thank you, that was actually very helpful." - Alan David Doane

“I’ve been following Anders Nielsen’s work since the very first issue of Big Questions. I’ve witnessed, therefore, the slow-paced but steadily outstanding growth of one of the most refined author of comics of the last years.
Perhaps we’re too close to his work, especially the recent Monologues for the Coming Plague, to fully acknowledge the importance of Nielsen’s oeuvre. But why pull any punches? Nielsen is a master of the understatement.
As one flips the pages of Monologues, there are two things happening: speed and backlash.
Speed because the one-illustration-per-page makes its reading, while a physical act, quite fast-paced. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, in a very weird manner, taking in account the apparent simplicity of Nielsen’s drawings and short sentences, it echoes the proverbial “times in which we live in”.
Backlash because only as an after-effect we get the full force of what’s at stake.
It’s only to be expected that people will deal with this book with a certain number of erroneous attitudes triggered by its superficial characteristics. But what apparently looks like last-minute thoughts or doodles over the phone, is actually something extremely purified, something very powerful that reminds me of the old Chinese legend (retold by Borges, among others) of the painter-calligrapher Chuang Tzu, who spent ten years to draw a single crab, but when he did it, he did it to perfection. But with a twist to this: what seems to be trivial, even meaningless jottings add up to a commentary on itself, both as an act of artistic endeavour (an expressive means) as well as of communication (a means of transference of meanings). The materials of which Monologues is made are extant to disappear. They are but vestiges or symptoms of the artists’ gesture.
In a time in which slickness has become the norm in both mainstream and alternative comics, few are the artists who’re strong enough to go beyond such an imperative, and who’ve been dealing out simple and pleasurable approaches to comic-making. One could mention Jeffrey Brown, Gregor Wiggert or Joann Sfar at this point (to show that these are really global tendencies). Although all of these artists, and several others, have quite distinctive styles and use it for very different ends, they do share an easy-going approach to what one could call its “final rendering”. They’ve raised a personal calligraphy into a means of comics-construction; they write comics more than they draw them. From this group, Nielsen is the most dedicated to the distillation of this pleasure, reducing the need for immediate legibility or the imperatives of clarity for all.
Still, there is a direction towards narrative. Many others have used the “doodled” character to narrativity purposes – I’m thinking of Thurber and Steig mostly, and perhaps Steinberg too. But it seems to me that narrativity, in Nielsen’s work, is becoming more and more as an afterthought as each doodle becomes, first and foremost, itself. Granted, the repetition of the characters involved imposes something quite different than mere individualistic cartoons. In an introductory text that Gombrich produced for a book on doodles, the famous historian discusses Paul Klee’s work and the relationship of the doodle with “intention”, precisely what would distinguish any doodle-as-such from clinical ones or from children’s drawings and from more “artistic” endeavours. “Far from setting out with a firm intention, [Klee] allowed the shapes to grow under his hand, following them wherever they led him”. Isn’t this what’s developing in Monologues? I don’t think a clear-cut direction was put forth on the outset itself, but it emerged nonetheless, and looking back at it, it is a firm one.
At this point, Dave Shrigley comes immediately to mind, perhaps a little too easily and shallowly, but I do feel that both share a very similar and uncommon capacity to most artists for illuminating, through sheer absurdity, on both content and form (a false dichotomy, as all dichotomies), our daily gestures of hostility towards the chaos that really makes up life. A hostility that bears the name of “order”, of “meaningfulness”… Another point of commonality with Shrigley’s work, and a few other artists perhaps, is the mode after which these drawings are not subsumed in any other end except their very own existence, although there is a far clearer narrative structuring in Nielsen, as mentioned before.
The features of the characters are quite simple, almost unexpressive. I don’t like to use the word “minimalist” because, above all, it has had its life in other arts and such a comparison is derisory, and on the other hand it implies no “reduction” whatsoever; what is drawn is what was drawn, period. There is no “simplification” (which would beg the question of “what does it simplify?”), for there is nothing beforehand, it simply emerges as such. A little in the beginning of the Gombrich text I mentioned earlier, the author quotes Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, in which “what he called ‘un componiemento inculto’, an untidy sketch, was preferable for arousing the mind”. And arousing the mind via untidiness is precisely what Anders Nielsen is doing, as if he is expanding the field of comics through sheer inaction, thus making his “mediocrity principle” both a lie and a springboard in relation to that end. This is not a contradiction, of course, for human existence is full of them, it is made by them.
This “incult atempt” (a more literal translation of Leonardo’s expression) is present in many of the oscillations in Nielsen’s work, a present with two realities, apparently antagonistic. For instance, Nielsen’s figures are representational only to the point they become non-representational; they deny the characters their own traits. I’m not speaking only for the fact that one of the characters has scratches for a head. I’m talking of their representation and what their physiognomies should signify at a first glance. Even in the “car wreck scene”, there is not much happening in visual changes of the face of one of the characters, while the other seems to change heads at every page, changes of no consequence at all towards the meaning of the “contextual scene” itself. But the overall force is derisorily elusive. It does not matter. It is the matter. It would be extremely easy to stage these monologues with real people, a few props and simple stage directions. And we would not be far from a Beckett or a Cocteau play.
Another interesting contradiction, and still related to all of this, is that his work seems to be flexible – where a more normative view of comics is concerned – but actually to serve the purpose of underlining a very strong rigidity. It makes us concentrate on what’s happening at the flipping of each new page. If I’m allowed a lousy metaphor, Monologues first half feels like a successfully played game of Tetris: each page is like a new “brick”, which adds a new element of signification to the whole, and after a certain while we realize a whole new layer of meanings that changes completely everything we had learned until that point.
This is nothing new in Nielsen’s oeuvre, given the fact that with his Big Questions (still in progress), the expression “the plot thickens” really gained a very evident existence with each new instalment. And paying close attention to the experiences in Mome, we know that Nielsen is trying out multiple territories at the same time. I don’t believe much in “evolution” where art is concerned, nor in the “progress” of an artist… What I do is to understand such a path as a trial-and-error trajectory in which every single experience is done under the maximum will…
All the better for those who take up his challenge.” - Pedro Moura

“I have a hot and cold relationship with the work of Anders Nilsen. His Big Questions series is fascinating and well-constructed (though I’m waiting for the collection since I can’t catch up with the out of print early issues), yet I found Monologues for the Coming Plague to be an utter disappointment which felt as if it had been tossed off in a minute or two. His work in the anthology Mome has given a similar reading experience for me, some good, some that feels unfinished and hasty. I do respect Nilsen’s willingness to experiment in ways that few comic artists would, taking cues, I think, from the conceptualism and minimalism of the fine art world and combining it with the narrative thrust of comics. His use of minimal drawing puts a great emphasis on text in many of his works, but it is clear his minimalist drawings are a result of purposeful stylistic choices rather than an artistic limit (for proof, one only has to look at the drawing in Big Questions or the Sysiphus story in Kramer’s Ergot 4).
My plan herein is to look at Nilsen’s work in 4 issues of Mome (I’m skipping pieces from two issues that I have because, well, I don’t have anything good to say about them).
“The Beast” (Mome, Summer 2005): This story shares something with the pieces in Monologues for the Coming Plague: a single faceless character speaks. In this case the character appears in four panels (albeit frameless and backgroundless) in front of a landscape photograph that stretches across each double page spread. I’m not clear on reading it what the purpose of the landscape backgrounds are. They don’t bear any apparent connection to the character or his words and seem to change at random. The idea of using a unified background for a double page like this is novel and interesting, but it doesn’t get put to any real use other than filling up space. The background could place the character in a setting or evoke a mood. I can see potential in this tactic, but it is not taken advantage of here. As for the words, they jump around and don’t come to any real… point. It feels improvised, some kind of automatic writing, on which more soon.
“Event” (Mome, Fall 2005): This is my favorite of all the stories, it’s adventurous and brilliant. This story consists of colored squares of varying numbers, sizes, and configurations with text underneath. For instance, a three page sequence: a gray square captioned “What you said you would do”; a square subdivided into four different colored squares captioned “Your reasons for not doing it: stated”; a larger purplish brown square “unstated.” The whole things relies on an interaction between the captions and the squares in relation to each other from one page to the next. The text and image are interdependent, requiring the combination to create the meaning. These pages would have little to them on their own, but as one reads from one page to the next, the differences between the size, color, and configuration of the shapes creates a pathway for interpretation. For instance, a page depicting a smallish grey green square captioned “Time spent trying in vain to correct the damage done [by you]” is followed by a page with a larger grey brown square captioned “[by others]” (see image below). The simple shift of the size of the squares from one page to the next emphasizes the certain qualities of the “you” in the story and his/her attitude to clean up the mess made by this “event”. It’s a simple yet highly effective way to convey this information based on one of the basic elements of comics, reading the difference from one panel to the next. A great example of an abstract comic. Like many of the other works here discussed it is a minimalist piece, but the minimalism is successfully used.
“On Whaling: A How To” (Mome, Winter 2006): Another talking figure comic: this one has no background at all and the figure goes through an almost constant transformation (veering from a hatted figure to a Haring-esque creature to weird hybrid-person/objects). He is drawn with a pink outline filled in with light blue, a surprisingly pleasing visual combination that looks great in the minimal style with the white background. The figure’s words are an often funny commentary on the classic “where do you get your ideas” question (“One sure-fire useful trick to getting good ideas is to accumulate diverse experiences and live an interesting life. I have not tried this myself, it seems dangerous. But I know that Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway got a lot of material this way for their zines about whaling.”). On the third page, the figure offers “guidelines that are sure to yield productive results,” outlining a brief method for a kind of automatic comics. Start with some kind of minimal figure, then find words for it in sixty seconds. After that sixty seconds you turn the page and draw the next page/panel.
This description of a process leads me to look at “The Beast” and “Monologues for the Coming Plague” in a different light. Are they perhaps examples of this style of automatic comics writing? I can’t say this improves my enjoyment of the stories, but it better explains where they are coming from. The Surrealists’ experiments with automatic writing are more interesting on a theoretical level than in actual practice. Drawing on the unedited contents of the unconscious is all well and good for the author but to the reader the results are more often than not just boring. Personally it leaves my me unsatisfied.
The way the character in “On Whaling” transforms does remind of me of some Surrealist objects and juxtapositions, such as the intersection of the character with various objects (akin to the “nothing is more beautiful than the the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”). This story is much more successful than “The Beast”.
“The Notary” (Winter 2007): Very similar to “The Beast” (even in its title), “The Notary” features an almost identical figure this time on a background of slightly blurry maps. The figure’s monologue is focused on his all encompassing doubt and his doubt of his doubt. He interrupts himself to perform mathematical calculations, which might be read as a certain type of certainty in contrast to the doubt. Math, at least at its basic level, provides verifiable answers and rules, such that one does not find in life. Though in both cases the math is “multiplication” which could also be the multiplication of doubt. I found this story more successful (again) than “The Beast”, though only on reading it after reading Nilsen’s Ignatz issue The End, which seemed to add a certain pathos to this character with his all encompassing doubt (also, The End has math in it too interspersed with monologue). Perhaps this story is much less automatic, or else, as an automatic exercise it brings forth certain emotional resonances.” – MadInkBeard

“What good is art when the world is going to hell? We’ll take for granted, for the sake of argument, that the world is in fact going to hell. It seems like a reasonable conclusion given global warming, the end of oil, water shortages, bird flu, AIDS, the Middle East, bad diets, the state of television, road rage, nuclear proliferation… the list goes on.
I’ve heard it said that every culture has food and sex, but that what counts as food and sex in different places and times is not at all predictable - rotting cabbage, tarantulas, getting peed on… art is like this, too. It’s rare to find agreement on something even as fundamental as what exactly it is.
I remember telling my photography teacher in college that what we were doing - trying to get perfect blacks in our prints, and perfect whites - seemed entirely beside the point of life, and that maybe I would go and be an Emergency Medical Technician in Bosnia instead (this was in the early 90s). It felt very good to say, noble and wise; it even felt plausible at that moment, which it wasn’t in the least.
All art started with religion, that is to say with the contemplation of life, death, fate, the eternal, the unknown. It was the telling of the story - usually just one, though generally with multiple contested versions - by which the culture in question defined itself. Slowly, the artifice of the telling became the main subject of the art. The gilding around the Madonna became more important than the Madonna herself.
Between college and an abortive attempt at graduate school I took a trip to Italy, Holland and France to see some of the artworks I’d studied in school. The thing that struck me most among the vast collections of that continent was the clear progression in the portrayal of the patron in art, the person paying the artist’s bill. Early on, the patron is shown in passivity, observing or interacting in a worshipful way with whatever divinity is being depicted. A couple of centuries later, the divinities, now mostly anonymous angels, are usually waiting upon the patron.
These days, instead of a person waited on by angels the patron is likely to be a sandwich cookie or car, waited on by people. Measured in quantity of print space, airtime or bandwidth. This is our primary artform - how we define ourselves, how we share and idealize our experience of the world. What is art for then? For selling things. For conferring status to objects. For creating desire. So we can add the degradation of art to our list of woes from which humanity is widely expected not to recover. Divinity and the unknowable are no longer part of the equation.
I am vaguely interested in commercials because they are sometimes very interesting, funny and horrifying, as art should be, but they are ultimately not very satisfying as foils for experience. As for those other related questions of life and meaning, they all got refined too. Working on them for two thousand years has not, fortunately, gotten us any closer to resolving them. But we still pursue them, and it’s probably a good thing to have dogma mostly out of the way in our pursuit.
A professor of mine used to belabor the point that the greatness of Modernism in general and of abstraction in particular is its very lack of utility. Being good for nothing, it offered a rare space in life that demanded nothing of you, allowing quiet contemplation - a great and rare gift. That sounds pretty good to me, although it also works as an explanation for the fact that so much of early and mid-20th-century art is so boring. It seems like the logical outgrowth of trying to create beauty while avoiding meaning.
I’ve never been convinced that this thing I do has much point. The interpretation of experience, the contemplation of beauty, life, the absurd; these are probably more or less what it is, but I’m not sure that we couldn’t get along without them. Several weeks ago, though, I was doing a book signing. At one point a woman got my attention, said it was nice to meet me and that my work had helped her through a difficult time. I didn’t know exactly what to say, the conversation moved on and I lost track of her as the night progressed. I don’t know what she was referring to specifically, but the comment stayed with me.
In November 05, the person I loved most in the world was killed after a long battle with Hodgkin’s Disease. In the months that have followed I have almost compulsively made work about her, about us and about the loss. It may or may not be worth reading. It may amount to therapy: important, valid, but not necessarily, strictly speaking, art.
With this kind of loss, nothing softens the blow. Nothing anyone says can make you feel better about it. What helps is being made to feel it at all. Conversation can do this, and certain music and storytelling do it powerfully - in the same way that words particularize ideas and shape our experience of the abstractions we use them to describe. The music I was listening to didn’t help me be sad, it became my sadness.
People are dying, being tortured, being sold into slavery, the world is on fire. So why does anyone think it’s worthwhile to play in a string quartet? Because after you bury your dead, after your wounds heal and you are released from your bondage you will want to hear the string quartet play. The strings will be like vocal cords wailing, allowing your grief. Art may be good for all kinds of things, and this is one thing I would not be able to live without.” – Anders Nilsen