James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, The Unnamed Press, 2023
"Weak in
Comparison to Dreams... is the most courageous and fascinating debut
I have read since Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves."
–Full-Stop
For years, Samuel
Emmer has monitored bacteria levels in drinking water for the small
city of Guelph.
He is content to
focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his
grasp on his own life recedes—and with it, family and friends. To
be sure, it is more than a little surprising when Samuel learns that
he has been appointed to the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee. Even
more so, that he is being tasked with interacting not just with
animals, but human beings. His assignment: travel to zoos around the
world and gather information on the stereotypical behavior of animals
in their enclosures—the city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if
naively, to a cruelty-free habitat for its animals. It is in Tallinn,
Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded
landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming
his way…
Weak in Comparison
to Dreams, by the historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no
other novel you have ever read, even as certain inspirations, from
Sebald to Tokarczuk, are clear. With an astounding breadth of
knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites
our love for the ambitious novel with experimentation that never
lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest
aspects of our individual humanity.
Experimental novel, told in dreams and photos, with 150 images,
diagrams, equations, and sheet music(playable on piano). The unhappy
story of a person pursued by dreams of burning. This is the result of
15years of work & teaching the history of fiction with images,
from Rodenbach to Sebald, Cole, andRankine. It's intended to break
new ground in the use of images and narrative.
Canadian man experiences a crisis while visiting a series of
international zoos.
“Is there a
difference between dreams and waking life?” wonders Samuel Emmer,
the narrator of Elkins’ novel, an expert in protozoa who works in
water management for the city of Guelph. “In both, things happen
slowly while we watch.” It’s an apt description of this mammoth,
formally inventive novel which encompasses text, photographs,
diagrams, tables, and sheet music. Over the course of the novel—in
which Emmer, who's been volunteered for his city's Zoo Feasibility
Committee, travels around the world visiting a series of zoos—the
presence of these highly regimented, eminently logical documents
begins to make sense. Even as the documents offer reassuring
certainty, Emmer’s own grasp on the world is slipping away. The
opening scene finds him thinking back on his relationship with his
now-college-age child. Emmer is feeling unmoored by life both
personally and professionally, and thinks, “When you lose your
place in the world, you suddenly wake up, as if your normal life had
been a dream.” Soon, Emmer’s waking life alternates with a series
of unsettling dreams, some of which hearken back to the landscape of
his youth. A note from his interns in which they detail their
observation of obsessive traits in him—what Emmer terms “some of
the same tics and traits as animals or meth addicts”—sends his
behavior in more extreme directions, including lying in a
professional context and egging on a child pretending to shoot zoo
animals. The novel’s final section, which takes on a very different
form from what’s come before, puts much of what we’ve read in a
new context, and conveys a powerful sense of loss.
A formally inventive
yet emotionally engaging work of fiction. - Kirkus
"WEAK IN
COMPARISON TO DREAMS is a novel that will haunt its readers even as
it enchants. An astonishing book; mesmerizing, dreamlike, phantastic,
grimly real. James Elkins has written a book of shimmering depth. His
remarkable, expansive, and materializing imagination at once produces
a toppling sense of vertigo and a deep pleasure that so many
connections, carelessly unseen, exist all around us. Never before
have I felt such empathy for a diagram, nor could I have anticipated
such fascination with the compelling descriptions (and depictions) of
musical compositions about pain and suffering."—Pippa Skotnes,
author of Lamb of God and the Book of Iterations
"Every now and
again, a book presents a new type of narrative that alters the way we
see literature. James Elkins’s WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS…
surprises as much as it intrigues."—Kimberly Brooks,
artist and author of The New Oil Painting
"Experimental
in the best sense of the word…"—Eva Schuermann,
author of Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the
Relation Between Sight and Insight
"WEAK IN
COMPARISON TO DREAMS is an experimental feast, an illuminated
palimpsest, a labour of intellectual love. It will push and pull and
ask you ‘just how do you think you read?’"—Maria Fusco,
author of History of the Present
"Reveries,
dreams, reflections and memories drive this Sebald-inspired narrative
through combinations of word and image… Elkins’s novel offers a
profoundly provocative exercise in visual thinking."—Hanneke
Grootenboer, author of The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking
"Elegantly
written and imaginatively intricate as well as subtle in its capacity
to induce readers to become involved in the details of a solitary
consciousness."—Charles Altieri,
author of Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics
of Literary Experience
"A moving and
profound contemplation on images in relation to dreams, memory, and
music….an unbelievably rich and haunting story."—Charlotte Klonk,
author of Terror: Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden (Terror: When Images
Become Weapons)
"The long life
of Samuel Emmer gives all-world art critic James Elkins an epic
canvas on which to entertainingly dramatize the ethics of zoos, the
music of contemporary composers, and the lives of amoebas, all in
twitchy, often hilarious, high-IQ prose. But all you need to know is
that J.S. Bach rocks and James Elkins rolls."—James McManus,
author of Positively Fifth Street
"WEAK IN
COMPARISON TO DREAMS is unlike any book I have ever read: a
fascinating mixture of introspective realism and dreamlike
surrealism, of text and image…. Elkins has created a highly
original, unique literary work."—Wojciech Drag,
author of Collage Literature in the Twenty-First Century
"WEAK IN
COMPARISON TO DREAMS is an extraordinary arthroscopic view into a man
whose life is liquefying, becoming a chrysalis. Deftly drawing on the
sciences and the world of visual representation, it is a story full
of wit, tragedy and surprise…"—Kate Joyce,
author of Metaphysics
"A stunning
achievement, framing profound questions of memory, meaning, and moral
responsibility within a highly inventive literary structure.
Fundamentally, this is a book about being lost."—Jonathan
Anderson, coauthor of Modern Art and the Life
of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism
"A lucid
account of a sleepwalking soul becoming increasingly lost as he
wrestles with unresolvable conflicts…"—Johanna Drucker,
author of Subjective Meteorology and All The Books I Never Wrote
"Elkins
presents a series of nested boxes, knowing full well that none will
provide a pat explanation of the self, for it is the quest for
understanding itself that is offered for us to contemplate."—Anna Arnar,
author of The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé
"Never
unequivocally symbolic, the meta-referentiality of the book will
thrill readers who admire Nabokov or Pynchon, the bleak atmosphere
those who love Kafka, the narrative flow of naturalism those who like
Don DeLillo."—Mark Staff
Brandl, artist and author of A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in
Contemporary Art
"WEAK IN
COMPARISON TO DREAMS tells the moving story of Dr. Samuel Emmer’s
life, his concerns about animal welfare, his dreams about fire and
the instability of his self. There is a great generosity of
imagination in Elkins’s writing…"—flowerville,
author of fortlaufen.blogspot.com
"WEAK IN
COMPARISON TO DREAMS introduces entirely new language games. What
first appear as illustrations of zoos turn out to be the labyrinths
of our own human behavior, by which we pursue our daily lives and
cling to the allegories that make us believe in our own ascendency.
Manifold dialogues between pictures and words line the verges of the
protagonist’s path, ultimately pointing to the few remains of a
life."—Lukas Schmutzer,
author of “Between Word and Work: On Marianne Fritz’s Whose
Language You Do Not Understand”
"Elkins’s
novel breaks down the boundaries between word and image, celebrating
the intertwining of text and pictures, inviting readers to engage in
a new form of storytelling…"—Si Han, author of
A Chinese Word on Image
"In this
encyclopedic novel innocent zoo inspections spiral into a bubbling
maelstrom of madness, lethargically engulfing kaleidoscopes of
scientific lore, sheet music, and photographs of dreams."—Evelina Domnitch,
author of Orbihedron
"A mesmerizing
synesthetic experience and great intellectual pleasure."—Philipp Weiss,
author of Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen
"The
constellations traced in the reader’s mind by Elkins’s novel in
the course of its exhilaratingly irregular orbit through manifold
registers of genre and tone will remain fixed there long after the
glare of lesser literary fiction has faded."—Douglas
Robertson, translator of The Rest Is Slander: Five Stories by Thomas
Bernhard
"Elkins enters
the field with an exhilarating, surefooted, and profound book."—Charles Green,
artist and author of Peripheral Vision and The Third Hand
"The
exceptional achievement of WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS… can only
be defined as a new model of the encyclopedic novel."—Jan Baetens,
author of My Life to Live
"A fascinating
journey… an endless literary feast."—Miguel Ángel
Hernández, author of Escape Attempt and Anoxia
James Elkins is a sixty-eight-year-old much-published historian and
theorist of visual arts, a professor who holds a chair at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. Weak in Comparison to Dreams is his
first work of fiction, and it is the most courageous and fascinating
debut I have read since Mark Z. Danielewski’s multi-media House of
Leaves in 2000. Other precursors—obsessive and excessive first
fictions—include William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas
Pynchon’s V, and Don DeLillo’s Americana, all concerned with
images as Elkins’s novel is. I hasten to add that the origin of
“fascinating” is negative, all the way back to a definition as an
“evil spell.” Elkins’s courage is casting a binding spell some
readers might consider a curse: writing a six hundred–page novel
about obsessive compulsion in the voice of an obsessive-compulsive
character. His first name is Samuel. Whether or not Elkins wanted the
name to remind us of that master of repetition—Samuel Beckett—he
is another one of those courageous fascinators.
Elkins’s Samuel
Emmer grew up in natural surroundings in Watkins Glen, New York, the
son of a “corrosive mother” about whom Samuel says next to
nothing. In one of the novel’s two presents, Samuel is a near-forty
part-time professor and scientist testing drinking water for amoebae
in Guelph, Ontario in 2019. His wife has gone back to Bratislava, his
daughter has gone away to college, and Samuel is going off the rails,
even off the trails he has followed in his routines both inside and
outside his lab. He is, for example, methodically deconstructing the
furniture and electronic devices in his apartment. His supervisor,
sensing Samuel’s incipient derangement, sends him—maliciously,
neutrally, or charitably—on a series of visits to zoos to check on
their handling of animals presenting troubling patterns of repetitive
behavior.
Samuel empathizes
with the animals and tries to imagine the lives of the zookeepers at
the first two sites. But his imagination becomes progressively active
and then aggressive. He fantasizes his host in Finland is a cyborg,
does an existential analysis of a monkey’s mind in Nashville, talks
to a host in the voices of spiders in Salt Lake City, and in Basel
indulges in total fabrications, insisting at length that his host see
suffering animals within a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, and
encouraging the children of visitors to pretend to shoot the animals.
Samuel feels he is losing his mind and control—and he is—but he
is also coming out of his former isolated routines to make
connections with others, both humans and animals.
Think of Samuel as
Bellow’s professor Herzog forced to visit problematic zoos rather
than retreat from his loss of family to the Berkshires where he
writes zany letters. Samuel becomes wackily inventive about his
credentials (he has none) and charmingly crazed in his identification
with animals: “I used to be safe with my amoebas. Little gluey
animals, tiny spots of sick. Now animals demented by despair shuffled
across the stage of my imagination.” Elkins pushes Samuel along
toward paranoia by including documents about animal compulsive
behavior that are sent to him between zoo visits by his intern and by
Samuel’s former student whom he calls “Viperine.” The more
those documents are supposed to help Samuel recognize his own
compulsive behavior, the more he imagines hearing the two “helpers”
whispering and plotting behind his back. My spot check of the
documents finds some are invented, so perhaps Samuel is right to be
suspicious of the senders.
When reports of
Samuel’s behavior at the zoos get back to his supervisor, Samuel is
offered a leave of absence but chooses to abruptly quit his job, take
his pension, and leave Guelph. Here there is a break in time in which
Samuel writes a manuscript about his breakdown. Never published and
almost forgotten, the five hundred–page manuscript is discovered by
Samuel in his basement forty years later when he is moving from his
home in a rural area of northern Canada where he has been living
alone. In the last hundred pages of Weak in Comparison to Dreams
(entitled “Notes”), Samuel reflects back on the manuscript and
describes his present life. Ah, the old discovered manuscript trick,
a timeworn way to show a character’s change. Not for Elkins. Though
superficial features of Samuel’s life are different now, he is
psychologically essentially the same, still obsessive-compulsive.
Maybe he’s even worse off than in his zoo days, for now he doesn’t
recognize his problem, has almost no imagination, and cares little
about contact with living creatures. “Notes” may make Weak in
Comparison to Dreams look like a recovery narrative, but it’s
actually a re-cover-up story. As I said, Elkins has courage, perhaps
because he’s not a young guy trying to lift off a career as a
novelist.
In both parts of the
novel, Elkins himself seems obsessed—with the writing workshop’s
mantra “Show don’t tell”—and his way of showing reflects his
long interest in photography. In What Photography Is, Elkins
suggested it’s “a good time to say goodbye to photographs of
people.” When Samuel remembers Watkins Glen, Elkins includes a few
photos of nature. Then come many photos of ugly zoo cages and
enclosures without animals. Stressed by his visits, Samuel most
explicitly reveals his repetition compulsion by describing over and
over nightmares of forest fires. For each of these dreams, Elkins
provides numerous photographs of fire and burned-over land. The
documents Samuel’s helpers send also stimulate visuals included in
the text: diagrams of animals’ repetitive pacing, of planetary
motion, and of Samuel’s routes around his apartment, all of which
have a vague figure-eight or infinity form, perfect for OCD. The only
humans pictured in the novel are threatened individuals such as
Icarus in a few old woodcuts. An “Envoi” has nine pages of
individual animals.
The photographs are
all black and white, generally about a half page in size, and not
particularly artful. Most of the photographs “illustrate” dreams,
which are usually frightening to Samuel and yet praised as a release
from his daily life, which he says is “weak in comparison to”
dreams. Since the sleeping mind is not yet capable of taking
photographs, Samuel hunted around for images that would show what he
was experiencing at night. Samuel’s accompanying texts follow
along, words telling and interpreting what is “shown.”
The photos are
numerous and repetitive but, because of their pedestrian quality, are
not particularly affecting. Maybe I’m missing Elkins’s intention,
but it seems Samuel’s obsessive inclusion of images in his
manuscript is yet another sign of his separation and desperation. The
photographs don’t connect him to the world, only to its dull and
miniaturized simulacra. Elkins’s photographs don’t create a sense
of mystery as those of Sebald, or Catherine Lacey in this year’s
Biography of X. Instead, Elkin uses the images to imitate his
character’s reductive mania. Although the photographs are not what
I would have expected in a novel by Elkins the photography critic,
they do again demonstrate his courage, his dedication to a unity of
subject, style, and media.
“Notes” also has
visual materials, not photos but partial representations of scores by
experimental composers that Samuel repeatedly plays for himself in
his isolated home. He describes the sounds as discordant, harsh,
noisy. I don’t read music, but if Samuel is right then the
music-producing visuals in “Notes” have an effect similar to that
of the earlier photographs. From composing a manuscript often ugly to
the eye, Samuel has “moved on” to collecting and playing music
even he admits is ugly to the ear. His location and his medium have
changed, but Samuel remains locked (like the animals) into himself,
trapped in a fugue-like state, a musical term become a psychological
one.
Weak in Comparison
to Dreams fortunately has several stylistic registers. Even
post-Pynchon, the scientific reports, graphs, and formulas would be
considered—though ingenious in invention—ugly in a literary
novel. Samuel’s commentaries on his dreams are thankfully not
surreal; the style is that of an earnest but mystified scientist who
can be quite eloquent:
It became difficult
to think. It was hard to keep seeing the world on fire, to keep
trying to make sense of the onslaught of images. The fires meant
something, they needed to be understood. They were like people waving
frantically at me, trying to get me to understand something.
In “Notes,”
Samuel, now in his nineties, writes in a rather banal, washed-out
late style. The novel’s language is most vivid (and novelistic in
the manner of those precursors I mentioned) when Samuel is talking to
zookeepers or thinking about their animals. That style is not weak in
comparison to the style he uses to describe his forest fires and his
life in retreat. Either Samuel or Elkins has not, however, lost all
imagination, for near the novel’s end are seven pages about one
Asger Gaarn, a Danish composer who compulsively wrote throughout his
whole life hundreds of preludes and fugues to memorialize other
composers, friends, strangers, even pets. Google could not locate
Asger Gaarn, the final symbol of obsession.
Because of “Notes,”
which is much about the art of experimental music, Weak in Comparison
to Dreams has a self-referential or metafictional implication. Once
Elkins decided on repetition compulsion, he seems to have adopted
exhaustiveness, the stacking of analogues as important as plotting.
Musical scores are piled high in Samuel’s home. Speaking of an
animal, Samuel says, “The more it becomes disturbed, the longer its
behaviors last.” Writing about Protopopov, Samuel says the music is
“compelling, and then after a while, it’s boring. It’s
fascinating because it’s so alien.” Weak in Comparison to Dreams
doesn’t have the worldly variousness of first novels by Gaddis,
Pynchon, and DeLillo, but its repetitive excess makes it more alien,
and fascinating. Seen as a whole and from some distance, Weak in
Comparison to Dreams does connect to a world wider than Samuel’s
mind. Humans are like pacing and punding animals, the planet is
burning, artists like those Samuel plays are creating work that may
be innovative but without content, the music even further from
representing the real than the visuals. Elkins is not one of those
artists.
Elkins has said his
novel is an outtake from a fifteen-year project that includes four
other, apparently finished novels that he has described in
extravagant detail on his website which is—no surprise—obsessive.
I mentioned House of Leaves earlier. Reading Elkins’s website, I
see that his novels resemble Danielewski’s multi-volume Familiar
project, which is now unfortunately stalled. I hope Weak in
Comparison to Dreams receives enough attention so that his
small-press publisher will bring out the remaining volumes that will,
it seems, add material about Samuel’s life and introduce other
characters.
Samuel is a
desperate man. I admit I may be desperate to “recuperate,” as the
French say, Elkins’s novel, to give its obsessiveness a useful
social function. Or, as someone who has written five novels about the
same character, I may be desperate to interest readers in a book that
casts a spell by repetition. Or after reviewing hundreds of novels, I
may be desperate for one that risks a “splendid failure,” as
Faulkner said, to make something new, even if that “new” is about
humans’ and other mammals’ resistance to or escape from the new.
- Tom LeClair
https://www.full-stop.net/2023/10/09/reviews/tomleclair/weak-in-comparison-to-dreams-james-elkins/
What happened that year made me into something different. I feel
like a caterpillar unwinding myself into a cocoon, settling in,
losing my appetite for leaves, forgetting my fear of birds,
contracting my soft green body into a hard brown shell, erasing my
caterpillar memories, saying goodbye to the sun and rain, becoming a
pupa. Soon I will be lost to myself, and before that happens, I want
to write this book.
When we first meet
Samuel Emmer, the narrator of James Elkins’ ambitious new novel
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, he works for the Water Management
Department in Guelph, Ontario. It’s 2019 and, as he puts it,
“something was going wrong with me.” His family life has fallen
apart, his wife has left him, and his boss has put him on the city’s
Zoo Feasibility Committee, which is the last thing he wants to do.
His role on the Committee is to travel to other zoos and familiarize
himself with their most problematic animals, with the hope that the
Guelph’s future zoo might be more humane. Guelph’s zoo planners
want “no lions that pace endlessly or elephants that twitch and
stomp or chimpanzees that pull their own fur out and scratch themself
raw.”
As Samuel travels to
zoos in the United States and abroad, two things begin to occur. He
begins to emotionally feel the pain of the caged animals he is
observing, and he is visited by a series of dreams that become more
ominous with each episode. Samuel’s descriptions of his dreams are
accompanied by sequences of photographs of forests. The first dreams
are of innocent looking woods, a pond, a river. In the fourth dream
he sees a distant fire, and with each succeeding dream the fire comes
closer, more threatening. By the twelfth and final dream he realizes
that “after the burning, the landscapes in my dreams were bare. No
fires or smoke. I must have burned my life down.”
Elkins, who is Chair
of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, had let it be known as early as 2008
that he was working on his first novel. Being something a
transparency geek, he created a section on his website called Writing
Schedule where he laid out the full plan for his novel-to-be and kept
readers up to date with his ongoing progress for Weak in Comparison
to Dreams, including charts, graphs, word counts, dramatis personae,
a synopsis of chapters, and the number of hours spent on the project.
Even if you don’t read the novel (and I encourage you to!), take a
look at this unique glimpse into the behind-the-curtains image of a
novelist at work. If I am reading his chart correctly, Elkins has
spent over 15,000 hours on his novel so far. But Weak in Comparison
to Dreams, which was just published by The Unnamed Press, is only the
beginning. According to Elkins’ website, it is Book 3 of a
projected five-volume novel. Elsewhere on his website he refers to
the numerous books that influenced his writing, including the massive
novel written in multiple columns by Arno Schmidt, Zettel’s Traum
(1970), which was finally translated into English in 2016 as Bottom’s
Dream (Dalkey Archive Press) and is 1,496 pages long.
Just flipping
through this volume’s 600 pages, it’s easy to see one of the
reasons why Elkins’ book is so innovative. Weak in Comparison to
Dreams is stuffed with b&w photographs (some which have lines
drawn on them), charts, graphs, mathematical equations, line
drawings, reproductions of old woodcuts, at least one map, and pages
containing sections of musical scores. If you take a peek at his
website Writing with Images, you’ll quickly see that Elkins has
long been interested in the subject of how text and images interact
on the page and on our screens. The variety of images he uses in Weak
in Comparison to Dreams is unequaled in the world of fiction to my
knowledge. Then again, Elkins is not your average art historian. He
seems to have mastered multiple other disciplines as well, including
several scientific disciplines, advanced mathematics, and
contemporary music. But the theme for which he has harnessed these
disciplines is deeply human.
As Samuel continues
to visits zoos, he sees what we have all sadly witnessed when we have
gone to zoos ourselves—that certain captive animals often make
obsessive repetitive movements in their cages. Watching an African
blue monkey, he sees that “she was protesting her intolerable
existence by trying to stop time. If she did the same thing over and
over, each time identically, then time would have to stop. She was
refusing to let time pass, she was pretending she lived in a single
spontaneous moment.” At first the book reproduces charts that
graphically replicate the patterned movements of caged animals.
Later on, we see
diagrams that Samuel believes show the mind maps of the animals he
has been observing.
Finally, Samuel’s
intern Vipesh and her “collaborator” Viperine suggest that Samuel
himself has developed many of the same traits as the caged animals he
has been observing, and we see charts that plot his movements around
his own room.
One of the things
that Elkins is suggesting is that all of the systems set up to take
care of wild animals in zoos—the zoo professionals, the research
scientists, the committees, the responsible politicians—have
failed, and that only the empathy of individuals who look without
prejudice at the unbearable horror of caged animals in zoos can see
the emotional tragedy of what is really happening.
Eventually, Samuel
quits his job with the Water Department and seems to be going crazy.
He gets into his car and drives north toward the Arctic Circle. In
the concluding section, Samuel is now a perilously old man who calls
himself Emmer. “I live in a cheaply built house a hundred miles
north of Guelph. A couple months ago, I was cleaning out the
basement, because Fina Hodges told me it was leaking, and I came
across the manuscript that I’d nearly forgotten.”
Every day I sit in
my study, looking over the pages. I read about the things I said and
saw forty years ago. I mainly fail to care about them, or even
remember them.
This morning I am
looking out the window, where an untrimmed hedge blocks my view of
the uncertain distance. Can you say your life is your own when your
childhood has gone so far away into the past that the boy with your
name seems like someone else’s child? When you read about your own
life and there’s no glow of recognition, no pleasure in revisiting
scenes that had been long forgotten? I have added these Notes to
explain, possibly to someone, how that feels.
Emmer’s only
preoccupation in his old age is playing his piano and exploring music
written for the solo piano. Composers “are the characters that fill
my days and remind me what to feel.” For pages, Emmer thinks
rapturously of twentieth century composers and their scores, as if
they were old friends.
I see Alexei
Stanchinski’s Three Sketches for Piano, feathery and lyrical,
written when he was still hanging on to a normal life, before his
father died, before he got hallucinations, before he was found dead
by a river, not yet twenty-seven years old. Then Ivan
Wyschnegradsky’s Nocturnes for the Vologda River, one of his last
compositions using ordinary notes, before he decided to adopt the
quarter-tones in between the keys on the piano. . . And in a corner
of the study, rolled up in a big cardboard tube, is Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Piano Piece 11, a constellation of notes printed on a
single enormous sheet of paper, like a map of some fabulous kingdom.
Elkin’s novel,
which might at first look off-putting with its suggestion of complex
science, higher math, and impenetrable music scores, turns out to be
a novel that is all too human, a tragic story of a man who cannot
solve the problems he identifies. It’s a novel about failure,
empathy, memory, and loneliness. It’s about finding peace in the
arts, in this case in music. And it’s a novel that questions the
idea that you can truly recall your past. The reader need not master
or even understand the various disciplines that Elkins indulges in.
In fact, it’s perhaps better to feel a bit estranged from these
faintly awe-inspiring practices.
In his summary of
this book, which is found on his website, Elkins hopes that his novel
will reignite “our love for the ambitious novel.” While there
will be plenty of material for academics and those who wish to look
deeper into the structure of this novel to pore over and write about,
Weak in Comparison to Dreams was written first and foremost to be
read and enjoyed. Elkins writes almost like a non-fiction writer.
He’s keenly observant and always seeking the perfect description
for difficult concepts and complex events, even when writing about
Samuel’s dreams. This gives the book a clarity of purpose and a
sense of confidence that makes it often exhilarating to read.
As of December 5, he
Unnamed Press was offering a limited edition set that included a
signed copy of Elkins’ book and a vinyl recording that features the
author reading excerpts and playing original piano variations of
sheet music that appear in the novel.
[Full disclosure: I
was asked to provide a blurb for the back cover of this book, which I
was pleased to do after reading it.] - Terry Pitts
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2023/12/06/james-elkins-ambitious-new-novel/
