The novel – James Elkins

FAQs

Do I need to read all the books to understand this one?

You can read each book by itself. They are entirely independent of each other. Each one is different, with its own style, mood, and stories.

Not to be rude, but then why read more than one?

Five Strange Languages is actually a single book in five volumes. It’s the story of a year in the life of one person. Several of the books overlap in time: in one you’ll read about some events in Samuel’s life, and in another you’ll discover other things were happening at the same time. If you want the full experience, the five were planned from the beginning as a single unified project.

I notice there’s music in these books, but I don’t read music.

The scores are designed to be seen.They are described in the text, so even if you don’t read music you can see them as pictures. If you do play an instrument, you can try them yourself.

And there are footnotes.

They are comments on the book, left by Samuel when he was over ninety years old. They aren’t the sort of notes scholars write: they’re his attempt to remember at least some small part of his earlier life.

These books are too long.

Two answers: they are antidotes to ADHD and screen addiction. But also, they seem long because they have images.

Does it have a happy ending?

Sorry, the last volume is all obituaries, but that’s life.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to write.

In more detail

I have been working on it more or less every day since 2008. It’s divided into five volumes. Book 3, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, is published by Unnamed Press. Order from Amazon here. Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, is due out in summer.

(If you came to this site looking for art history, theory, and criticism: there is no visual art in these five books, sorry. I’ve written a pamphlet on why someone in the humanities might want to try writing “creatively” or experimentally, outside their discipline. It’s free on Academia. There are also two websites with lots of material — about a book’s worth in each — on these subjects: “What is Interesting Writing in Art History?” and “Writing with Images.“)

In lots more detail

Here are some pages that may help as study guides for Five Strange Languages. These are all documents I’m using to write. They are live: Google updates them every five minutes. A couple are hard to read on this page. You can see them in full here (note tabs at the bottom) and here.

First, here is a timeline of the characters in all five books. This is a large spreadsheet, which prints out at about two by three feet. (Scroll up/down and right/left.)

A chart showing which parts of the book represent forms of sanity, and which show forms of irrationality or insanity.

A table showing the symbols I used to help organize the leading concepts. This is a “mathesis” or “pasigraphy”; Joyce, for example, did something like this in Finnegans Wake. It helps to manage unwieldy ideas.

This is a long document with descriptions of the themes in each of the five books. It includes maps, photos of the places in the novel, and photos of the books that went into the novel. The document is easier to read here.

A chart of the relation between the story and the way it’s told (narration versus fabula).

A spreadsheet with an overview of the project.

A more detailed spreadsheet of the contents of the five books. I use this to keep track of references to characters, composers, places, and events.

A set of tables I made to estimate how many hours, days, and years I’ve worked, and how many hours I’ve spent, on average, on each page. These tables also have current word counts for all five novels.

Selections from these documents will be published as Notes and Materials, possibly in 2025-26. The idea is to create a hybrid work: fiction accompanied by nonfiction. Since I wrote them together from the beginning, they speak to each other.

As always, comments and questions on any of this are welcome.