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If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to write.
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In more detail
I have been working on Five Strange Languages 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. On Amazon here.
Here are summaries of the two novels.
A Short Introduction to Anneliese
This year’s book, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, is about an out-of-work scientist, Anneliese Glur, who has been working on a theory about life for twenty years, by herself. She has filled her study with notebooks, and she is unsure if they make sense. She tries to convince Samuel, a friend of a friend, into spending a year of his life reading them.
The wonderful people at Unnamed Press have written dust jacket copy for the book that emphasizes this story, but underneath, and at heart, this is something different: it’s a book about long books. At its center is a hundred-page chapter in which Anneliese talks about long books. She’s been reading the biggest books she can find in order to figure out how other authors managed to keep control of their writing. In that chapter Anneliese reviews dozens of real books: long epic poems (including the world’s longest, a poem from Tibet), encyclopedias (which Anneliese thinks of as readable books), long classics like Thomas Aquinas and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, long fan fiction (technically those are the longest works of fiction ever written, far longer than the books they emulate), and many long novels including Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Lucy Ellmann, Proust, Joyce, Arno Schmidt, and Marianne Fritz. Anneliese decides that each of these books, in its own way, fails at controlling its structure.
She herself talks endlessly to Samuel, in a sort of demented monologue, always promising that her speech has a shape and is very carefully rehearsed and has a strict structure—which however never clearly emerges. By the time Samuel hears her reviews of long books he is wondering if she even understands how to construct and control an argument. She then tells him her verdict: all books over a certain length, she says, are insane. No one can control their thoughts over the course of more than a couple hundred pages.
She tells him she then set out to read books people have considered to be insane, to see if she might be suffering from one of the conditions that people have identified in those authors. She reviews a wide range of books by unstable or dissociative authors, including Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Mental Illness, Wilhelm Reich, Immanuel Velikovsky, Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, and a dozen others. She concludes she has many of the mental conditions they had, and she gives Samuel a comprehensive list of thirteen kinds of mental and cognitive issues that she herself has, from simple anxieties to deep theories about the meaninglessness of language.
At that point she concludes her speeches to Samuel, and tells him he needs to read her roomful of notebooks and let know if she’s sane. In the last part of the book he looks through the notebooks, and we read excerpts along with him. He follows her thought as she plunges into strange frames of mind which captured her for years. As he reads, he also thinks back over the first several hundred pages of this book, when Anneliese was talking continuously to him in apparently directionless rants. He wonders whether she managed to give her work a shape—if the hundreds of notebooks actually comprise a single long book, or are just the evidence of a lifetime of wasted work.
So: this isn’t a normal novel. It is a book about very long, complex writing projects, and what it means to spend years writing without readers, as Anneliese did. It’s for anyone who has battled through War and Peace, Proust, or any novel over a thousand pages long. My purpose in writing is to engage the idea of very long, complex books, to see how they make sense, and to keep the reader, and Samuel, in doubt as long as possible: is Anneliese a sort of genius, who has produced a tremendous work of imagination and science? Or has she lost herself in the course of twenty years of isolation? Does disorder and delusion accompany every writing project after enough time has passed?
All this is to say: caveat emptor. I think this book is something genuinely new in fiction, because it goes so far into the world of long reading and writing projects, but it’s definitely not just a narrative about a cranky eccentric unemployed woman scientist trying to capture the attention of a reader.
Weak in Comparison to Dreams
Samuel is a civil servant in Guelph, Ontario. The city is planning to build a zoo, and he is sent to zoos in different countries to study animal welfare. He is besieged by the sufferings of zoo animals.
Each night he dreams of walking through an endless mountainous landscape. There are forest fires in the distance, and they get closer each night. He knows that the fires mean something is happening to him in real life, but he can’t understand what. In the zoos he behaves more and more erratically, lying and provoking his hosts. His assistant, a person of indeterminate gender named Viperine, sees that he is suffering and tries to help, but word of Samuel’s misbehavior reaches his supervisor, and he is fired.
As in all the novels in Five Strange Languages, there is actual sheet music in the book. In classical music, preludes and fugues often come in sets of twelve (or twenty-four, as in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier). In this book, the twelve chapters about Samuel’s days are like preludes, because preludes have no fixed form. The twelve nights are like fugues, because they weave ideas in and out, forming and unforming different patterns. As the book progresses, Samuel’s waking life falls apart, and each night he finds himself surrounded by fires. Before the end of the book, he burns, in his dreams, just as his waking life falls to pieces.
And as in the other novels, Weak in Comparison to Dreams has footnotes at the end, written by Samuel when he is over ninety years old. My original inspiration for Five Strange Languages was the idea of a narrator who has lived so long, and traveled so far in his imagination, that he has forgotten much of his earlier life. The older Samuel doesn’t have dementia, and his memory loss isn’t caused by trauma: he’s an example of a life that has effectively become two separate lives. In a sense I wrote this novel against Proust, for whom memory was a magically rich resource for the imagination, as it is for many novelists. I wanted to show what a life looks like without memory, but also without any desire to recover memory or even to experience life as a single coherent thing. And, in this book, I wanted to show what happens when waking life is not as strong as dreams.
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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.
(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.“)
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.