The Island of Point Nemo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
translated from the French by Hannah Chute
450 pgs. | pb | 9781940953625 | $17.95

Reviewed by Katherine Rucker

The Island of Point Nemo is a novel tour by plane, train, automobile, blimp, horse, and submarine through a world that I can only hope is what Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s psyche looks like, giant squids and all.

What begins as a seemingly simple case of jewel-thievery affecting a high-class widow takes a twist for the dystopian and absurd as the heroes chase severed limbs and diamonds the size of your fist across the globe. Every clue toward the recovery of the jewels is another knot in the storyline, and every character they meet is a new disaster, a new twist in the road.

On the advice of hookers, sword-swallowers, and train car strangers, always dandily dressed to the nines, Martial Canterel, our hero, races toward Point Nemo (the place in the ocean geographically farthest from land) in search of the stolen diamond while Point Nemo (the book) barrels deeper into a world that, every time you think it’s gotten too fantastical, you’re reminded how real it is.

The book’s English translator, Hannah Chute, says she likes the book for its particularly dark brand of absurd. “I like books,” says Chute, “where the world is quietly ending in the background.”

The state of reality in the Point Nemo world is certainly casually crumbling, from mobs of mercenaries hijacking trains to islands of circus-troupe rejects. But what seem like some of Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s more absurd creations aren’t actually creations: grotesque models of the human body displayed as art (), guerrilla groups out to save the world one good deed at a time (), and bicycle-powered e-readers (Christmas 2017?).

The good news is that all of this is just a story we’re being told! Or, rather, it’s the story being read to factory workers to quell their boredom as they build e-readers the whole monotonous day long. This novel encasing the novel isn’t a bit fantastical: Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès shows us the lecherous boss peeping into the locker rooms, the sexless marriage (complete with creative, cringe-worthy, porny attempts at reawakening desire), the long hours working for nothing, and the beloved dying wife inspiring the author.

In the end, of course, the world is still in chaos around all of them. Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s novel ends up not so unlike the riveting story-within-the-novel told to the enraptured factory workers to keep them on task: an entertaining yet haunting distraction from a world quietly crumbling around the reader.

A stolen diamond and three right feet, wearing shoes of a non-existent brand, that wash ashore in Scotland set into motion the first plot of Island of Point Nemo, a rollicking Jules Verne-like adventure narrative that crosses continents and oceans, involves multilingual codes, a world-famous villain, and three eccentrically loopy detectives.

Running parallel is the story of B@bil Books, an e-reader factory in France filled with its own set of colorful characters, including the impotent Dieumercie and his randy wife, who will stop at nothing—including a suspect ritual involving bees—to fix his “problem,” and their abusive boss Wang-li Wong, obsessed with carrier pigeons and spying on his employees.

With the humor of a Jasper Fforde novel, and the structure of a Haruki Murakami one, Island of Point Nemo is a literary puzzle and grand testament to the power of storytelling—even in our digital age.

Hannah Chute: I’d like to begin at the beginning. Island of Point Nemo has so many interweaving elements, so I have been wondering what the actual inception of the novel was. Did you begin with B@bil Books? With the Ananke diamond and the steampunk universe of Martial Canterel and Shylock Holmes?

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès I generally spend a long time preparing a very detailed plan before starting to write, so the weaving of the stories was set well in advance. This book has a spiral structure where the chapters are connected vertically and linearly, like the chambers of a nautilus shell. In the same way, I spent several months doing a kind of preliminary “casting,” drawing many of my characters and some important settings, to develop a sort of graphic “story board” whose pages–hanging on lines stretched out in several rows–ended up covering almost all of the walls of the place where I live.

HC: And how did you write the book? Did you write the chapters in the order they’re in now, or did you jump around following the storylines or different characters?

JB: After this I started writing my chapters in the order in which they were published. As early as Chapter VII, though, I realized that I needed the story of the Ananke diamond in its entirety in order to work out the connections and capillary action that I wanted to set up with the world of B@bil Books. So from that point I wrote all the adventures of Martial Canterel and his crew before returning to Arnaud Méneste and the e-reader assembly plant.

HC: Several of the more far-fetched-sounding plot points in the Ananke storyline are actually drawn from real-life inspirations. I’m thinking, for example, of the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine disorder, the Skoptsy religious sect, Point Nemo itself, etc. Did you go out looking to incorporate elements like these that would perhaps sound made-up to readers who are not already familiar with them?

JB: Yes, this is the very game of fiction. Fantasy can only work using elements that are drawn, at least in part, from reality. It is the choosing and sticking-together of these elements that makes it possible to invent new stories. As in all my novels, every detail is “true”—even the most improbable depravities and the elephant catapults! It is the assembling of these details that is “fictitious” and which forms the universe of my novel.

HC: The interplay of technology and reading is strongly present in both the B@bil Books world and the Ananke world within the novel. Within the steampunk universe of Canterel and Holmes, it gradually becomes clear that physical, printed books are a thing of the past and that they have been entirely replaced by ebooks. And the factory in the “real” world is of course an e-reader factory. Its management doesn’t even seem to think that the books on these e-readers will ever be read. As Monsieur Wang believes, “The digital library was just a modern variation on the sin of pride, the sin of upstarts anxious to show of their prosperity, surrounding themselves with flashy books—even just empty bindings—that they had never read and never would read.”

Is this meant to be an omen of how a future like the one shown in the Ananke storyline could come to be? What effect do you think technology has on our desire to read and our reading itself?

JB: Island of Point Nemo is a double dystopia. One of the goals of this type of fiction is to warn the reader by pushing to their limits the dangerous aspects of a society devoted to monopolization and consumption. Same with religious and ideological dogmas. The question is how to renew our way of living in the world in such a way that man no longer sees himself as “master and possessor of nature.”

Technology, as we know, has no sign; it is neither good nor bad in and of itself. It all depends on the values that govern its use. Focusing on spectacle–the consumption of televised or digital images at the expense of reading time–creates a mental passivity in our method of accessing information. It is not impossible that this laziness gradually alienates us from the effort that reading requires, and eventually leads to a profound transformation of our relationship with writing.

As for books themselves, I agree with Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco: “The book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel, or scissors. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”

HC: Arnaud Méneste draws on newspaper clippings and the literature that he and his now-comatose wife have read, trying to put together a novel so great that it will wake her from her long slumber. How much does your writing philosophy resemble Méneste’s? Do you believe literature can save people?

JB: Literature–some books, in any case–has the power to change our view of the world, and thus to interact with reality. This is the power of imagination, of creative freedom. To say something is always to start to make it exist a little. It is in this sense also that “every name is an omen.”

As I recount in this novel, it was through reading Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo that the cigar makers of Cuba were convinced of the merits of rising up against social injustice, to the point of engaging in revolution. I do not believe in any “salvation,” but rather in this shift in focus that allows our lives to move in a new direction at one point or another.

HC: And is reality, as Méneste says, “a subservient mirror of what has already happened in novels”? When he reads the chapters of his novel to the factory workers at B@bil Books, is he changing them, or are they changing him?

JB: I do not think there is a reality apart from the perception we have of it. That is to say, reality and fiction are inextricably intertwined in my mind, to the point that reality can sometimes be considered a lesser variant or bad copy of fiction. When Méneste calls on our memory as readers to construct his novel, he unconsciously creates an extremely powerful reaction, an alchemy capable of upsetting the world order, connecting parallel universes, inverting reality and fiction. It is this transmutation that is at work in both him and his wife, as well as in all those who attend his readings.

HC: I ran across a reader review of the book online in which the reader complained that the novel would have been great for children if it weren’t for all the sex and violence. In the U.S. in particular, I think there is a certain idea that adventure stories (such as those written by Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo) are just “fun” stories for kids, and that they can’t be serious literature. Why do you think this trope exists? Is there a difference between “real” literature and “popular” literature?

JB: There are different literary genres—popular novels, detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy, etc.—and none of them is “inferior” to the others, but only those texts that do not leave the reader unscathed belong to literature. I make no distinction between these books, whatever their genre, and others. And these others can be captivating and successful, and give me great pleasure in reading them, but I know as I read them that they are “outside of literature.”

“The supreme effort of the writer as of the artist,” writes Marcel Proust, “is partially to lift the veil of ugliness and insignificance which leaves us without curiosity about the world. So he tells us [. . .] look! Learn to see! And at that moment he disappears.”

A book belongs to literature when it succeeds in this unveiling that makes visible, with reverence and the approximation of chiaroscuro, the complex beauty of things. Through an original perspective of reality (not its servile representation), the “literary” work leaves me by myself, free to measure my being against this unexpected opening. My view of the world is thus enlarged by the vision of another, and I am enriched, because the world is enriched by my reading.

The literary event, when it occurs, flows through novels, aphorisms, poems, essays, and any other form of writing. I have not gained more knowledge from reading On the Genealogy of Morality, De rerum natura, or A Short History of Decay than from Gargantua, Anabasis, Last Exit to Brooklyn, or The Magic Mountain: with each I learned to see better for myself; each of these readings changed my worldview, and so helped me become what I am.

HC: There are monsters of many kinds in Island of Point Nemo. The monsters in the Ananke storyline are more viscerally horrifying (for example, the deep-sea creatures that the crew of the ship Black Orpheus encounters as they near Point Nemo, or worse the foul murderer the Noh Straddler). But thinking of the sex-starved and desperate Carmen Bonacieux, the cold and cruel Monsieur Wang, or the pitiful but grotesque Marthe, some of the characters in the “real world” seem more monstrous still. What makes a real monster?

JB: According to its Latin etymology, monstrosity is a wonder, an aberration that one points at, unable to find the right words to name it. A departure from the norm that makes us aware of a border between “normal” and “abnormal.” This frontier has kept evolving over the centuries, and fortunately physical deformities are no longer exhibited at fairs or Barnum circuses. Moral deformities, however, continue to cause problems. What terrifies us today is less the disgrace of the body than that of the spirit. As Gerard Amiel points out, “man’s lack of spirit and his total plasticity open him to all possibilities, including the worst. Anyone, under these conditions, can become a tormentor. What fascinates us today is no longer the exceptional nature of monstrosity, but its banality. The humanization of monsters gradually forces us to recognize the monstrosity of man. We tried to drive the monstrous to the edges of humanity, then to eliminate it, but it found refuge in us.”

My interest in monsters is part of this questioning of human nature. The “real monsters” are individuals who for one reason or another—pathological disorder, extreme faith in a divinity or ideology, voluntary conditioning, etc.—no longer possess the minimum of empathy with others that would prevent them from being torturers, or just from deliberately harming others. “Winter is coming,” the refrain of Games of Thrones, refers to this internal monstrosity that constantly threatens us, more than an external danger that we should protect ourselves from.

HC: The characters of Island of Point Nemo range all across the globe, as you yourself have done during your life. Considering all the traveling you’ve done and the number of places you’ve lived, do you consider yourself a French writer? An international writer?

JB: By my native language, I am obviously a French writer, but this does not prevent me from feeling connected to the rest of the planet. Hence the importance, to me, of this American translation.

HC: What is next for you? You’ve mentioned that you are planning to write a series of novels to expand on themes from the stories in your collection La Mémoire de riz. Is your latest novel, Dans l’épaisseur de la chair, a part of this?

JB: The twenty-two short stories of La Mémoire de riz play with the symbolism of the major arcana of the Tarot of Marseilles. Each of my books since then has been, to some degree, part of this initial context. This is a way of considering and exploring the general coherence that I perceive in my work, without clearly distinguishing it. Dans l’épaisseur de la chair follows this constraint: it contains several characters already present in La Mémoire de riz. I am unlikely to succeed, but ideally—for aesthetic reasons—I would like to leave behind twenty-two volumes of a novelistic mosaic from which perhaps would emerge something like a single compendium of the world.

To give you a better sense of the wacky energy of this book, here’s the complete jacket copy:

A stolen diamond and three right feet, wearing shoes of a non-existent brand, that wash ashore in Scotland set into motion the first plot of Island of Point Nemo, a rollicking Jules Verne-like adventure narrative that crosses continents and oceans, involves multilingual codes, a world-famous villain, and three eccentrically loopy detectives.

Running parallel is the story of B@bil Books, an e-reader factory in France filled with its own set of colorful characters, including the impotent Dieumercie and his randy wife, who will stop at nothing—including a suspect ritual involving bees—to fix his “problem,” and their abusive boss Wang-li Wong, obsessed with carrier pigeons and spying on his employees.

With the humor of a Jasper Fforde novel, and the structure of a Haruki Murakami one, Island of Point Nemo is a literary puzzle and grand testament to the power of storytelling—even in our digital age.

Click below to enter to win a copy!

I like the fact that the BTBA has a strong track record for picking not only the massive, monumental doorstoppers that tend to garner the lion’s share of award attention but also the slim, sleek books that are often much richer and better-constructed. The best possible example is our first award, in which we gave the svelte Tranquility by Attila Bartis the nod over the imposing 2666 from, of course, Roberto Bolaño. 2011 saw us pick the slender The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (beating out sizable finalists Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary, Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, and Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss). But we’ve also gone for the bulky books: in 2013 we gave it to the sizable Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and in 2012 is was Wiesław Myśliwski’s epic Stone Upon Stone.

So, in that spirit, here’s my discussion of some of the more sizable books that I both think are strong contenders for the award, and that I think should be left out.

Contenders

by Mircea Cartarescu.

This is, quite simply, one of the most amazing books I’ve read this year. Cartarescu is one of the few authors I’ve read that could legitimately claim the legacy of Thomas Pynchon (now that Pynchon is writing parodies of himself). I’ll have lots more to say about it in an upcoming review at The Kenyon Review, but for now, here are links to a and at The Quarterly Conversation. Read it.

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I have a feeling that when it’s all said and done, this will be many people’s favorite volume of the My Struggle sextet. It’s subtitled “A Man In Love,” and that’s just what it is: the story of Knausgaard falling in love with the woman who is now his wife. There are so many passionate, ecstatic moments in here that anyone who has ever been in love will recognize, wrought extraordinarily well by Knausgaard. Plus, the book also has: his on and off feud with his crazy neighbor, who might be a prostitute; why he hates interviews; and the story of the incident in which he turned his face into a bloody mess with a razor blade.

by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

This is billed as the Arabic world’s answer to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Apparently it begins with a lengthy list of synonyms for various parts of the male and female genitalia.

by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

If the Nobel committee would ever give their award to a writer like Krasznahorkai, this would be the book they would give it to him for. An inquiry into what humanity needs spirituality that is unlike anything I have ever read. Grand in scope, accomplishment, virtuosity. Grand, grand, grand. Read my review in Wednesday’s

Intrigued

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

Reviews have made this book sound extremely diverse and remarkably achieved. Could either be incredible or too big for its own good.

by Wiesław Myśliwski

Okay, the title of this book is not awesome. But it is by the author of Stone Upon Stone, a book that seemingly everybody loves (I did enjoy it). And it is reputed to be even more of a masterpiece than that one.

by Christa Wolf

An autobiographical look at ‘90s Los Angeles interspersed with memories of the Eastern Bloc where she re-discovers that she was actually a Stasi agent? Might just be crazy enough to work.

Maybe Not

by Antonio Munoz Molina

Billed as the War and Peace of the Spanish Civil War. Muñoz Molina is certainly one of Spain’s pre-eminent authors, but I’ve already read War and Peace.

by Wu Ming

I’m tossing this on because “Wu Ming” is an awesome name and it’s a pseudonym for a collective of Italian writers. How cool is that? Apparently not cool enough to make something more than middlebrow Dan Brown. The collective’s previous book, Q, was a massive hit: I hope this book makes Verso boatloads of money so they can keep publishing Badiou and Ranciere.

A Conversation with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

Tuesday, September 24th, 6:00pm
Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library

Publishers Weekly had this to say about Where Tigers Are at Home, the Winner of the prestigious Prix Médicis: “Blas de Roblès simultaneously channels Umberto Eco, Indiana Jones, and Jorge Amado . . . what begins as a faux metabiography turns to picaresque adventure with erotic escapades, scams, and unexpected changes of fortune.”

Come here Open Letter Books director Chad W. Post talk with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès about his novel, about Athanasius Kircher—the bizarre, almost always wrong 17th century philosopher at the center of the book—and about Blas de Roblès’s time teaching French literature and philosophy in Brazil, China, Italy, and Taiwan.

*

A Conversation with Simon Fruelund

Tuesday, October 1st, 6:00pm
Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library

Simon Fruelund, the former editor at Gyldendal, Denmark’s largest publishing house, has burst onto the international literary scene with the publication of two books in English translations this year—_Milk and Other Stories_ and Civil Twilight—both of which have received great critical praise. As Alan Cheuse of NPR stated, “Fruelund is a master of the short form, importing some designs from our own Raymond Carver, applying them to the interstices of the European everyday, and making them his own. The title story is a masterpiece in miniature.”

His translator, K.E. Semmel, recipient of a Danish Arts Council grant and inveterate St. Louis Cardinals fan, will discuss Fruelund’s work with him, touching on issues of translation and trends in Nordic literature as a whole.

Eleazard is translating the hagiography of Kircher written by his amanuensis and acolyte Fr. Caspar Scott; each chapter of this novel opens with an account from Schott’s biography, and most chapters end with Eleazard’s journal reflections which reflect his own feelings but also reach into Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers (in a style reminiscent of Markson actually).

His ex-wife Elaine is a university paleontologist who travels in the company of other scientists upriver through a jungle inhabited by smugglers and indigenous tribes. They want to find the origin site for fossils of which a few samples have been tantalizingly brought back by a previous scientist; he had been given them by a tribal shaman.

In a passage that describes all the quests of the novel, Elaine recalls one of Eleazard’s rants:

Sending a missionary to convert the Chinese or a cosmonaut to the moon is exactly the same thing: it derives from the desire to govern the world, to confine it within the limits of doctrinaire knowledge that each time presents itself as definitive. However improbable it might have appeared, Francis Xavier went to Asia and really did convert thousands of Chinese; the American, Armstrong—a soldier by the way, if you see what I’m getting at—trampled the old lunar myth underfoot, but what do these two actions give us, apart from themselves? They don’t teach us anything, since all the do is confirm something we already knew, namely that the Chinese are convertible and the moon tramplable.

The reader is not too optimistic about the outcomes for each story line, even when coming to care for the fate of the characters who de Roblès portrays in sympathetic terms, save for some unambiguously nasty people.

One of Elaine’s companions is a graduate student named Mauro, son of an overreaching, ambitious state governor and his alienated wife. Governor Moreira seeks a land deal to lure foreign investors, and he uses increasingly violent means to disposes from the land the poor who stand in his way. Eleazard meets and briefly socializes with the governor and wife. Eleazard is accompanied by Lordena, an Italian woman who is one of the few guests staying in the town inn, and who begins a relationship with him while hiding her bleak health prognosis. Her quest will lead eventually to a Santeria ceremony to seek healing.

Eleazard’s daughter Moema is a sometime college student who relies on dad’s money to fund drug binges for her and her lover Thais, and a young male professor whom the two women drag to an isolated fishing town for variations of sexual pairings and encounters with fishermen/smugglers. Moema will seek some real meaning through idealized human relationships and to herself; but she takes direction, for example, from a billboard she’s seen: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” The reader is not inspired to confidence about Moema’s new resolutions.

The elite, powerful, and educated—the governor, Eleazard and Elaine, Lordena, Kircher and Scott in their own day and time—are counterbalanced by ten-year-old Nathan, a crippled beggar who lives in a favella with his uncle Ze. All the characters have at most only two degrees of separation from one another by the end of the novel. Ze and Nathan are on a collision course with Moema and the governor.

Also offering contrast are a shaman and his tribe who have been isolated for centuries, but who possess the memory of a Jesuit missionary from the eighteenth century who brought with him one of Kircher’s many books. They are the erstwhile rescuers of Elaine and her party. The tribe is on a quest of its own, to return to some ur-existence, in part guided by the Jesuit’s teaching distorted and parroted through generations of shamans.

Still, the story of Kircher takes up what seems a full half of the novel over against all of the contemporary Brazilian stories of Eleazard, et al. Kircher is a real figure from European history. Varyingly regarded as a last scientific holdover from a medieval natural scientific approach and a quintessential Counter-Reformation thinker, Kircher has become a subject for contemporary rediscovery. A Man of Misconceptions by John Glassie (Riverhead, 2012) is one of the recent explorations of Kircher’s fascinatingly weird genius, captured by de Roblès, as Kircher gets almost everything wrong, from medical treatments, to his quest to identify the pre-Babel language of humanity, to natural phenomena. In one comical scene a dismayed Schott describes Kircher as he insists on drawing closer and closer to an erupting volcano’s opening:

The heat was almost unbearable and we were finding it difficult to breathe when dozens of crawling things suddenly started to pour through our refuge: all sorts of snakes, salamanders, scorpions and spiders scuttled between our legs for a few moments that seemed close to an eternity to me. Flabbergasted by this phenomenon, we did not think of using our equipment to collect some specimens. Kircher, who had observed the process with his usual concentration, immediately drew the most unusual of these creatures in his notebook. “As you see, Caspar,” he said when he had finished, “we have not wasted our time coming here. Now we know from the evidence of our own eyes that certain creatures are born of the fire itself, just as flies are engendered by manure & worms by putrefaction. Those there had been created practically before our very eyes . . .”

De Roblès makes this long novel readable by his control over pacing, with subject headings within each chapter linking to specific story lines. No one story goes on so long that the reader loses the thread of the others. Many of the quests lead to transcendent-seeming moments with de Roblès using effective, incantatory language to carry along the reader. The 32 shortish chapters, plus prologue and afterward, would seem to beg for one of those dramatis personae lists that authors of complex novels sometimes provide; not needed here.

Having said that, I’ll also admit that I bogged down about 1/3 of the way in. I’m the sort of reader who has finished some longer books after two or three attempts (Moby-Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow), never attempted any of those long Victorian novels, passed through the long-Russian novel phase in late high school years never looking back, and I still haven’t completed Ulysses (sorry Prof. Davis), nor Gaddis’ Recognitions or JR, no matter how many new copies with attractive new covers I’ve bought.

So I set this book aside for over a week. In order to write the promised review I returned to the novel when I decided I would try the last 100 pages just to find out how matters resolved. Clearly the plots had too many turns for this to work, so plan B was to skim the in-between parts. Be darned if it didn’t hook me instead. This novel is a quite satisfying read, one of best novels I suspect that will appear in English, in the original or translation, in 2013. The endings of the various quests draw in story lines closer and closer, characters previously separate eventually move into relationships with one another. If a new reader begins to doubt the worth of the effort, bogged down in some intellectual digression, this reassurance: the Prologue starts with a Eleazard distracted by a parrot named Heidegger (!): “‘Man’s swelling his pointed dick! Squaaak! Man’s swelling his pointed dick!’”

Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston.

I’ve been interested in this book literally for years, having first heard of it on a trip to France in 2009, and am very excited that this is finally available. (And hopefully I’ll have some time this summer to read it . . .)

Here’s a bit of Grant’s review:

French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a French journalist lives in a dilapidated mansion in a town being overtaken by the Amazon vegetation, with his housekeeper Soledad: all of this at first seeming like Garcia Marquez-like clichéd Latin American tropes, but subverted in short order. He is a character at the center of a fragmented family and the various narratives that radiate out into seven different directions, each a quest of varying and dubious goals, but all of it conveyed with seriousness, more often with dark humor.

Eleazard is translating the hagiography of Kircher written by his amanuensis and acolyte Fr. Caspar Scott; each chapter of this novel opens with an account from Schott’s biography, and most chapters end with Eleazard’s journal reflections which reflect his own feelings but also reach into Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers (in a style reminiscent of Markson actually).

His ex-wife Elaine is a university paleontologist who travels in the company of other scientists upriver through a jungle inhabited by smugglers and indigenous tribes. They want to find the origin site for fossils of which a few samples have been tantalizingly brought back by a previous scientist; he had been given them by a tribal shaman.

In a passage that describes all the quests of the novel, Elaine recalls one of Eleazard’s rants:

bq.” Sending a missionary to convert the Chinese or a cosmonaut to the moon is exactly the same thing: it derives from the desire to govern the world, to confine it within the limits of doctrinaire knowledge that each time presents itself as definitive. However improbable it might have appeared, Francis Xavier went to Asia and really did convert thousands of Chinese; the American, Armstrong—a soldier by the way, if you see what I’m getting at—trampled the old lunar myth underfoot, but what do these two actions give us, apart from themselves? They don’t teach us anything, since all the do is confirm something we already knew, namely that the Chinese are convertible and the moon tramplable.”

Click here to read the entire review.