Forthcoming in a new “Dalkey Essentials” edition,��

It’s also one of George Saunders’s favorite books! He plugged the opening line (“The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers.”) in ��������,��and the book as a whole in��BOMB:

It’s an alternate history of the twentieth century, all true, but arranged in a weird way. For example, he starts the fascist era by concentrating on American nationalist groups like the ones Charles Lindbergh was involved with. It throws your whole sense of history off, and yet every word in it is true.

The section below is in honor of�������������������Ի���������Գ�𾱳����.��It’s long. It’s worth it. Enjoy.

Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

by Patrik Ouredník

translated from the Czech by Gerald Turner

With the emancipation of women and the invention of contraception and tampons and disposable diapers there were fewer children in Europe but more toys and kindergartens and slides and climbing frames and dogs and hamsters, etc. Sociologists said that the child had become the center of attention in the family and gradually its most influential component also. And children wanted to be independent and have their own identity and did not want to wear their older siblings’ hand-me-down caps or shoes and they always wanted new caps and shoes and colored pencils and construction sets and teddy bears and dolls. In the European countries twelve-and-a-half thousand times more dolls were manufactured in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth century and instead of wood and sawdust they were made of plastics and in the course of time they learnt to whimper and talk and were more and more independent, and they would say good morning and enjoy your meal, for instance, and some of them could weep and burp after eating or sing part of an aria. The best-known doll was called Barbie and was first manufactured in 1959. It was 30 centimeters tall and had big breasts and hips and a slim waist and was the first doll to behave like an adult. Soon it started to talk too and said i’ve got a date with my boyfriend this evening and what will i wear to the dance? and would you like to go clothes shopping with me? At first she was dressed like a ballerina or an actress or a model, then later as a stewardess, a teacher, a veterinarian, a businesswoman, an astronaut, or a presidential candidate. And in 1986, a Barbie doll appeared dressed in a striped concentration-camp uniform and a striped cap too. Various ex-prisoners associations protested and said it made a mockery of the suffering and the memory of the victims, and the manufacturers answered back and said that, on the contrary, it was an appropriate way of acquainting the younger generation with the suffering in the concentration camps, and that little girls who bought the doll in the striped uniform would identify with it and later, when they were grown up, they would more easily comprehend what sort of suffering there was. And in 1998 the Germans came up with the idea of erecting in Berlin a large monument to the victims of the Holocaust, which was to be visible from afar, because, in addition to celebrating some positive historical event, the function of a monument is also to be a warning to future generations. Some people thought that an art object was not the proper way of expressing the Holocaust, which defies all aesthetic rules, and others concluded that the ideal project would be one that expressed the fact that the Holocaust defied expression. And four hundred and ninety-five artists sent various proposals for expressing a warning to future generations and one proposed manufacturing a large, eight-colored, six-pointed star turning on its own axis, and others proposed constructing an enormous Ferris wheel, on which concentration-camp wagons would be hung in place of the usual fair-ground cars, and others proposed constructing a large bus station with red buses and timetables on which the terminal stations would be the names of concentration camps, and others proposed erecting thirty-nine steel posts on which why? would be written in various languages, warum?, waarom?, varfør?, proč?, pourquoi?, perché?, dlaczego?, cūr?, kuida?, miksi?, miért?, zakaj?, kodêl?, hvorfor?, jiatí?, pse?, niçin?, etc. Some people were of the opinion that it ought to be a monument to the victims not only of the Holocaust, but of all possible genocides, because only in that way would it contain the living historical memory, otherwise it would be simply a heap of steel or iron that would say nothing to anyone within twenty or so years. And some historians said that building monuments was problematic in all events, because preserving the memory of some event did not of itself guarantee that it would not be repeated, and they provided instances of preserving memory that had led to fresh conflicts and wars.

The Jews who survived the Holocaust said that monuments and museums, etc., were important, but that best of all were direct testimonies, and they would visit schools to tell the pupils what they had gone through. And they wondered how to preserve the memory of the Holocaust after their deaths, and the Swedish association of former Jewish prisoners recommended passing on their testimony to some young person, who would learn it by heart and visit schools and tell the pupils that they had known someone who had experienced such and such. And before they died they would pass the testimony on to another young person, etc. And in 1945, the Jews issued an appeal to public opinion, requesting the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine, where the Jews could be among their own and would not have to fear any more holocausts. And they fought against the Arabs and the English, who were occupying Palestine at the time, and organized assassinations and illicit immigration operations. And in 1939, the English decreed immigration quotas that reduced the number of Jewish immigrants by 75% and enacted a law prohibiting Jews from buying land. And in 1947, a ship docked in Palestine with illegal Jewish immigrants from Germany and the English sent it back again. And in 1938, the Swedish government requested the German authorities to insert a capital J in passports for Jews, so that the Swedish frontier police could recognize a Jew who did not look like one. The ship that docked in Palestine was called exodus after a book of the Old Testament and 4,500 Jews were sailing in her, having survived the concentration camps and wanting to return to the Promised Land. And in November, the United Nations voted in favor of the creation of the State of Israel. And lots of people in Europe traveled to Israel to see the new state in creation. And young people from Europe went to work in Jewish agricultural communes known as kibbutzim, where everyone worked for the good of all. And everything was shared and everyone sang songs together. And the Israeli travel agencies issued posters on which young people with serious expressions observed the sun rising over Jerusalem, and underneath was written our suffering was not in vain and take advantage of low prices.

Sexologists said that the Barbie doll was the first tool for inculcating a feminine identity in young girls, and the doll’s successful reception proved that child sexuality existed. Child sexuality was much spoken about in the twentieth century after it was discovered that little girls would like to have a child with their father, which was actually a substitute penis because little girls would like a penis too, and the doll was a child from their father and a penis at the same time. For a long time only little girl dolls were made but then they started to manufacture little boy dolls, and little girl dolls had a groove between their legs and little boy dolls had a little penis. And in the seventies, they started to manufacture black or brown dolls, although they were mostly bought by white parents who wanted to show their children they were not racists. Racism was a theory from the nineteenth century that said that the human races have immutable characteristics, and they were at different levels of development and the most developed were the white race which had an innate sense of social organization and abstract thought and convivial entertainment, and a racist was someone who feared that mixing between races jeopardized the specific characteristics of the white race and eroded the genetic potential that enabled the whites to continue advancing in the forefront of mankind. People who did not like Jews were not racists but anti-Semites, because the Jews were not strictly regarded as inferior, like Negroes, Indians, Gypsies, etc., but more of a natural aberration. The word anti-Semite appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and denoted a person who did not want the Jews to rule the world and called on their fellow citizens to resist. Racism became a major social problem after the Second World War because large ethnic minorities settled in the rich European countries, and society had to absorb them. There existed two models for absorbing ethnic minorities—integration and assimilation, and integration was adopted by countries that believed that various cultural models could coexist within civil society and that it was better not to mix one with another and for each of them to preserve its specific character, and assimilation was implemented by countries that believed in universalism and were of the opinion that there existed a higher social interest that took precedence over specific ethnic and cultural characteristics. For a long while it looked as if the assimilation model was more successful, because in the countries that implemented it there were no race riots such as there were in England, America, etc., but at the end of the century, when people started to talk about globalism, universalism went out of fashion and everybody wanted to have their own identity and be proud of their race, but not in the sense of race, but civilization and live in accordance with traditions and return to their roots, etc.

Sex became very important in Europe in the twentieth century, more important than religion and almost as important as money, and everyone wanted to have sexual intercourse in different ways and some men rubbed their sexual organ with cocaine to prolong their erection even though cocaine was banned in all circumstances. And after the Second World War films started to include scenes in which the leading characters had sexual intercourse, which was previously considered improper because lots of people still believed in God and sexual intercourse was generally only hinted at by a shot of a bed or a clock or the sky, or it suddenly went dark. And women wanted to have orgasms all the time and that made men nervous and they had problems with erections and tried various aphrodisiacs and attended psychoanalysis to discover where the problem lay, such as whether they might have suffered some childhood trauma that they were unaware of. Psychoanalysis was invented in 1900 by a Viennese neurologist who wanted to study mental processes and evaluate subjects by means of the unconscious, and he came to the conclusion that neurosis, hysteria, etc., were symptoms of sexual traumas in childhood, and he devised for this purpose new methods and concepts such as repetitive compulsion, regression, repression, ego, superego, libido and complexes, which could be either Oedipal or castration complexes. And in 1938 he fled from the Nazis to London and four of his sisters died in concentration camps. And when patients knew why they were depressed and neurotic they immediately felt better because it was normal. Communists said that people who lived in a Communist society had no need for sex because people’s greatest happiness should be from work well done, whereas in capitalism people did not get enjoyment from their work because they were exploited and therefore resorted to various surrogates. And they said that without class consciousness sex could not bring satisfaction even it were repeated endlessly and they were afraid that if people were to attend psychoanalysis and resort to surrogates it would threaten the cohesion of the socialist camp. And they did not want people to read decadent books or wear garish clothes, have eccentric hairstyles, chew gum, etc. Chewing-gum was invented by an American pharmacist and was first sold in Europe in 1903, although its use spread mainly in the fifties and sixties. It was mostly chewed by young people, who thereby expressed their attitude towards society and didn’t have fillings in their mouths yet.

In the fifties film heroes usually had sexual intercourse in cornfields because cornfields were associated with youth and the new life awaiting the young heroes, and wind ruffled the ears of corn as the sun sank on the horizon and women’s bosoms heaved, and in the sixties film heroes had sexual intercourse in the surf on the ocean shore because it was romantic and sand clung to their skin, and their bottoms could be seen, and mist hung over the water. [. . .]

That said, this isn’t necessarily the place for a long political rant—especially since I’m gleefully unaware of what it might mean that this is hosted on the Ģ����ý server—so I’ll just plant this powerful protest video here and move on to the ideas (not entirely unrelated?) that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. (And since the rest of Open Letter is on furlough and can’t edit this: ACAB.)

*

The original idea for this post came from a line I can half-sort-of-maybe remember from Michel Butor’s Passing Time, which was translated from the French by Jean Stewart back in 1961. (By Simon & Schuster of all presses.) The book is way way out of print, and for the life of me, I can’t remember why we didn’t reissue this at Dalkey Archive when we did�������Ի���. I like all of his books, but there’s something about the tone and “detective story” aspect of��Passing Time��that comes back to me time and again.

“” by Kathleen O’Neill is both very interesting, and an incredible way of jogging my memory, even if the quote I initially was structuring this post around, well, probably doesn’t exist.

The novel is written as a journal—starting in May, but recounting the events from the past October—by Jacques Revel about the year he spends in Bleston (a sort of stand-in for Manchester, England). While he’s in the dark, wet, cold, bleak industrial town, he meets a couple sisters, a potential arsonist, and the author behind the pseudonymously written��The Bleston Murder, who survives an attempt on his life. What makes this book really work is that, as Revel rereads his own diary, he sees inaccuracies in his own account of events and essentially becomes a detective in which he discovers that he himself was the criminal (and kind of the victim). It’s a fascinating book that really melds together form and content, and is essentially, a meditation on the relationship between the writer and the reader—or the criminal and the detective.

What I thought I remembered from this book was a quote about how there’s a contract between the writer of a detective novel and the audience in which the author is responsible for creating a world in which all the clues fit together and the audience receives a “satisfactory” resolution in which the criminal is exposed and justice is served.

Although this isn’t quite the same (at all), here’s what I think the actual quote from��Passing Time��is;

Any detective story, is constructed on two murders of which the first, committed by the criminal, is only the occasion of the second, in which he is the victim of the pure, unpunishable murderer, the detective, who kills him . . . by the explosion of truth.

Both of these quotes (the real and imagined) play nicely off of bits from Franco Moretti’s “Clues” (collected in��) and his analysis of Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

And detective fiction’s characters are inert indeed: they do not grow. In this way, detective fiction is radically anti-novelistic: the aim of the narration is no longer the character’s development into autonomy, or a change from the initial situation, or the presentation of plot as a conflict and an evolutionary spiral, image of a developing world that it is difficult to draw to a close. On the contrary: detective fiction’s object is to��return to the beginning. [. . . ] So it is too with the reader who, attracted��precisely��by the obsessively repetitive scheme, is “unable’ to stop until the cycle has closed and he has returned to the starting point.

He develops this idea in much greater depth—part of which we’ll come back to later—but this got me thinking about the “detective” books I like the most: ones in which the reader has to sort clue from noise, in which the center doesn’t necessarily hold, and the plot never quite congeals in a reassuring, satisfactory, or, in Moretti terms, bourgeoisie fashion. Books like����by Patrik Ourednik.

*

Originally written in 2006 and translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker in 2010,�� is, ostensibly, a detective novel. But one in which the clues don’t seem to add up, the resolution is unsatisfying by typical standards, and one of the crimes being investigated is never clearly articulated.

We know from the jump that we’re in for some sort of game, given that chapter 1 is a notated chess game:

1 e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Bc4 d6 4. nf3 Bg4 5. O-O Qd7 6. d4 g5 7. c3 Nc6 [. . .] 27. hxg3 hxg3+ 28. Kg1 rgh8 29. Bf3 Qxg4

(I assume this is all accurate and playable, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least partially nonsense.)

Then, in chapter 2, we have two major events that more or less drive the book itself. First off, Viktor Dyk (winning dick as in detective?), a retiree and main player in this novel, gives a young woman inaccurate directions to the Academy of Fine Arts (we find out later that she’s raped as a result) and then we hear about Mrs. Horak’s death. Or at least part of it.

“Have you heard? Mrs. Horak was hit by a car.”

“No! Is it serious?”

“Serious or not, she’s dead from it, dead as a doornail. Supposedly she staggered home, opened the door, and bang! She was gone. She couldn’t breathe, poor thing, and her eyes were wide open.”

To give you a real sense of the whiplash-inducing, playful tone of this book, here’s a bit from the same chapter about Viktor Dyk:

Dyk had a habit of pulling pronouncements out of his noggin and dressing them up with fraudulent, usually biblical, sources. Long ago he had come to realize that repeating what someone else had once said was considered the utmost expression of intelligence in his country. At one time, in the days when he still collected beetles, he used to declare ownership of his pronouncements (“as I always say”), but he never got any response except an awkward smile. Until one day it occurred to him to add “Book of Ruth 6:4″—and lo and behold, eyes lighted up all around, women’s in appreciation, men’s in envy. Since then, he had done so every time.

Fast-forward to chapter 6, and we��maybe��get introduced to the mystery that Inspector Lebeda (introduced in chapter 8) is going to be investigating.

Mrs. Horak’s death wasn’t a result of the accident. The car was innocent. It barely grazed her. Mrs. Horak fell down, banged her knee, tore her stocking. Ranting and limping, she made her way home. Once there, she turned on the gas, opened the oven, and stuck her head in. They say that women, particularly in old age, rarely resort to suicide, and when they do, they think long and hard about their decision and as a rule they choose less radical means than men do. But statistics provide only an imperfect picture of an individual’s life: in this respect Mrs. Horak defied sexual categorization. She’d had enough, she’d had it up to here. [. . .]

We shall see later whether and to what extent these statistical incongruities influence the course of our story and the fates of our other protagonists. In any case it spurred the firemen to call the police without delay. Which they would have done regardless; this, however, enables us to evoke a promising atmosphere of tension, thereby strengthening the dramatic line. The firemen may not give a damn, but our readers certainly do.

One of the difficulties in describing this incredibly fun, somewhat enigmatic book is that it is��like a chess game. There are so many people, so many moves, so many positions on the board. For instance, Lebeda’s main case at the start of the book is called “Damage of Advertising Surfaces in Public Spaces,” in which he’s trying to figure out which groups are defiling the “city’s metro and streetside postering surfaces [. . .] with signs of an active anticapitalist, anti-advertising campaign—whole posters x’d out in black, as well as graffiti both general (Down with advertising, Ads lie, Citizen, don’t be an ass, Pay the unemployed) and specific (Women are not goods, This washer will wash your brain, Bud won’t make you wiser) [. . .]” The interpretation of these “defacings” (and, given the current situation, livI’m ALL FOR some anti-capitalist, anti-racist graffiti) is either a key to untangling the mysteries of this book, or a total red herring.

And suddenly, I’ve returned to the beginning of my take on this book: Detective novels in which the clues are misleading, maybe not actually clues at all, contradictory, and filled with digressions are��exactly��the sort of detective novels I am drawn to. Post-modern puzzle books are totally my jam. But what is the function of these sorts of books versus “traditional” (Sherlock Holmes era) detective novels?

*

I feel like I should be more embarrassed about this next statement than I actually am: I LOVE Riverdale. Especially season four. The show runs at 150% crazy at all moments in time, but season four is the most Lynchian—by way of��The Secret History—show I’ve ever seen. It’s a masterclass in how you’re��not��supposed to write television. Instead of an A-plot that lasts for a few episodes with B-plots moving along secondary characters, every episode of��Riverdale��has A through Z plots for EVERY character, and moves at breakneck speed, changing the overall “game” of the show CONSTANTLY. Every scene either kicks off a whole new plot that would constitute a season on a “normal” show, or ends the plot that was just kicked off. I can only assume that watching Riverdale��is like snorting LSD off of a tab of meth.

Anyway, by the middle of season four, at least half of the characters on this show—and yes, this features all the Archie-Betty-Veronica comic book characters—have either murdered someone or disposed of someone who has been murdered. It’s insane how many crimes go unpunished in this town. A character gets out of jail and is, instantly—in the same episode—elected mayor. The police chief��rehides a body he buried in season 2 (?) with the help of an FBI agent (?). I want to say that this show is off the rails, but it’s a show in which the original “rails” look like a Jackson Pollack painting.

Every season of this show is centered around one mystery (or one hundred), but the resolution of that mystery is irrelevant from the start. For��Riverdale��to work, we have to suspect everyone—easy to do since they’ve all either taken a life or disposed of a dead body or done a shitton of jingle jangle—and know that nothing is permanent. Nothing is off the board.

*

The Moretti idea that this entire post is based around is that the function of detective fiction is to “return to the beginning” in order to ensure that the values of society at large are reconfirmed at the expense of individuality.

The difference between innocence and guilt returns as the opposition between stereotype and individual. Innocence is conformity; individuality, guilt. It is, in fact, something irreducibly personal that betrays the individual: traces, signs that only he could have left behind. The perfect crime—the nightmare of detective fiction—is the featureless, deindividualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same.

A criminal transgresses, affirming their individuality by violating a social norm; a detective uncovers their identity; they are brought to justice for said transgression. (Unless you’re an American cop . . .) A detective novel, in its purest sense, is a confirmation that what we “all” believe in is preferred with the detective capable of reaffirming the status quo. The core of Moretti’s idea is that by transgressing, you become an individual, and it’s the detective’s purpose to reestablish the order of society as a whole. It’s not OK to murder your co-worker, and by being found out and jailed, we all are reminded what is acceptable.��

Neither Case Closed, nor Riverdale entertain this idea��for a second. In��Case Closed, it’s all about providing too many clues, too many crimes, too many iterations to establish a single, widely accepted, “wrong” thing that deserves to be put back in line. Was the transgression Mrs. Horak’s suicide and what went on in that building? What societal norms need to be restored? The disdain Viktor Dyk has for his countrymen? If anything, this is a detective novel about violence against women, but even that’s not addressed in a satisfactory manner. Case Closed is an incredibly fun book that points out how non-totalizing detective narratives are in real life. There’s no single, simple solution. Such is baseball, such is life.

Riverdale��can’t have agreed upon societal norms. Full stop. If everyone in Riverdale agreed on the same set of principles the world would fall apart. That show only works by knowing that it’s all subjective and wild AF. Instead of sending one character off the edge and exploring that, break the town. Totally. There’s never a resolution to anything because any resolution would kill the very engine of this show, which is the wild individuality each character asserts over and over again. Sure, Archie is always dumb and making the wrong choices, but his bad decisions are what make him a unique character. All resolutions in Riverdale (the arrest of the Black Hood, the discovery of who killed Jason Blossom, Jughead’s death)��is erased immediately in order to allow for the character to transgress again and set off a new storyline. It’s totally daytime soap opera shit run through the mind of David Lynch and Michael Bay.

*

Immediately after reading Moretti’s “Clues,” I picked up ��by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Agnes Scott Langeland and published by New Directions. Been meaning to read this for a while, but, given just how perfectly it fit in with Moretti’s ideas, I’m really glad I waited.

This is billed as an “existential mystery” centering around Pål Andersen’s decision��not��to report a murder he thinks he’s witnessed. It’s a novel of inaction and indecision, one that directly responds to Moretti’s ideas about the sociology of detective novels.

Everything’s set in motion on Christmas Eve, when Professor Andersen sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment building directly across from his:

[. . .] he reared back in horror as the man whom he had declared with such immediate certainty to be young put his hands around the woman’s neck and squeezed. She flailed her arms about, Professor Andersen noticed, her body jerked, he observed, before she all at once became completely still beneath the man’s hands and went limp. [. . .]

“I must call the police,” he thought. He went over to the telephone, but did not lift the receiver. “It was murder. I must call the police,” he thought, but still did not lift the receiver. Instead he went back to the window.

Days pass, and he does��nothing until he shows up an hour early for a dinner party with the plan of filling the host in on what he saw and asking his advice. But he doesn’t do that, either. Instead, over the course of the dinner, he thinks about how they all used to be at the cutting edge, the rebellious youth who opposed the system and loved avant-garde poetry, but that now, well, they were the establishment.

They were strongly disinclined to regard themselves as pillars of society. Because they didn’t feel they conformed: not to the authority, or rather duties, which they enacted, nor to the social group to which they belonged. They denied being what they were. [. . .] They continued to be against authority, deep inside they were in opposition, even though they were now, in fact, pillars of society who carried out the State’s orders, and no one besides themselves (and old photographs from the year 2020) could perceive that they were anything other than State officials, part of the State fabric, and the fact that most of them voted in elections for the ruling party would hardly surprise anyone other than themselves, but they, on the other hand, would argue that they didn’t want to throw away their own vote and by so doing bring the right-wingers into power.

His desire to return to some earlier place, where his beliefs and actions were more radical, more “meaningful” actions is the engine of the rest of this book. Through the lens of Moretti, he asserts his individuality by��not��serving the role of the detective, refusing to allow society to reassert its moral viewpoint.

This isn’t to say that what he did was right. I mean, I hope I don’t have to say this, but please report any and all acts of domestic violence (and police violence). And believe women. But, in the context of this novel—in which there are many hints that this “murder” might not have actually taken place—the crime serves as the catalyst to allow Pål to explore the relationship of the individual to society, especially a society that’s built on historical beliefs or rituals that modern people don’t necessarily connect with. This is also reflected in his ambivalence over teaching Ibsen, since he doesn’t feel the same jolt reading him nowadays, and the vast majority of his students don’t feel it either.

His sin of omission couldn’t be defended. Every civilization is built on such actions being indefensible. That goes without saying. In all circumstances. When he didn’t report it, he had become and outcast, along with the murderer. An outcast in his own eyes, along with the murderer. And he deserved this. And behind it all was God. As the ultimate reason why breaking this natural order was a taboo which no living person can explain, touch, or wipe from their memory.

The idea of detective fiction as a conflict between the individual and a monolithic society is fascinating to me in part because I don’t think it holds anymore. It made sense back in Sherlock Holmes times, and into the 1930s, but post-WWII, the idea of a “monolithic set of societal mores” feels . . . naive? We don’t agree on anything anymore. We have a president who won’t protect his citizens, ennobles fascists to be more fascist, and plays a victim role like a sniveling punk in hopes of further fracturing the American people. So, again, please report domestic abuse, but maybe assert your individuality by not reporting fellow protestors and standing up for the values that we should��all agree on. Like justice. And defunding the police.

THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD

The future isn’t what it used to be. You must have noticed this yourself: the future isn’t what it used to be.

In the past, the future mainly unfolded in one of the following ways:

(1) The world would end, and everything would start again from scratch, with the creation of an identical world—the pessimistic version of most belief systems.

(2) The world would end in a horrifying and final bloodbath, from which would arise a world of bliss—the optimistic version of some religions.

(3) The world would never end, and bliss, which acted as the leavening agent, would continue to increase until the end of days, which were themselves infinitely extendable—the foolhardy version of the ends of History.

But by the beginning of the twenty-first century such theories had run their course. Forecasts had changed. All people endowed with a certain understanding of the facts on the ground agreed on one point: no matter how you imagine it, it’s going to end badly. Either in a horrible bloodbath followed by nothing at all—the optimistic hypothesis. Or by bloodbaths here and there, followed by further bloodbaths here and there, without end, until the universe expands to the point that its density reaches an infinite value, which would in turn precipitate the destruction of the galaxies and the poor miserable wretches who live there. Some observers added a supplementary aspect: a concomitant and heretofore inconceivable dulling of humanity.

*

MY PROJECTS

Writing a book about the end of the world was a longstanding project. I’d already written a play on the same subject. It was called Yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow. But you’re obsessed, my wife said when I mentioned the idea of taking another crack at it.

I don’t think so. But I might be wrong. According to psychologists, the idea of the end of the world allows people to accept their own mortality. What’s more, the world doesn’t even have to end. They say the death of others in and of itself is soothing. To be on your deathbed and to be able to say, In any case, this is going to happen to all those stupid bastards, would bring peace to the soul.

Just as long as you don’t believe in the afterlife. Imagine! Just imagine! To run into all of them again!

*

ON HUMANITY

Would it be so bad if humanity were to disappear? Some would be delighted. They’ve been clamoring for its disappearance for many a moon. It would lead to the liberation of other species, and the Earth would finally be able to breathe after the catastrophes brought about by the thoughtless and murderous parasites that we are.

But the subject of this book is the world.

*

CATASTROPHIES

The end of the world had been predicted numerous times over the course of human history. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it ought to have occurred forty-two times.

That each of these times didn’t come to pass, or at least not completely, by no means obviates the next. Quite the opposite: statistically speaking, with each failure the odds increase considerably. Ends of the world are like human births. A woman’s gestative capacity is only one in four. The three prior copulations are both necessary and fruitless.

The reasons for the end of the world were varied. The fury of a disappointed God raining down on humanity and exterminating it once and for all. The planet colliding with a near-Earth asteroid. A meteorite shower falling on Earth and causing a deadly tsunami. Asteroid collisions leading to melting polar caps. A mysterious event causing the South Pole to shift from its axis. The end of the calendar cycle leading to something terrible. Extraterrestrials armed with sophisticated weapons invading the Earth. An inversion of energy currents making the Earth pass into the fourth dimension. The Earth disappearing into a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider. A sudden end to the magnetic field allowing solar winds to penetrate the atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere suddenly blowing into space, and the oceans drying up. Have you had your breakfast yet?

According to an American think tank, there was only, both presently and symbolically, one minute until the end of the world. The organization brought together researchers who year after year entertained themselves by evaluating the more or less negligible chances of humanity’s survival. When it was looking its best, at the beginning of the 1990s, humanity had seventeen minutes to live.

1948 *******

1949 ***

1950 ***

1951 ***

1952 ***

1953 **

1954 **

1955 **

1956 **

1957 **

1958 **

1959 **

1960 ******

1961 ******

1962 ***

1963 ************

1964 ************

1965 ************

1966 ************

1967 ************

1968 *******

1969 **********

1970 **********

1971 **********

1972 ************

1973 ************

1974 *********

1975 *********

1976 *********

1977 *********

1978 *********

1979 *********

1980 *******

1981 ****

1982 ****

1983 ***

1984 ****

1985 ***

1986 ***

1987 ***

1988 ******

1989 ******

1990 **********

1991 *****************

1992 *****************

1993 *****************

1994 *****************

1995 **************

1996 *************

1997 *************

1998 *********

1999 *********

2000 *********

2001 *********

2002 *******

2003 *******

2004 *******

2005 *******

2006 *******

2007 *****

2008 *****

2009 *****

2010 ******

2011 ******

2012 *****

2013 *****

2014 ****

2015 ***

2016 **

2017 **

2018 **

2019 *

The researchers justified their prediction of “extraordinary and undeniable threats” stating it was due to “unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals.”

They forgot, please see above, the wrath of God, who is always liable to try out new methods.

*

Purchase��The End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place from your , or via Bookshop.org, where proceeds from the sale via will go to the .��

One of the more interesting catalogs that arrived over break was the new Spring/Summer 2011 catalog from Dalkey Archive. There are a $%^&load of translations in here, from a number of different languages and countries. With the total number of original translations plummeting in 2010 (more on that later this week when I finally finish updating the Translation Database), I’m sure that Dalkey will be one of the top producers of translated literature.

As alluded to in the earlier post about Hotel Europa, Dalkey has traditionally supported its authors by publishing (and reissuing) several of their works, rather than dumping them if sales for a particular title aren’t all that impressive. This is very admirable, and this catalog features books from a number of “classic” Dalkey authors. (Can’t find these titles on the Dalkey site, otherwise I’d link to them. And all quotes are from the catalog):

• Patrik Ourednik’s The Opportune Moment, 1855, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker;

• Juan Goytisolo’s Exiled from Almost Everywhere, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush;

In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo’s perverse mutant protagonist—the Parisian “Monster of Le Sentier”—is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors.

• Julian Rios’s Procession of Shadows, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor;

• Luisa Valenzuela’s Dark Desires and the Others, translated from the Spanish by Susan E. Clark;

Dark Desires is the author’s autobiographical fantasia on the ten years she spent living in New York City. Valenzuela has called this book her “apocryphal autobiography,” and in it she says very little about her work as a writer, about the city itself, or even about literature.

• Viktor Shklovsky, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, translated from the Russian by Shushan Avagyan;

• Jacques Jouet’s Upstaged, translated from the French by Leland de la Durantaye;

• Claude Ollier’s Wert and the Life without End, translated from the French by Ursula Meany Scott;

• Goncalo M. Tavares’s Learning to Pray in the Age of Technology, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without the least compassion.

There are also a number of interesting sounding “new voices”:

• Jean Rolin’s The Explosion of the Radiator Hose, translated from the French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie;

• Edouard Leve’s Suicide, translated from the French by Jan Steyn;

• Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano, translated from the French by Jane Kuntz;

Talismano is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities—in particularly, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was.

• Asaf Schurr’s Motti, translated from the Hebrew by Todd Hasak-Lowy;

An unassuming, unambitious man named Motti, who owns a dog named Laika, has a good friend named Menachem. Motti and Menachem drink beer together every week, and Motti spends the rest of his time daydreaming an imaginary love story for himself and his neighbor, Ariella. Motti is the very picture of inertia, until, one night, a drunk Menachem, driving home from a bar with Motti, runs over a woman and kills her.

They’re also doing a couple Japanese Literature Publishing Project titles (Plainsong by Kazushi Hosaka and The Shadow of a Blue Cat by Naoyuki Li), and, what may the be the most exciting announcement, they’re brining out Mark Polizzotti’s new translation of Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa.

I’m sure we’ll end up covering a number of these on the site, and as I peruse more catalogs, I’ll post other “Spring/Summer 2011 Preview” posts . . .