Special guest Rodrigo Fresán joins Brian, Chad, and Kaija to celebrate being on the��, talk about his novels, his career, the ideas he circles back to time and again, the idea of a writer creating their reader, what’s next for him, and much more.

Also: The books for Season 25 are announced at the very end.

The “” t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

This week’s music is “” by Shovels & Rope.

Stay tuned for the schedule and details about Season 25, coming in February 2025.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our����and on��,��, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

��DZ����Ƿ�����,����, and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The “” t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be next week at the regularly scheduled time and will cover the end of Rodrigo Fresán’s��.��You can find the full reading schedule��here.

This week’s music is “” by FM Belfast.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our����and on��,��, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

��DZ����Ƿ�����,����, and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

On the final episode of 2024, Chad, Brian, and Kaija talk about Nico C. and being unmoored from time, last words, footnotes and ellipses, some highlights from the past year, ice, and more.

The “” t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be next week at the regularly scheduled time and will cover pages 189-245 of Rodrigo Fresán’s��.��You can find the full reading schedule��here.

This week’s music is “” by Ra Ra Riot.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our����and on��,��, etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

��DZ����Ƿ�����,����, and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Lori Feathers (podcast,��, , and ) joins Chad and Kaija to talk about prizes—Melvill��is longlisted for the NBCC Greg Barrios Prize for Translated Literature!—the narrative structure of��Melvill, Nico C., and vampires. A lot of fun is had along the way.

The “” t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be in TWO WEEKS and will cover pages 123-188 of Rodrigo Fresán’s .��You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week’s music is “” by Yellow Ostrich.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our and on , , etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

��DZ����Ƿ�����,�� , and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The large image associated with this post is AI generated.

With Melville’s��Fidèle��receding into the dark distance, we turn our attention to Rodrigo Fresán’s��Melvill, a bombastic book about Alan Melvill and Herman and the passing down of stories from one generation to the next. On this special episode, translator Will Vanderhyden joins Brian, Chad, and Kaija to talk about translating Fresán, about the style and word play found in his books, about the footnotes, about what’s to come. They also talk about the line connecting this to��Confidence-Man, and how to read footnotes. And about the interplay between two narratorial voices in this first part.

Also mentioned are , , and .��

And here’s where you can get your own “” t-shirt mentioned in this episode.

Next episode will cover pages 62-123 of Rodrigo Fresán’s .��You can find the full reading schedule here.

This week’s music is “” by Young Fathers.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our and on , , etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

��DZ����Ƿ�����,�� , and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The large image associated with this post is AI generated.

[This is not to be confused with the , which was the first one I launched and, although it has some broad philosophical overlap with the Three Percent one, it exclusively focuses on Dalkey Archive titles, history, and stories. But please subscribe to that as well! There are some really interesting essays in the offing . . .]

As you may have noticed, last week Two Month Review dropped its first one-off episode on��Dear Dickhead��by Virginie Despentes & Frank Wynne. This is something we had been talking about for quite some while—a way to expand the number of books we’re covering (so as to include ones that��aren’t��600 pages long) in a way that captures the spirit of TMR, but with a few wrinkles.

We’ll be experimenting with what works best over the coming months, and posting these as occasional bonus episodes along the way. We do have a few titles lined up, but the only one I want to announce now is that we’re doing ��next week, so expect that soon. (Should be interesting to hear Brian leading us through his own book, discussing what he thinks works, or would change now, who influenced him, etc.) After that . . . well, wait and see!

Our next full season of Two Month Review has also been decided, and it’s a twofer: First up will be , followed by��. Full schedule detailed below.

It’s probably obvious why we decided to do these two books, but, for anyone who isn’t a long-time listener, we have dedicated almost three dozen episodes of TMR to Fresán, specifically his “” (,,��). And we’re always going to feature his new titles as they’re released!

But in contrast to his other books,����is “short,” clocking in at a tight 308 pages, so it makes sense to add on a related title. As much as I would love to reread��Moby-Dick in this context, I think that����is actually a better fit. A Melville title that some people might not be familiar with, but one that Fresán referred to as “Pynchon before Pynchon.”

Here’s the jacket copy from the Dalkey Archive edition (not currently available):

A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat,��The Confidence-Man��exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P. T. Barnum, in particular—and draws a dark vision of a country being swallowed by its illusions of progress.

It begins with a mute boarding a Mississippi boat and ends without a conclusion: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” In between, the confidence man, so well disguised as to avoid clear identification even by the reader, meets and tricks a boatful of unusual characters. The culmination of Herman Melville’s brilliant career as a novelist, and the introduction of a particularly American brand of satire that is as caustic as it is funny,��The Confidence-Man��creates an elaborate and beautiful masquerade that asks: who in this world is worth our confidence?

Why is Dalkey Archive doing yet another edition of��The Confidence-Man? And why is it doing Melville at all? First, this edition, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill over forty years ago, contains remarkable annotations by H. Bruce Franklin, intended for both the general reader and the scholar. It’s an edition we have long admired. More importantly, we believe that��The Confidence-Man��is America’s first postmodern novel—game-like, darkly comic, and completely inventive.

I read this for the first time before we published it at Dalkey and remember being wonderfully surprised by how lively, how fun, how playful it was. Not that Melville’s other books aren’t those things, but this seemed like a swerve compared to say, , or (but maybe not ).

As mentioned above, the Dalkey edition is between printings (using this podcast to prep the new files, actually), but there are many other editions out there. And the Dalkey one is easy to find used.

Teaser: Subscribe to the archive for a special treat related to this book . . .

Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden’s��Melvill may well be their best collaboration to date. That’s saying a lot after the “Part Trilogy,” but this book is remarkable. It’s one of the few books I’ve published in which multiple people have emailed to tell me it’s one of the “best books they’ve ever read.” It is, to put this in crass, commercial (a.k.a., publisher) terms: This novel is the best chance to date for Fresán to breakout breakout among English readers. He’s had a lot of success, but given the subject matter (one of the Great American Novelists), its relatively short length, and the richness of the text itself (still replete with Fresán’s games), and the stunning cover (designed by Fresán’s son), this particular Fresán book is “approachable” (again, apologies for the gross publisher term) and thus could reach a very wide audience.

Instead of quoting the , let’s just marvel at this STARRED��:

“Argentine writer Fresan (The Invented Part) focuses his visionary latest on the inner life of author Herman Melville and the exploits of his tormented father, Allan. In the first section, set in December 1831, 12-year-old Herman sits by Allan’s deathbed as the elder Melvill (the second “e” was added later) recounts his illustrious revolutionary roots in Boston, promising marriage to the fetching Maria Gansevoort, ruinous career as a merchant, and mystical final adventure, in which he walks across the frozen Hudson River and hears “messages seeming to come from the Beyond.” Herman faithfully records it all—but cannot resist scribbling copious footnotes that embellish, interrupt, and underscore Allan’s narrative. In the book’s second part, Allan speaks for himself, describing his time in Venice, where he encountered Nicolás Cueva, a “pale young man with white hair” who claims to be undead and imparts forbidden knowledge, prefiguring the subject matter of Herman’s novels. The magisterial final act returns to Herman, who narrates his adventures among sailors and cannibals, lambastes his critics, and reunites with his father’s ghost. The narrative gestures at the kind of ever-expanding realm of imagination that the great author himself incarnated, and the kind Fresan’s Herman prophesies: “A book (a pure style of book, a book of pure style) where many things would end so many others could begin.” This is a masterpiece.”

When I worked on Melvil, I saw it as a natural extension of the themes from the “Part Trilogy,” but also a sort of fresh start for anyone approaching Fresán’s works for the first time. There’s something for everyone . . .

So buy both—or download a public domain version of the Melville, but spend the money on —and join us for 10 weeks of hijinks and ideas about how narratives are constructed and stories inherited.

Here’s the official schedule (all dates are for the week of the YouTube recording and podcast release; stay tuned for specifics):

Nov 4: Chapters 1-9 of The Confidence-Man��

Nov 11: Chapters 10-19 of The Confidence-Man��

Nov 18: Chapters 20-26 of The Confidence-Man��

Nov 25: Chapters 27-38 of The Confidence-Man��

Dec 2: Chapters 39-End of The Confidence-Man��

Dec 9: Melvill��(pgs 1-61)

Dec 16: Melvill��(pgs 62-123)

Dec 23: NO EPISODE

Dec 30: Melvill��(pgs 123-188)

Jan 6: Melvill��(pgs 189-245)

Jan 13: Melvill��(pgs 246-End)

See you on or in the podcast app (, ) of your choice!

A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his��Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—h������asits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light.��An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love,��Melvill��contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.

If you enjoy what you read below, you can from now until midnight PT on October 31st. (U.S. residents only, discount applied automatically at checkout.)

*

Now he knows he’s surrounded by everyone and everything, but he feels more alone than ever. Here, the perfect solitude of one outside but with no way out. Freezing but soon to burn, the fire of a fever already rising inside him. Speaking in smoldering, scorching tongues: sparking words that flame and name, far away and foreign to any warmth of home, to that home he’s dying—and where he’ll die—to return to.

Ready to be one more among so many memories. Wanting to be remembered like this. Epic in defeat. Broken but stronger than ever because there’s nothing left to break inside of him. Nothing to hide, all’s been revealed. All of him to everyone. Exposed to all and after all.

His name pronounced (mispronounced, emphasis on the ultimate syllable, foreignizing, Frenchifying it, making it more removed and, perhaps in that way, worthier of greater rejection) with a combination of shame and condemnation.

His name before a jury that would never dare find for him and, prejudging, would reach a unanimous verdict: “Young Wastrel of a Patrician Family,” and that’s the way—all-caps when written and��italics when spoken—people write about him in letters and speak about him at balls and banquets and masses.

Thus, his sentence to be served posthaste with no possibility of appeal or pardon. But here he is, still begging for someone to at least testify on his behalf and to write his story and to put him into words and, in a way, if not justify him then at least give him a modicum of redemption, a modicum of significance and purpose and reason to exist.

To be written.[1]

To be a being written (him being someone who more than once wished and dreamed he could write it all down and is already ready to transfer the acquittal of such a sentence) on empty and frozen pages like the waters he’s walking across now, barely keeping warm with the breathless breathing of dead supplications and unheard prayers. Messianic and miraculous, yes; but not like the Omnipotent and triumphant Creator on high but like a deity plummeting from higher still, in free fall, prisoner and fallen in his disgrace. His once divine voice no longer commanding, deafening, proof of love and respect but, trembling and weak, dwindling until it becomes a silent and flashing sacrifice he makes to himself. And, meanwhile, as he prepares his own execution ceremony, asking himself, without an answer, why (wasn’t this a distinctive trait of mortals? that almost last and willful gift of your whole life summarized in seconds and in reverse so you could understand it better or not bother? wasn’t that the explanation of the mystery of why so many people died with a Momma, Mommy, Ma on their lips?) all the people and things of this world that he loves or that don’t love him, the whole history of his story, now seemed to converge in this white darkness. Darkness he advances through, previously opaque and obscure and so late, suddenly without time and as if untethered from time, forever and ever, implacable and clean and transparent.

*

Record and file it, even if you prefer not to:

It’s the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1831, and Allan Melvill walks across the frozen waters of the Hudson River.

*

And, oh, when you walk on ice, on water in suspended animation, moods shift and thoughts are thought differently, Allan Melvill thinks. He thinks about how thoughts are thought with the most burning coolness. He thinks about how you think of anything other than that which, once deemed unthinkable, is, as such, impossible not to think about: about how that ice could break and about how, then, sinking to never again rise back up to that surface of superficialities to be ignored or attended to, you would cease to think forever. He thinks about the cold that freezes into crystals that bind together and break apart to separate and rise into the sky to then fall on the living and the dead in always different shapes.[2] With that cold that forces you to close your eyes to discover that, like certain lizards, you can see through your eyelids: his now almost sliced off by the freezing blade of the wild wind that whips his hair into disarray.

The same thing would happen (Allan Melvill thinks now, like he’s never thought before, thinking about what would be thought about or about what one would never dare to think about again but that, in the act refusing, one thinks about, thinking about how he once thought, afloat in a damning floating city of the damned) when we find a way to remain aloft, airborne and truly and joyfully displaced. When man can fly aboard marvelous machines (not just aerostatic balloons) whose sound will be like that of thousands of men clearing their throats after the morning’s first pipe. And with and in those machines, battles will be waged among the stars, and they’ll even make it to that fleeting moon, which, at this very moment, the clouds cover and uncover only to cover it again, and hurl down almost merciful white flakes of snow on Allan Melvill, as if they were soldiers laying siege to that defeated and humiliated deserter of the crucifying crusade of his own life.

But we’ve got a long way to go before that. Now, beneath his feet, that ice is the only solid thing left to hold him up, while around him and above him everything is thin ice in suspense, and the important thing is not to fly but to keep from falling or sinking or drowning.

Thus, in the dark, Allan Melvill remembers first; but then it’s as if he were dreaming, as if he were dreaming himself, or seeing himself from above. And he’d read somewhere that people who lived and wandered through landscapes of endless ices often felt that someone, their doppelgänger, was walking beside them (like that vanquished and enslaved memento-mori walking beside a triumphant Caesar or other victorious generals) and whispering in their ear the more than fifty names snow can be given, but not the names for each and every one of the infinite and always-different flakes that make up that snow and that, first, give the shape of snow to whatever they happen to come to rest upon and, then, to all the shapes they take after giving shape to the snow.

Then, suddenly, to the surprise and wonder of Allan Melvill, his whole life (his life as a father) is lived and relived, it melts away only to resolidify, like an invention invented by the boy who, though he would never theretofore have imagined it, has turned out to be the most inventive and imaginative of his children.[3]

[1] But no, not yet. It will be years before that happens: the sad masquerade of my father (there’s no need for me to wait for the revelations of a future yet-to-be-revealed science that will be dedicated to the interpretation of dreams and daydreams) rewritten wearing different masks like that of a riverway conman or that of a delusional captain or that of an incestuous decadent or that of a by-product of the Revolution or that of a more confusing than confused pale-gray colored scrivener, among many others. And it will be even longer before I comment on it from here: from the marine and oceanic depths of these pages en route to the last and final shore. Me holding and losing my breath; because nothing is more exhausting than swimming upstream, taking in air, in pursuit of the always forgetful founts of memory.

[2] Imagine a book always at high sea. A book adrift and drifting in swirling digressions and dodging not icebergs of small tips and massive bottoms but compact glaciers that have as much to show as to hide. A book that is nothing but a perpetual draft, because every book is never-ending. A book that is the draft of a sketch; because the smallest constructions can be completed by their original architects; while the largest, the truest, always leave the conclusion on the tallest rooftops to fix and secure there the posterity of whoever reads them beyond the one who wrote it.

My case, without looking any further.

[3] His light casts my shadow. The one is the eclipse of the other. I, at his feet, will tell what he, lying there, tells me. He is bound and I’m bound to him; and I trust that all the information that I’ll offer has, moreover, some literary and dramatic value, beyond the tragedy and sorrow of the events that keep that man prostrate here. Thus, I shall send my indefinable imagination (truly the most exact of sciences) off to hunt and track and catch the facts. And then, flay and eviscerate them, as once upon a time I did whales. To those whales that, as the years pass, seem to me more and more the product of youth’s liquid dream. Always taking care to keep their stomach gasses from bursting and covering me with guts and blood and excrement. And to keep from spilling that illuminating sperm of the truth that, once processed, will be irreconcilable as something that happened but, at the same time, will be read (will be read by the light of candles and oil derived from that same whale sperm) as something even truer than it ever was. Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.

Thus, everything that one invents ends up (or starts out) being true and, taking place, ends up having taken place to thereby begin to take place.

by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden is available in better bookstores everywhere on October 8, 2024, and available at 30% off (until 11/1/2024) on the .��

This week’s music is “” by The Kinks—a throwback to TMR season one.

Stay tuned for the Mulligan Stew schedule, which will drop this weekend. And get the !

You can purchase each of the books in the trilogy separately (,��,��, OR, if you don’t have them and are ready for the reading event of 2023, then get����for $40—approximately 30% off.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our�� and you can support us at ��and get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. And please rate us—wherever you get your podcasts!

��DZ����Ƿ�����,����and�� for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

This week’s music is “” by Veps.

Next week we’ll be finishing the book (full schedule), and you can watch it , or by subscribing to our .

You can purchase each of the books in the trilogy separately (,��,��, OR, if you don’t have them and are ready for the reading event of 2023, then get����for $40—approximately 30% off.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our�� and you can support us at ��and get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. And please rate us—wherever you get your podcasts!

��DZ����Ƿ�����,����and�� for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The large image associated with this post is from the U.S. Government and, I assume, copyrighted by them.

This week’s music is “” by Concrete Blonde

Next week we’ll be covering pages 644-700 (full schedule), and you can watch it , or by subscribing to our .

You can purchase each of the books in the trilogy separately (,��,��, OR, if you don’t have them and are ready for the reading event of 2023, then get����for $40—approximately 30% off.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our�� and you can support us at ��and get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. And please rate us—wherever you get your podcasts!

��DZ����Ƿ�����,����and�� for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.