Reader has the intention of writing a novel but cannot disentangle the protagonist from himself (or from the author, for that matter). Having “no life” to speak of, what results is a curiously structured outpouring of cultural detritus: snippets of literary anecdote or quotation, curious fragments of biography, unusual names, scholarly relics and little-known details cataloguing the misfortunes and travails of the artistic life: madness, illness, poverty, failure, neglect, affront, suicide, frailty, decline, calamity and death. Eventually we sense that this often very funny collage of ruin is Reader's deflected autobiography: unable to face his own impending mortality he looks away always at the last moment yet locates the unspeakable precisely by avoiding it. This book is both formally experimental and very moving.
(July 2013)
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