The Ice Saints (2023)
a novel
An impoverished student Leon Kalan tries to understand his life through literary classics, finds a company of well off students and tries to ingratiate himself with them, but they use him as a pawn in a dangerous game.
“[…] a sincere portrait of the glamour and misery of a certain generation, that in its broadest strokes performs a balance between a moving meditation on how to keep faith in the wasteland and a warning against the pitfalls of excessive enthusiasm.”
“While it may appear we are reading a type of a bildungsroman, the true core of the story is revealed to be precisely the impossibility of bildung, of development as such, the experience of being stuck, the predestination, wholly conditioned on class. […] a well thought out and perfectly crafted book.”
“To float around the town as a phantom, untouched by the world, which existed past him and would remain the same even if Leon were never there, struck him as effrontery. Should the world not owe him something just for being there to observe it? Who else would think of the shape of these houses in this exact way, who would experience such a revolt of the sun against the unmoving cold, who would listen to the shuffling of boots on concrete, smell the stone and the dried leaves, who else would in this momentary constellation of space in the square so profoundly and so desolately want?”
Pixels (2021)
a novel
A novel told through an intricately connected web of novellas, exploring individual autonomy and cognitive sovereignty in the face of designed and self imposed systems of control, seeking liberation in the making of art, with a narrator unlike any in the history of literature.
“The novel is without a doubt a masterfully written work, which is aware that modern reality, as it is, is difficult to summarize in words, but it approaches this goal with the openness of the narrative as well as diverse and imperfect points of view, and it supports observation with a dense network of intertextual references and philosophically based reflections. Everything is reinforced by thoughtful, filigree polished language, which often borders on poetic sentences. In short, a literary conglomerate cut out for the present.”
“They huddled closer. The proximity of their bodies and their minds facing in the same direction ripped the cover of received meanings from the world. Wherever they turned, in unison, as if their mirror neurons were caught in a quantum entanglement and firing each muscle segment in complete synchronicity, without delay, the form was shedding its narrative, the light was equalized to the average of frequencies, the night drank the colors of light, the fragile earth aerated the cover of asphalt and each lighted window curved the foundation of the entire horizon.
The ordered blocks of buildings, like the first megaliths from the dawn of humanity, were already calling out to the morning, shaking off the tangle of print and cables that held them fastened to the ground, each finding in a star its own opening in the sky and sending there the signal of reach, transmitting from their foundations the awareness of their mighty drift on magma, the immensity of the plate and the density of the radiation beneath. The soles of the group’s feet touching the ground acted as the necessary boundary between dissipation and hardening – how all solidity flowed, how the arch of the atmosphere caressed the vacuum –, their minds were the domain of elemental forces, they were beings, they were beaming, and the dreams of those within the cone of their perception took on a gentler light.”
In/Half (2013)
a novel
European Union Prize for Literature 2016
published in Amsterdam (De Geus, 2017), London (Oneworld, 2018), Athens (Vakxikon, 2022), ...
In the near future, the world has been torn apart. America is in anarchy, with drones enforcing restrictions on public assembly. Europe is fighting China in Africa, and all news of the conflict are tightly controlled. Postmodern Japan, beset by serial killers and radioactivity, struggles to rekindle the memory of history. Three characters - an addict theater director staging a play through heartbreak, a war minister whose son has joined the front lines, and a poet drawing a dangerously large crowd to her reading - are navigating an uncertain, unknowable world through different political landscapes, literary styles, and conceptions of the self to reach the depths of what makes us human.
Who can mend the tear?
“A novel that repays careful reading for some brilliant set-pieces, for its believably flawed characters, and for its bone-dry, even cynical, wit.”
“Sustains its ghostly, ethereal tone and will be appreciated by readers looking for a mind-bending puzzle.”
“In/Half is an overwhelming vision of the future ... and shows an exceptional writer at work.”
“On the 6th of August 1991 at 16:00:12 GMT Tim Berners-Lee, an independent researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), made a short announcement in the Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext about the World Wide Web (WWW) project. With this announcement the Web became a public service. The majority of modern historians (sic) set the date of the 6th of August 1991 as the beginning of a socio-geo-political-ideolusionary anomaly known as the Great Cacophony.
Some modern historians (sic) have reservations about that date and consider 1 January 1983 as the starting date of the Great Cacophony, when the TCP/IP protocol (the infrastructure of what would later be the web) replaced the NCP protocol and allowed for the combining of separate networks (ARPANET, NSFNET…) into a single global network: the internet.
Still other modern historians (sic) argue that the Great Cacophony began in Canada on 22 October 1925, when the Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent application for a transistor. Historians of this persuasion, who consider bare technological innovation as the sole driving force of history, then move the date down through the past – Charles Babbage, differential engine, in 1833; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a calculating machine based on the Staffelwalze (‘stepped drum’), 1672; Blaise Pascal, the Pascaline mechanical calculator, 1642, etc. etc. etc. all the way back to the Roman abacus, which was used by the Sumerians as early as 2400 BCE and which should therefore more aptly be called the Sumerian abacus.
Historians of yet another persuasion, for whom technological invention in and of itself represents nothing particularly earthshattering, demand in the leaps, twists and turns of history also the presence of human beings and their relationship with material, which incidentally pushes them into the area of metaphysics and the subjective position, which means that few serious people take them very seriously. These historians agree that the internet or the WWW represents a major shift in the area of human communication, but that the Great Cacophony cannot of course be placed so late in human history, and they prefer to locate its beginning in Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press (1444) or in Cai Lun’s (Han dynasty) perfection of the papermaking process (c. 105 BCE) or even at the outset of writing itself (cuneiform, Mesopotamian Sumerians, c. 5300 BCE).
Modern historians (sic) of the fourth persuasion, whom nobody really considers to be historians at all and who themselves mostly prefer not to be thought of as historians, and who it would probably be better to call modern time-thinkers (as they themselves say, instead of the titles that others have hung on them – modern obscurantists, quasi-savants, esosophoterics), consider ‘the Great Cacophony’ to be a superfluous expression, a banal neologism for a concept that was developed long before the dawn of the third millennium by Édouard Le Roy, Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: the concept of the noosphere, the sphere of human thought that arose the moment homo sapiens first looked at a thing and said, this thing is, in addition to what it is, also a thing and by the grace of scientific classification transformed himself, poof!, from homo sapiens into homo sapiens sapiens, a modern, extra-aware human being.”
translated by Jason Blake
