Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek

  It’s been a while since I’ve read any of Slavoj Žižek’s work一by my reckoning, 2020 when I reread Welcome to the Desert of the Real in the hopes that it would help with my Master’s thesis for some reason. I’m revisiting some of his work via this short book of essays, Zero Point, which has proved serendipitous to some of my more recent reading memories, which I’ll circle back to shortly.

Zero Point is divided essentially in two sections. The first set of essays deals primarily with the (re)rise of Donald Trump from a Marxist-psychoanalytical lens. Of the early essays, the most interesting claim I thought Žižek presented was how the purported left has fed into the rise of Trump particularly by capitalizing on his flaws. Consider, for example, how late night comedians have routinely pointed to Trump’s personal and moral flaws. They’re not wrong about their assessment, but Žižek suggests that their form of critique actually exacerbated his supporters’ feelings of identification. Essentially, the argument runs that people identify more with others’ failures than with their successes, so that by highlighting all of Trump’s flaws, people came to see him as more reflective of their interests (while that factually remains untrue). 

Some of Žižek’s claims about Trump are frustrating and run counter to “common sense” understandings of political phenomena. In particular, Žižek objects to calling Trump a fascist and instead suggests that Trump is an extreme liberal on the grounds that he prioritizes letting big business do as they please. I’m not sure I agree, especially when considered in light of Trump’s tariffs. I also find some of Žižek’s claims about the Right and Left dubious. At one point he points to what appears to me a misinterpretation of the Left. I forget if he suggests a contradiction because the Left supports both Israel-Ukraine or Palestine-Russia; whichever the combination was, I think he’s wrong on that front. In other respects, Žižek is prescient. For instance, in one essay he predicts that the United States is setting up Iran to be their next enemy and tease war. And, well, here we are.

The second and more substantial section of the book is an exploration of the conflict in Israel and Palestine. Like the conflict, the inception of this Žižek collection requires some contextualizing. In 1949, a bedouin girl between the ages of 10-15 was gang raped and murdered by twenty men in the Israeli Defence Force. In 2017, Palestinian author Adania Shibli wrote the book Minor Detail based on the event, which I read by coincidence in 2024. In 2023, Shibli was awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis but the Frankfurt Book Fair ceremony at which she was to be honoured was “postponed” and then canceled with the excuse to not overshadow the then-recent Hamas attack against Israel.

Žižek’s collection of essays here is a response to these events, namely because he was delivering a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair when he was heckled and ushered offstage. That piqued my curiosity. The essay is replicated in full at the end of the book and, honestly, it’s a lot less controversial than I expected. Essentially, following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th, Žižek suggests that we ought to also consider the plight of the Palestinians. He was told that this was not the time to talk about it.

So, when is the right time to talk about it?

Arguably, Žižek essentially takes a middle-ground. He opposes antisemitism, of course. He also opposes the slaughter of Palestinians. There are some controversial claims, like how Netanyahu (whom Žižek refers to as a war criminal) wants and requires war, how he is happy to have Hamas as an enemy that justifies all his own horrors. At the core, he suggests that mutual recognition is required to move forward, but that there are factors that obscure that possibility. Paradox runs through the text: Germany reinscribes antisemitism in the unequivocal support it provides to Israel while the United Nations, precisely because they have no power and are not formally accountable, provide the hope of speaking the truth. Solutions are not forthcoming.

I appreciate that Žižek has a degree of focus in this collection, even if his usual topic-hops still crop up. What is a bit of an issue is that Žižek repeats himself across the essays, even going so far as to repeat some anecdotes word for word (e.g. the one about Biden embarrassing himself by claiming to have seen pictures of beheaded children following Hamas’ October 7th attack only for Israel to admit that no such pictures ever existed). Žižek has always had a bit of a repetitious streak; across books, including this one, he repeats the same jokes to illustrate points. The repetitiousness becomes more noticeable in a short collection. Yet, for all that repetition, there is very little by way of definitive, declarative, unambiguous conclusions. The essays do not feel actionable in the same way that more polemical texts sometimes do.

I suppose I’m also ambivalent. Žižek’s work often inspires reflection, and he’s not someone I can wholeheartedly endorse nor dismiss out of hand. His perspective is worth considering and, for a few hours’ worth of reading, Zero Point offers a reasonable, if repetitious focus. It’s contemporary and timely—a blessing and a curse for a work of philosophy. 

Happy reading!

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra

There are times when the length of a review is a clear indicator of a reviewer’s feelings. I know from my own experience that my lengthiest reviews are the books I most adore or the books that inspire the most ire. This leaves me in an odd position for Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet, a novel about which I took precisely zero notes but which I nonetheless see as essentially perfect.

Despite being published a mere four years ago (!), Chilean Poet already feels timeless, eternal, classic. It inspires a feeling I haven’t had towards contemporary novels very often, though Zadie Smith’s White Teeth comes to mind. I’m trying to identify why Zambra’s work feels like a classic already and I think it comes down to the fundamentals of novel writing just being done extremely well. Chilean Poet has a flexible, lively style that adapts itself to the purpose of scenes. The characters are all fleshed out beautifully and they feel authentic and relatable, even and especially in their flaws—at the core, they are all likable. The plot and structure provide the right balance of forward momentum whilst not abandoning the reflective interiority of the characters. There’s also something about the omniscience of the narrator that speaks to the timelessness of the tale.

It could be argued that the novel has three main characters: Gonzalo, Carla, and Vicente. Gonzalo and Carla are teenage lovers sneakily touching each other under a pancho who inevitably break up—partly because of Gonzalo’s love of poetry and Carla’s complete disinterest. Roughly six years later, the two reconnect and Gonzalo quickly and correctly deduces that Carla has a son, Vicente. The following six years are the flourishing of the trio’s domestic life, which is replete with the beauty of small moments and the quiet tragedies that undercut our bliss.

Zambra’s capacity for selection, for focus, is stunning. Each scene, even the quotidian, is critical. For instance, there’s a scene in which Gonzalo and Vicente are caught off guard by a clerk to name their bond. Awkwardly, they describe themselves as “friends” and then have a discussion about the connotations of the word step-father in different languages (stepfather in Spanish holds a diminutive). There’s a tragic moment where Carla miscarries and it sets off a sequence of events that feels (narratively satisfyingly) inevitable in the way only carefully constructed novels achieve. There’s a whole sequence in which Gonzalo reads his poems to Carla, who is unimpressed, and then plagiarizes poems from other poets, who impress her. He gets caught in a lie about publishing a book and he commits to the falsehood, which also forces him to withhold the information that destroys his relationship with Carla: he has been accepted into a PhD program in New York and it is time to leave.

Each of the characters are so distinctive and beautiful and true in all of their weird little details. Vicente, for instance, needs to be weaned off of his addiction to cat food when he’s six years old. The interiority of the characters makes them so rich and likable. Seeing their inner tensions is insightful about how people are while also being compelling in terms of the conflict. In the final movement of the book, Zambra reunites Gonzalo and Vicente after years of separation. The two discover a great deal of experiential overlap, both being passionate about poetry. In the final sequence, there’s a tension of whether the two will ultimately reconcile. There are some truly excellent lines of dialogue where they offer barbs alongside praise, and sometimes the comments are both praise and disparagement at the same time. Their fates are left ambiguous, and it feels so beautiful to see their own uncertainties emerge. The last page of the book, without ruining anything, is mischievously evasive, which gives readers a kind of uneasy optimism about their futures.

Gonzalo, Vicente, and Carla are my favourite characters. There is, however, a fourth main character—Pru. She’s an American journalist in her thirties that finds herself in Chile for a story following a messy breakup with her girlfriend. Her section gives more insight into Vicente, of course, but also she ends up on a story where she interviews all kinds of Chilean poets. Zambra has a real knack for being able to describe literary culture. Again, it’s riddled with tensions of people who like each other’s work but whose jealousy prevents them from open admiration and they pretend to read each other’s work to seem enlightened but also are trying to eschew everything in the name of a new generation of poetry. The whole culture of poetry is depicted as a bit of a farce and, like his character, it feels completely real.

I think it’s really hard to be funny in literature. Zambra, though, has great timing and great turns of phrase. There’s a playfulness to the text that gives it a light touch. The fact that the tone isn’t overly serious makes some of the dramatic moments hit that much harder. Who would have imagined that the simple act of rearranging a fridge magnet would have such a heartbreaking quality? (Incidentally, Zambra explores some translingual meditations, one of which is about how adjectives in Spanish are gendered—except for triste (sadness), implying that sadness knows no gender or bounds). 

Chilean Poet has some elements of the Künstlerroman tradition (novels that focus on the artistic development of its main character from their youth to adulthood). Think: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or perhaps The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, we are treated to poems that the characters have written. Particularly in the final movement, the poems once again elevate the conflict and the insight into the characters. The commentary that runs alongside the poems and offers to the audience moments of such wonderful tenderness.

Against John Keats, I’d argue that beauty and truth are sometimes mutually exclusive. Not so here. The book is beautiful and true and touching. It’s gorgeous and sad and funny and moving. It had everything I would want from a genuine classic and offered, on top of that, surprise. I adored it. I hope at some point I’ll read this one again and feel the same magic and the same heartbreaking beauty the next time around.

Happy reading!

Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker

  I continue to find myself compelled to read books about video games and people reflecting on their experiences. As such, I’ve most recently read Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker. The book is exactly as it professes: it’s a collection of Drucker’s memories and experiences of games.

The tone is mostly light and jokey—Drucker is a comedian, after all—as Drucker recounts anecdotes like showing up to his crush’s house in a homemade Super Mario 3 costume. There are some overtly comedic interludes, like a series of bad summaries of famous games or mock Steam reviews. There are also some moments of surprising tenderness, too. In one chapter, Drucker tells the story of his sister having a party at their house and his video games being stolen. His dad, at this point in the book, had been continually described as distant and uncomprehending to his son’s passion for games. When Drucker cried over his stolen copy of Street Fighter 2, his dad drove him around town and spoke to store employees, putting his pride on the line and asking or begging for a discount to replace his crying son’s game.

The most powerful chapter, in my view, is the one that got the most serious. Perhaps it’s because so much of the book is written in an overtly comedic tone that when Drucker describes the loss of his friend and their connection over the game Nier Automata, it hits hard. His friend was in a horrific car accident that killed her boyfriend and left her with serious challenges for the rest of her life. She developed other health complications and passed away. Drucker juxtaposes the story of their friendship and the loss of her alongside the existential themes of Nier Automata, a game that has 26 endings and, if you get the best of them, asks you to delete your save file. It’s a game about loss that serves as a tragic partner to Drucker’s memoir.

Granted, books like this are partially nostalgia bait. When I hear Megaman, my ears perk up, when someone references Silent Hill 2 I feel that special kind of magic that brings me back to my attic bedroom in Kingston, navigating the unsettling foggy streets. I recognize that my extant interest in games draws me to books like this and it’s okay to read a bit of fluff once in a while, right?

What was kind of cool is that Mike Drucker was unknown to me before I started the book, but has actually had a pretty prolific career. It was kind of cool to hear about how his writing career took off. He wrote for Saturday Night Live, he worked for Nintendo doing localization work (so cool!), he did reviews for IGN, did stand-up comedy, worked on a few other shows, including Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and others. A surprising side effect reading about video games was getting to hear a bit more about the process of developing a career in both comedy writing and video games.

I don’t really have a ton of commentary for this one. Good Game, No Rematch is a collection of accessible, generally humorous, stories. It felt like a light read and it was a nice trip down memory lane for myself while learning about Drucker, too.

Happy reading! Insert coins to continue.

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

  This review is a hard one. I think Discontent by Beatriz Serrano captures a very specific experience and distinct voice. Specifically, the novel’s protagonist Marisa embodies the directionless ennui of modern corporate life. She’s a marketing creative crushed by the lifelessness of the workplace and is cynical about all of her coworkers and the whole “being employed” thing. She has Master’s students that look up to her, from whom she pilfers ideas and treats with disdain as they scramble for scraps of praise. She skips out for hours at lunch time to go to museums. She dreads the company retreat and greens out in order to avoid a team-building paintball game.

Serrano’s writing is competent. Other than some suspension of disbelief issues towards the end and a couple of structural issues, I don’t have any major issues with the writing itself. It’s descriptive and it’s tonally consistent. The dialogue rings as plausibly true. There’s a sarcasm to the narrator’s voice that delivers some engaging quips, my favourite of which being a reflection on a Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights: “Bosch is off somewhere fucking a hydrangea, and I’m checking my work e-mail” (26). The main character is irreverent and potentially likeable.

Here’s my issue, though: it’s hard to elevate corporate ennui into an edifying artistic experience. Marisa is relatable, but her experiences aren’t particularly distinct. She goes home and watches YouTube videos while she eats dinner; she tweets and retweets causes she supports and overthinks her online presence; she has friends with whom she falls out of touch and then creeps on social medial; she has a neighbour with whom she has sex and has an unspoken intimacy; she does as little as possible for work and has that kind of existential ennui over major life decisions. The trouble with writing something so true-to-life is that it leaves the question: is this kind of existence worthy of being art? Serrano describes YouTube videos that I’ve seen; do I need to watch a fictional character watch a YouTube video? Does that just replicate my own boredom and doomscrolling? A similar issue that plagues the works of Douglas Coupland: it is so referential, so allusive, so intense in its pursuit of realism that it keeps me rooted in the banality of the world and runs the risk of getting dated quickly.

The novel is more or less a series of vignettes, loosely tied together with the looming work conference. One chapter is devoted to Marisa’s trip to the Bosch exhibit. One chapter outlines her relationship with her neighbour and their intimate routines. One chapter sees Marisa encounter an old friend with whom she’d fallen out of touch; the two immediately reconnect and have a drunken night on the town that actually establishes one of the book’s few tender moments. Marisa’s friend Elena serves as an interesting contrast to her. Elena has constructed a new self, while Marisa feels trapped. Elena has the freedom to pursue art, essentially by getting a boob job and playing up her sexuality to get men to pay for her life, while Marisa is floundering creatively. 

Marisa’s encounter with Elena compels her to finally open a box of artifacts left behind following the likely suicide of her coworker Rita. That’s another thread that runs throughout the book: this spectre of Rita. Marisa describes a connection with this other cynical employee, who looms as what Marisa might become. When Marisa opens the box, it’s revealed that Rita had a notebook on which she made artistic renderings of her coworkers, including one that doesn’t seem particularly flattering of Marisa. I’m not sure the payoff really happens for that—but also, I suppose that’s like life; sometimes we’re adrift and there isn’t really much of a narrative payoff.

That being said, the book does have a narrative culmination at the work retreat. Serrano really takes Marisa in a dark direction at the climax. At the best of times, Marisa isn’t particularly likable and this is where the book really took a turn for me. Marisa has a quick hookup with a paintball employee. Okay, whatever, I guess her and her boyfriend aren’t official. Then, she’s put on the spot to deliver a presentation about creativity. In a panic, Marisa decides that her plan is to drug all of her coworkers. She mixes MDMA into all of their lemonade and not only did it make her irredeemably insufferable to me, but it also stretched the limits of the plausibility. Would a generally normal but disaffected employee go that far?

That takes us through the first section of the book, which struck me as a surprise because we only had 20 pages left to go. This is where the structural problem emerges for me a little bit. Section two is about 15 pages. Section 3 is about 7 pages. This might come back to the ‘true-to-life’ aspect of the book; we have loose threads, tacked on vignettes, little experiments.

Even so, the second section of the book is actually kind of fun, if implausible. It’s a series of e-mails sent by the company to its different teams. As it turns out, someone who got drugged had to be hospitalized, and now there’s an investigation. The e-mails discussing the specifics keeps popping up and Marisa’s out of office autoresponse keeps popping up. It’s kind of funny because the conversation then also brings up the discussion of taking Marisa off the e-mail so that her out of office e-mail stops coming through.

The final section is an epilogue of sorts. It’s a description of what happened to Marisa when she returned from her vacation. I won’t spoil the specifics, but something pretty horrific happens. There was a set-up for it, so it feels like a reasonable payoff, but it comes across maybe more comedic or lighthearted than I was prepared for it to be. It rings a little false; the closing lines, in particular, offer a saccharine and overly clean reflection that makes all of our boredom and existential doubt seem trivial. Marisa narrates. “I’ve figured it out. In the end, all we need in life is someone who loves us, a bed with nice big pillows, a  few cans of cold beer, and tomatoes that still taste like something” (177). It seems like Marisa reverts to conventionality—a response to the horror of banal routines that itself lacks imagination. The ending just doesn’t quite hit.

Overall, I didn’t mind Discontent. It’s worth a quick read, but I’m not sure it really elevates our boring everyday lives into something more worthwhile. I’ve read some conflicting views on this one; some people praise the humour and relatability of the book and how perfect it is for describing corporate life. Others have a much more negative view of Marisa and the tone of the text. Let’s just say it’s messy.

Happy reading!

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff

  You are reading your review of Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff. You wrote this review following a two week pause after closing the final page and trying to process. You didn’t get far. Well, you did. You got through the over 600 page sprawl in what felt like record time. Rarely do you find a book that has such a lively and compelling voice and structure. You have very little idea of what the book is about, of its purpose. Yet, you found it weirdly compelling.

Here’s what you understand:

You are on a plane reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff. You’ve been enlisted to adapt this novel into a film and you’re excited but you’re not really sure how to make it happen because Your Name Here is a novel, in part, about you reading it. It’s also a collection of e-mails (real? tbd) between Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff, sometimes using fictional names, talking about their ideas for Your Name Here. Your Name Here is also about a novel Helen Dewitt is writing about a fictional writer, Rachel Zozanian, who is also struggling to write a book and e-mailing an irreverent Hunter S. Thompson type and also trying to get her older novel, Lotteryland, adapted into a film. There are also sections of Lotteryland reproduced in full within the text.

Okay, I’m going to give up the ‘you’ here because it’s going to spiral more than I’m prepared to do here.

A lot of the concepts of the book are fun and thoughtful. The use of second person is a clever device that is offered with some metacommentary (there are different ‘you’s—something I’ve thought about before—general ‘you’s, specific ‘you’s, singular, plural—or in Helen DeWitt’s conception, a European second person). In case it’s unclear, the work is extraordinarily esoteric and erudite. The tone is playful and referential, drawing on the works of authors from Italo Calvino to Tolkien to Theodor Adorno. The filmic references are peppered throughout, too—though the literary allusions landed more with me.

As I’ve sort of referenced already, the plot of the book is a bit sprawling and muddled. What really holds it together (if it’s held together) is a kind of raw energy and irreverent voice. I kept turning the page and turning the page, drawn forward by the language alone. There’s an excellent section in which the book outlines classic literary tropes: Chekhov’s gun, The MacGuffin, Plot Vouchers, and Unexposed Contents. The self-awareness of the book can’t help but make me feel like I’ve missed something. The book is hinting to and/or bludgeoning me that I’ve missed something critical. Towards the end of the book, I get another pang of that absence:

There are people who don’t see the need for a false passport until it’s too late. There are people who don’t see the need for credit cards under a variety of aliases until, again, it’s too late. These are friendless orphans, alone in the world. These are the very people who also see no need for a shell company in the Channel Islands until, once again, it is too late. They may, perhaps, see The Importance of Being Earnest and giggle at the jokes---perhaps they even see it at an early age---but the wisdom of the work is lost on them. (592) 

This passage comes up with less than twenty pages to go and I felt that despair: it’s too late. I’ve been lured in and strung along and now it’s too late for me to escape. It makes me think of that moment in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (oh oops, turns out they are also referenced in the text) when they contemplate how there must have been a moment that they could have said no before their untimely demise. I got that same feeling of mourning; I was swept away not realizing I was being trapped.

The whole book felt like a series of false starts (c.f. The “ultimately unsatisfying” If on a winter’s night a traveler) but before you realize it’s not going anywhere, you can’t escape. There are a number of warnings presented as interludes throughout. After the first twenty pages:

You still don’t know what’s going on. The fat guy is back. You and the girl get out of your seats, the guy wrestles his bulk to the window, you and the girl return to your seats. The girl is reading an adult edition of Harry Potter, not Harry Potter plus leather fetishist lesbian triangles, just same old same old with a marginally less juvenile cover, which means this could not be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. You return to Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. To your left, the girl murmurs softly: Beckett!
          You glance, startled, to your left; implausible as it may seem to argue that the unspeakable Potter “gets people reading” so that they can ultimately move on to Murphy and Malone Dies, it’s surely infinitely less plausible to imagine a reading trajectory that starts with Waiting for Godot and moves on to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when the reader is old enough to appreciate it.
[…]
         
What’s going on? Is everyone writing PKD spin-offs these days? Is this something everyone knows about but you, something you would have known if you had taken out a slash-and-burn trial subscription to the New Yorker or Harper’s or the New York Review of Books? If so, you wish you’d known sooner and soberer. You like keeping up with new literary trends, but if everyone’s doing it you’d rather read an example that doesn’t involve revisiting Calvino’s ultimately unsatisfactory If on a winter’s night a traveler (24)

After 275 pages:

“You’re reading Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt. You’re extremely aggrieved. Instead of the wealth of stories you loved in the last book there are narrative strands which you find hard to follow. Also, you’ve always admired Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a real tour-de-force with 11 first chapters of novels in a wide range of genres. DeWitt just keeps bringing in new chapters of the same book within a book; a writer who is clearly no match for Calvino for sheer inventiveness has no business casting aspersions on Our Man in San Remo. Meanwhile Lotteryland is the only part of the book that makes you wonder what happens next, you get involved in the story only to be thrown back into the surrounding narrative chaos. You find yourself hoping yet another flimsy pretext will be found to introduce yet another totally superfluous second-person narrator, an anonymous reader, nothing too fancy, who becomes engrossed in Lotteryland, by the recluse Zozanian” (275).

After 475 pages:

You’re on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on. Zozanian has embarked on a book with your character, so now we have a book-within-a-book-within-a-book-within-a and you seem to be the minimost perestroikist in a nest of Gorbidolls. A cast of extraneous characters seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Rabbits in a Viagra trial. Rabbits in a Viagra trial designed to tackle the freak four-hour erection problem. Who are these people? What are they doing here? It’s like the finale of Blazing fucking Saddles. (475)

What I can say is that, probably more than any other book, Your Name Here is consistently aware of its audience. DeWitt and Gridneff know exactly what you’re thinking and pre-empt you at every turn. It’s pretty incredible that they can anticipate and craft your journey like that.

Of course, the book is a blend of styles. It’s equal parts literary and irreverent. That, too, is reflected on. The fictional author Rachel Zozanian comments on her desire to “write something clinical and cold, like manet’s olympia. she wants to place manet’s olympia next to aristide bruant dans son cabaret” (434). There are then lists of prices for different goods that she purchased or would like to purchase.

In fact, one of the major threads of the book is exposing the finances behind the art. There’s a whole sequence in the book of e-mail exchanges asking about payment. After selling information to a tabloid writer, Ilya Grindeff’s alter ego / character, a character is seeking payment and there are dozens of pages trying to locate and retrieve the cheque she was promised. Meanwhile, in Lotteryland, wealth and prizes are distributed at random and the character is doing ‘luck checks’ on a lotto machine. Meanwhile. Rachel is seemingly sleeping with men for money, or maybe writing about a character who does so, or maybe is writing about her years in University. I’m not really sure, to be honest. The focus on finances is a clever commentary on art. They foreground all of the illusions we like to paint over with the final product. The work of art independent of market forces serves to reinforce the idea that art has a special status, when in fact it’s always grounded in economics. Essentially, we get thrown into some pretty interesting Marxist discourse: is debating over payment an artistic experience? Is art ever free of the tether of feeding the artist that makes it? These kinds of questions guide the work: “If there is a disappearance or breakdown it’s important to have a line of credit; it was not clear that books should be bought on the small number of credit cards acquired since the last purge” (434).

The work is driven in interesting ways, too, by desire. There are unspoken desires that permeate throughout each of the narrative threads. What is most compelling to me, though, was some (shockingly) some of the authors’ commentary on Tolkien. Early on, the book presents a case for writing a book that incorporates Arabic; the goal is to build understanding between the United States and the Middle East (the book is set in the early 2000s during the height of the war on terror). They comment on the way that Tolkien invented languages and included fragments of invented languages. The end result of this is not that Tolkien has produced knowledge for his audience, but instead desire: desire to learn more. They want to do something similar with Arabic, and there are Arabic lessons in the book, complete with alphabet translators. I loved this idea, that the novel will somehow produce desire to know more about the Middle East (and beyond, obviously).

Your Name Here deals with a lot of complex issues and makes unlikely leaps. These leaps are what kept me reading; I loved the odd little meditations. If you’re looking to connect with characters, I’d say your opportunities are pretty limited. If you’re looking for plot…also, reasonably lacking. Style the book has in spades. The philosophical and aesthetic exploration in the text is really compelling. 

The book has so much going for it. I loved a lot of it. It was maybe “ultimately unsatisfactory”---but that’s by design. I was never going to get a story. I was never going to get an ending. Even the ending offered feels like a new start. I honestly don’t know what to make of this book; it will both linger with me and not. What I can say is it was definitely a unique and therefore worthwhile experience.

You’ve been meaning to read it; you probably should. What a feat!