Mar 192012
 

Basara_Svetislav

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The following excerpt is from Svetislav Basara’s novel, The Cyclist Conspiracy, his second to be made available in English. The novel is translated from the Serbian by Randall A. Major and published by Open Letter Books. Basara has published more than 20 works and has earned every major Serbian literary award, including the prestigious NIN Prize. The Cyclist Conspiracy is a collection of apocryphal texts dedicated to the secret of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, a mystical sect whose members gather in their dreams and spend their waking lives riding bicycles, creating havoc, altering the course of human events, and meditating on the form of the bicycle. This excerpt follows one unwitting member, L. Loentze, as he is initiated into the Order and introduced to his new post as the chief architect of the Evangelical’s Grand Insane Asylum.

—Taylor Davis-Van Atta

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L. Loentze: The Madness of Architecture–The Architecture of Madness

1.

When, huffing and puffing, the messenger of the Grand Master delivered the orders for me to write a paper dedicated to the study of space, I remembered a few details of a letter which I was sent many years ago by Dr. Çulaba Çulabi. In spite of that, I found myself in a dilemma. I knew that a generalized, practically undefined topic does not demand exactness or credibility, that the goal of research is purely subjective and that it will lead me in quite a different direction, revealing things to me that I do not want to find out, just as the appearance of Dr. Çulabi sent my life in a direction I was not expecting, at a time when I still ran a very profitable engineering office, had a lovely house, and respectable friends with whom I played tennis on Sundays. Dr. Çulabi showed up one day in my studio. He said that he, Çulabi, was a representative of the IMPEX COMMERCE Company; he had heard praises of my work and wanted to hire me for a big job that his company had taken over. If I thought his name was strange, the job he proposed to me was even stranger. Namely, with a deadline of ten months, I was to draw up the plans for a Circular Psychoanalytic Center with 15,000 offices; then the plans for the interior of Napoleon’s study (in 450 copies), and finally a plan for the torture chamber of the Holy Inquisition, complete with the devices for torture. I said that it was a really big job and that I had to think about it. Çulabi had nothing against it. His rather strange appearance did not fill me with confidence. I checked the business records of the IMPEX Company and I found out that it was reputable, and also that Çulabi was indeed a representative of the company.

The next time Çulabi visited me, I told him that I would accept the job. I offered him some cognac (which he refused) and coffee (which he accepted), and then we got down to signing the contracts. That was the last time I saw Dr. Çulabi in the waking world. But that same evening when I fell asleep, I dreamed of him in an unfamiliar town; he was standing under the eaves in front of a dilapidated house, and he was obviously waiting for someone because he kept glancing at his watch. When I approached him, he said that I was late. He took me into an empty tavern (I remember that it said EVROPA in peeling black letters above the door), he offered me a seat, and then he talked to me for a long time about Byzantium, bicycles, real and false eternity, and I remember that I was horribly bored in my dream. He also told me that the contract we signed in reality was really important, but that I had been hired because of a much more important job, for the repair of a cathedral that had been damaged during the war by some Nazi commandos. Then he told me that, from that night onward, I was a member of a certain sect, the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross. I argued with him and said that no one recognizes contracts made in dreams, and that I had no intention whatsoever of being a member of any kind of sect. Çulabi smiled mysteriously. “It isn’t up to you,” he said. “You don’t choose, you’re chosen. But you just don’t get it, I see. So, tomorrow you’ll break two timepieces.”

When I awoke, I remembered the dream in detail and laughed: a dream is just a dream. Still, I was upset, and I could not figure out why. In front of my office, I looked at my watch. It had stopped. I tore it off my hand and – beside myself with anger – slammed it down on the sidewalk, remembering Çulabi’s threat in my dream at that very instant. I went into a nearby bar, drank two cognacs, gathered my thoughts and went to my office. For a while everything was all right. Concentrating on my work, I forgot all about the dream and the broken watch. However, the wall clock began to chime twelve. Seven, eight, nine . . . I counted silently, attempting to overcome the rage that was growing in me. I did not manage; I grabbed an ashtray from the desk and flung it. The glass on the clock broke, the pendulum stopped swinging. My fellow workers looked at me like I was a madman, which I was to some extent. I mumbled a few words of apology, said that I was not feeling well, that I was nervous and exhausted, and I left the office. Later, when I had come to my senses, I called my doctor on the telephone, described what had happened to me (saying nothing of the dream), and he recommended a certain Dr. Schtürner to me, a reputable psychiatrist, a student of Carl Gustav Jung. He also told me not to worry, that my spiritual health was all right, and that the whole thing was most likely the consequence of psychological exhaustion.

The next day, I did not go to my office. I had an appointment with Dr. Schtürner at eleven in the morning. I was rather upset because that night I dreamed Çulabi in that same town; he was leaning against a linden tree (in full bloom), laughing out loud and saying nothing. I thought that, regardless of the financial consequences, I should break the contract with IMPEX COMMERCE, but I changed my mind: that would be a sure sign that I had gone completely mad; I cannot break contracts with customers just be­­cause I am dreaming their representatives. But I decided to tell Dr. Schtürner everything.

“Yes,” Dr. Schtürner told me a while later in his office, “such things do happen. However, there is no cause for alarm. Dreams are a practically unstudied area. The unconscious knows much more than the conscious. For the unconscious, temporal-spatial limitations do not play any kind of role. And you see, preoccupied by work and social obligations, you have very little time for yourself, and that is being expressed in your unconscious processes. Your dream, as I interpret it, is a warning. The nervous tension that forced you to behave uncontrollably has been reduced by the very fact that you faced it, because you, if I may say so, dulled its edge by thinking about the dream.”

Dr. Schtürner asked me to tell him one of my typical dreams, a dream that I had often and which remained most clearly in my mind. I told him that I do not have such dreams, but the doctor insisted; everybody, he said, has such a dream, you just have to relax and you will remember. Lying on the couch in Dr. Schtürner’s office, I tried to remember such a dream and in the end I did, but that was a dream that I had not had in years:

In the company of a woman I don’t know, I am walking down a village road. For some reason, her company makes me feel uncomfortable, like the unpleasant company of unfamiliar people. I look at her from the corner of my eye to check, and become certain that I have never seen her before. I try as hard as I can to get rid of her. I turn left and right, but she follows in my footsteps. Then I come up with an excuse – I’ve forgotten something – and go back the way we came. I arrive in a village which, obviously, rests on a cliff above the sea which I cannot see, but I hear the murmur of the waves. And there, in the narrow village square, I see an older woman whom I recognize to be the elderly figure of my mother. She has her back turned to the sea and she is crying. I approach her, and the voices of people who I cannot see are saying that “she was thrown out of her home in her old age” and that “no one takes care of her.” At that moment, not far from me, I see that unfamiliar woman who I tricked. She is watching me, more in pity than as an accusation, but I am overcome with anger and I say: Get out her out of here. Then I shout: Get out her out of here!

Doctor Schtürner carefully noted down the dream, with the comment that it was interesting; he recommended that I not go to work for a while and made an appointment for the next day at the same time. But that night, I dreamt Çulabi again. “Loentze, Loentze, it will do you no good to resist. You’re working against yourself. Because you’re not listening to me.” I jumped up out of my sleep all covered in sweat, overwhelmed by an undefined fear. Then I comforted myself with Doctor Schtürner’s remarks. I’m just exhausted, I thought, my unconscious is warning me, I will get some rest and everything will be all right. I took two pills to calm my nerves, read for a little while and quickly sank into a dream with no one in it.

“You see,” Dr. Schtürner told me the next day, “your dream is completely clear and is full of unambiguous symbols. You say the area is by the sea, but that you cannot see the sea. You hear the murmur of the waves. The sea is, you might know this, a symbol of the unconscious. You don’t dare to look at the sea (into the unconscious), but you are still aware that it exists. Beside you is a woman you don’t know. Are you sure that you have really never seen her in real life?”

“Quite sure,” I said.

“An unknown woman in a dream, that is a symbol of the anima. It represents your soul which you are obviously neglecting. As I mentioned yesterday, you are too busy in the waking world and therefore your internal world is disturbed. The anima is trying to get closer to you, but you don’t want it to. And why you don’t want it to becomes clear in the next episode of the dream: the one where you encounter your mother in her ripe old age.”

I wondered how all of that was related.

“You don’t have a father?” Dr. Schtürner asked with a lot of tactfulness in his voice.

“No,” I said. “I was born out of wedlock. My mother never told me anything about my father, and I never dared to ask.”

“There you have it. By nature, you have an affinity for mysticism; if I may so, you are poetically inclined. However, the fact that you grew up without a father caused you to choose an extroverted, almost exact profession in which you have affirmed yourself as a successful man. In other words: you had to be both father and son for yourself. That is the explanation of your dream: an unresolved Oedipus complex. You don’t have a father. The day when you confronted the Sphinx, when you symbolically came to the conflict between your corporality and spirituality, you wanted to marry your mother. But the myth is incomplete: you don’t have a father and you don’t know who you should kill. So, your tragedy – symbolically, of course – is not complete, it has not been lived through to the end, you have been left without catharsis. This can be interpreted from the fact that your mother, very old, is standing with her back turned to the sea. She is no longer expecting anyone.”

I hardly managed to say anything out of my amazement.

“And what should I do?” I asked.

“Listen to what Çulabi is telling you. Your problem can be solved only in dreams.”

 

 2.

 At the time, of course, I could not have guessed that Dr. Schtürner was also a member of the Order of Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross and that the whole thing had been prepared even before I was born. That night, I was not afraid of my dreams. I fell asleep fairly early; Çulabi still had not come. I waited for him in the gloomy tavern, this time it was full of people talking in a language I did not recognize, probably a Slavic one. When Çulabi arrived, I told him to tell me about my father. Who is he? Where is he? How can I find him?

“Your father died recently,” Çulabi told me. “For reasons which would not be clear to you now, we won’t talk about why he never came to see you. But you should know this: your father was an exceptional man. You can be proud of him. His name is Joseph Kowalsky.”

“Kowalsky?”

“Yes,” said Çulabi. “Kowalsky is your father. In a way, I am sort of replacing him, so I will always be around at the beginning. And you really will need help, just as I did and many others before me. Because some things are just hard to understand . . .”

That it really was like that, I found out the next night when Çulabi, via indescribable nightmares, led me close to the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit. The shining astral structure was damaged by emanations of the nasty thoughts of the members of the Traumeinsatz, a unit formed by the Third Reich with the goal of destroying the Order of the Evangelical Bicyclists. As if hypnotized, I stared at the building, a magnificent house of worship which is not built like earthly churches of brick and stone (of which the Tower of Babylon was also built) but of the yearning for unification with the primordial light, a yearning that itself became light.

“This is why you studied architecture,” Çulabi told me. “Your task is to repair the Cathedral and, fulfilling your age-old dream, to make it even more beautiful. But before that . . . Before that you have to finish one more job, up there, in the waking world . . .”

The task was banal. Senseless. At least I thought so in the be­­ginning. To Bajina Bašta, a nondescript town in the heart of the Balkans, I was supposed to take two small documents, A Tale of My Kingdom and A History of Two-Wheelers; further, I was to hide those documents in a pile of magazines where they would await their future finder and reader. However, residing in that little town during that foggy autumn, I realized that I had gotten onto the trail of my task: I was not supposed to do any kind of study of space; I was to write a paper on the organization of a space in which, in one place, all of the evil of this world could be gathered so that it could be systematized and systematically destroyed. After three months of work, I made the Outline for the Project of the Universal Insane Asylum.

On the pages which follow, I present the results of my work.

—Svetislav Basara

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Mar 192012
 

The Cyclist Conspiracy is a defiantly unique and adventurous creation whose roots cannot be so easily traced. The novel is a collection of found texts—memoirs, manifestos, scholarly papers, historical archives, tales, poems, lists, maps, drawings—dedicated to the secret of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, a mystical sect whose members gather in their dreams and spend their waking lives riding bicycles, smashing clocks, creating havoc, and meditating on the form of the velocipede. —Taylor Davis-Van Atta

 

The Cyclist Conspiracy
(Fama o biciklistima by Prosveta, 1988)
Open Letter Books, 2012
Translated from the Serbian by Randall A. Major

Chinese Letter
(Kinesko Pismo by Vidici, 1984)
Dalkey Archive Press, 2004
Translated from the Serbian by Ana Lučič

Svetislav Basara belongs to a tradition of modernist writers out of Serbia and the former Yugoslavia that includes Danilo Kiš, Dubravka Ugrešić, Oskar Davičo, and Ivo Andrić. The enfant terrible of contemporary Serbian literature and culture, Basara has won every major Serbian literary award, including the NIN Prize for his novel Uspon i pad Parkinsonove bolesti (The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease), yet he is little-known outside of Serbia and to date only two of his twenty-plus works have been translated into English—the novel Chinese Letter and, just published by Open Letter Books, The Cyclist Conspiracy.

Politically and socially active (he has worked within the marginalized Christian Democratic Party of Serbia and has served as Serbian ambassador to Cyprus), Basara holds no pretensions of adhering to real world activities in his fiction, yet he manages to write exclusively about the anxieties of the modern age with inventiveness, conviction, and a playful touch. “It’s the same with people as with money,” he once said in an interview, “the more of something there is, the less valuable it is. Hyperinflation of humanity. Fatigue. The crisis of meaning…. Nothing exists except for selling and buying.” This may seem a grim, if justified, outlook, even coming from a man who describes himself as “feeling averagely awful,” but Basara carries a lighthearted comic touch to his fiction that echoes the likes of Flann O’Brien, Beckett, and Queneau: against a backdrop of permanent pessimism, Basara, like his characters, seeks solace in the absurd, laughter amid the despair. Pausing for a moment, Basara added to the above statement: “But none of this is so bad.”

Basara does not consider himself a part of any national or international literary movement, but his literary influences are obvious—Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Ionesco, Queneau—and he routinely makes explicit reference to their work in his novels: it is not unusual for a Basara narrator to break from a scene—or what passes for a “scene” in his novels, which can be read as collections of pathological monologues—to pay sudden and undue homage to an oblique literary reference. Nearing a paranoiac fever pitch toward the end of Chinese Letter, the narrator Fritz breaks his own line of thought to proclaim, “This coffee is conspiring against me! I have a box of coffee on which it says FRANCK KAKA. Quite an ordinary box. But this is a perfidious anagram: FRANCK KAFA. It means—‘The Trial.’ Why quotes? It’s enough to say the trial. I hope it’s clear to me what I wanted to say.” Far from an anomalous passage, these lines exhibit not only the manic temperament and intense kinetic energy that is typical of Basara’s writing, but also the explicit referencing and stylistic mimicry that feed the mania. Such passages hold no narrative or structural purpose; their only purpose is to introduce to the surrounding text, apropos of nothing, textual moments of literary history so the two, like the meeting of creatures from different geologic eras that nonetheless share genealogic roots, may hold a brief and bizarre bit of dialog with one another. Basara’s prose writhes with literary history and his characters tend to have obsessive relationships with a certain literary heritage. As one might imagine, much is lost in Basara’s self-referential fictive worlds and it is not always clear to anyone what is trying to be said, but this is all quite fitting within the context Basara’s grappling with modern psychological anxieties and (mis)communication.

In Chinese Letter, the narrator—a man who calls himself Fritz but is sometimes Salajdin Bejs or something else entirely—is given the task by two anonymous thugs to write “100 pages or so” of his “story,” a task that serves no purpose and, if not completed, holds no certain consequences. “Nobody told me what I should write about,” Fritz says, “but they gave me a deadline. They said: ‘We’ll be back soon.’” The account Fritz produces of his attempt to complete this statement is, of course, the novel itself, which runs a lean 100 or so pages. The utter senselessness of the imposition forces Fritz to confront the existential absurdity of what it means to be a witness to one’s own behavior and existence. Chinese Letter is an existential novel that directly and unapologetically traces over Kafka and Ionesco, a book not distinctly inventive in terms of its major conceit, but acutely attuned to its own genealogic history.

Ostensibly an account of Fritz’s daily activities—his “story”—the novel quickly becomes an act of psychological self-assessment. Like a Thomas Bernhard novel, it’s not the reportage (the activities, observations, epiphanies, etc.) that matters so much as the digressions, leaps, and discursive prose: it’s through our observation of the telling of Fritz’s story that we come to a deeper understanding of the structure of his mind and a stronger appreciation of his emotional state. His observations about the world around him are quite unimportant (even when Fritz stresses their importance): they are merely information collected by his outward senses, while the truest expression of his self is revealed only in the direction, often circuitous, of his maundering, which is unknowable to his outward senses and, seemingly, to his conscious self.

With nothing much happening in his life (and thus nothing to write about), Fritz arrives in the novel paranoid, afraid of the consequences of not completing his statement. He turns inward, immediately running into a most discomforting thought, his fear of death and—even more frightening—the prospect of living amid the constant certainty of death. “There is no use beating around the bush. I have to face an unpleasant fact. I will soon die,” Fritz writes very early on. “Death is standing next to me, always ready, and I’m afraid. My life is nothing but a fear of death and finding the ways of making this fear less unbearable. And one more thing: my life is a constant digression from the subject. My job is not to die but to write.” Here Basara is telling the reader, in black and white, how to read the book, and what immediately follows this passage is the first in a series of digressions that help form the structure of the novel, each digression also serving to heighten Fritz’s pathology as he scrambles to avoid the most unavoidable truth. For Fritz—as is typical for the self-observant observer (see: Bernhard)—laughter and despair are intractably linked. His digressions are typically very funny. (His first is a pathological discussion of the conspiracy of cancers, cirrhosis, tuberculosis, and billions of bacteria to stop the functioning of his organs.) They are often singular chunks of prose in which an idea or word is isolated and chewed at, murdered out of all meaning, Basara’s obsessive repetition pushed so far that the idea/word/image in question takes on new meaning that is completely divorced from its “real world” connotation, becoming at once funny and disturbing. This relentless repetition also brings us closer and closer to Fritz’s state of high anxiety as we experience him losing his language and thereby losing his mind.

As the novel progresses, Fritz, who must return and return again to his desk to complete his statement, writes increasingly bizarre digressive texts in his effort to fill up the pages and finish his task: one night at a bar he meets—or, more likely, invents—a girl not named Luna (or at least in all likelihood her name is not Luna) whom he decides is his savior; then his neighbor (her name is probably Moira) cuts her veins open in an attempt to gain his attention and affection; his sister marries, then divorces, a man he calls “the mongoloid”; finally, his mother is kidnapped by white slave merchants, only to be returned safely home later that afternoon. These texts hold no common narrative links; they are merely stations on Fritz’s cyclical mental route and they look stranger and more disturbing every time we pass by. It is these serial digressions and Basara’s repetition of language that help the novel take on the form of the fugue: variations on the theme of Fritz’s obsession. The structure of the novel is the structure of Fritz’s pathology. Yes, Fritz’s writings (the novel) are clearly pathological but they also seem to shield him from a larger pathology. Forced to write this statement, his writings bring him into a tango with death from which he cannot extract himself. He cannot stop writing since it is the act of writing that is keeping him alive, his only guard against absolute apathy and monotony, which is to say, a state of living death. His mental wanderings (not what he says, but how he tells it) betray his humanity, reveal him as a thin fleshy strip marking the boundary, as he puts it, “between ‘I’ and ‘Nothingness.’ ” In this way, the account he produces—the novel we hold in our hands, in all its fractured madness—becomes a most earnest and, at times, touching statement for being.

Fritz’s absurdist ramblings echo with perfect pitch those that have come before. It is a bold undertaking to write in such naked homage to the likes of Ionesco. Basara not only does this, but then draws attention to what he is doing. (Not only is Fritz a self-observant observer, the novel itself is conscious of its self-consciousness.) Back home from his psychiatrist’s office, trying to fill up pages and avoid death in all its forms, Fritz writes, “I lay down on the bed, without taking my coat off, and decided to read. I read backwards the whole of Don Quixote because this seemed a more human way of reading this book. First Don Quixote dies, and then Sancho Panza’s adventures follow, and then people in the book read the chapters that are coming… and only at the very end he is reading the dusty books that inspired him to perform heroic deeds for which he died a long time ago.” Directly following this passage, Fritz begins writing his own story in reverse (away, away from death!), his attempt to subvert history, searching, like a nostalgic Quixote, for meaning and salvation in the past.

There are moments in Basara of such stark and inexorable loneliness. By the end of Chinese Letter, we have a mad narrator similar to that in Krasznahorkai’s great novel War & War, a man who exclaims: “Believe me when I say, as I said before, he said, that the whole thing is unreadable, insane!!!” Such is Fritz’s statement (the novel): an unbeautiful, broken, intensely personal missive meant for nobody in particular. By the end, we can confirm what we may have suspected from the start: that the anonymous forces charging Fritz with his task have emerged, seemingly without reason or purpose, from within our narrator himself and that his “statement” is a madman’s transcendent vision of existence in an intolerably senseless world.

Chinese Letter, which is Basara’s first novel, charges forever forward, headlong, packed with delightful language and playful prose. A heightened focus on the sentence imbues Basara’s prose with affirmations and negations of existence—his sentences writhe, breathe, which, makes rare moments of boilerplate (lifeless) existentialism all the more glaring. With Chinese Letter Basara has tapped into the most powerful fictional engine: a self-observing observer who is riddled by doubt. But unlike a Kafka or Bernhard narrator, Fritz is created not by his situation but by the author himself, which is to say that the self-consciousness of the novel is not always put to best use. Fritz’s task is self-imposed, not an inherent flaw of the novel, but it does at times limit Basara’s ability to transcend now-tired tropes of the existentialist novel.

The Cyclist Conspiracy, on the other hand, is a defiantly unique and adventurous creation whose roots cannot be so easily traced. The novel is a collection of found texts—memoirs, manifestos, scholarly papers, historical archives, tales, poems, lists, maps, drawings—dedicated to the secret of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, a mystical sect whose members gather in their dreams and spend their waking lives riding bicycles, smashing clocks, creating havoc, and meditating on the form of the velocipede. With one “S.B.” as the “editor” of this collection, the apocryphal texts span several centuries and detail the exploits of these mystics, who are deployed to various, often pivotal, moments in human history to exert their considerable influence over human affairs and subvert psychological, philosophical, political, and theological systems. Considered by many Serbian critics to be Basara’s best work—and one of the ten best Serbian novels to be written in the past quarter century—The Cyclist Conspiracy is definitely a more ambitious novel than his debut.

The book is ostensibly an anthology tracing the Evangelical Bicyclists’ influence on human history, and the exploits of these anarchists bring a sense of play to the surface text, but the really interesting thing is Basara’s endlessly inventive use of a single, commonplace concept (the bicycle), which is the organizing principle behind the work. With nearly every text, Basara reimagines the bicycle (it is presented as a constellation, as the shape of a woman’s soul, as the Holy Spirit (if viewed from above); now it’s dissected and presented as an assemblage of ancient symbols) and with each successive text (each recurrence of the image) a mythology builds until, somewhere mid-novel, the Bicycle stands amid a slew of contradictory texts: an unknowable, baffling centerpiece that has had all its previous meaning torn away, an old invention made new, like the novel form itself in Basara’s hands. Not the relentless linguistic progression of Chinese Letter, The Cyclist Conspiracy is nonetheless highly structured and highly stylized.

The organizing principle of Conspiracy is somewhat similar to that of Chinese Letter, but instead of a series of digressions that implicate a central concern, The Cyclist Conspiracy places the image at the heart, around which Barasa constructs a variety of texts, each a different form, always returning to the idea of the velocipede in bizarre ways and meanwhile having created space in which to show off his stylistic dexterity. The novel, in fact, is all artifice. As members of the Order traipse about history on their bikes making a mess of things (“We wanted to prove that a logical system can be built into any sort of nonsense,” boasts one member), so Basara proves it possible to subvert the “conventional” novel form in order to create a complex work that is beautiful in its meaningless madness.

Included in the Order of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross are many famous figures, including Sigmund Freud (he also makes a cameo in Chinese Letter), Eugène Ionesco, Jozef Škvorecki, Bohumil Hrabal, George W. Bush, and Steven Hawking, among many others whose lives are all falsified to fit the needs of the novel—and most are further still altered as the novel evolves and progresses. Their histories are often not even consistent with their falsified versions posited by Basara earlier in the novel! Historical events are likewise exaggerated or totally fabricated. Anything with a “real world” equivalent is intentionally misrepresented in the novel; history is rewritten to serve a higher cause. “This chronicle should be accepted by the reader as a mystification,” reports one member, “because the reason for the existence of our Order is indeed the spreading of mystifications and the causing of disturbances.” Basara mocks our need to seek out cause-and-effect rationales that explain our collective narrative, our history—rationales that are logical, digestible, easily retained, and that are almost always false to one degree or another. (The act of creating and repeating such stories is another kind of system.) Basara has no interest in portraying history as it happened or positing any new version of events, but rather in subverting the method we use for telling and retelling it. There is a larger truth conveyed in his work: the novel ends with a series of documents that outline the Order’s master plan to build a Grand Insane Asylum that will house 20 million people (some of them characters in the novel). The absurd idea, meticulously spelled out for us by one of Basara’s madmen, step by step, is a hilarious capstone to the novel that perfectly captures the modern despair and madness that underlies such a plan and makes this one unsettlingly familiar, if not conceivable.

Given our modern age of bad information, willful deceit and ignorance of those in power (and would-be power), there is solace in being reminded that this is not a new contagion. It seems it is a natural impulse of us to misinform, corrupt, and sicken our collective being. (We’re reminded of Basara “feeling averagely awful.”) When challenged, those who spread the sickness call their challengers blasphemous heretics, and they populate Basara’s fictive world as well. For Basara’s characters, even their names—convenient marks of identity—are fickle, deceitful, ultimately useless. What is great about Basara’s fiction is that, like any truly new advent, it arrives as if detached from any world outside its own, yet simultaneously it proves an organic outgrowth from the most hidden recesses of our reality.

These are introductory notes to an author who is a major force in contemporary European literature. Thanks to a small number of English-language presses doing the heavy lifting, we will hopefully hear more from him in the near future.

—Taylor Davis-Van Atta

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Taylor Davis-Van Atta is the founder and editor of Music & Literature, a brand new arts magazine dedicated to publishing critical literature on neglected composers and writers from around the world. The magazine debuts in print May 2012. Issue One features Hubert Selby, Jr., Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and includes previously unpublished work by these featured artists as well as Stig Sæterbakken, Paul Vangelisti, Shushan Avagyan and many others.