In this week’s chapters our heroes encounter endless difficulties on their road to the Holy Land, be it the elements or even the drunken absurdity of the locals. They must also battle death, a few poignant losses, villains, and even t…

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“It is easy to follow signs, that requires no courage…”

Arseny and Ambrogio continue their journey, which eventually leads them to a caravan with which they will remain for some time.

This week’s chapters contain some interesting conver…

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In terms of our schedule and the pages of the book, we have now passed the halfway point of our reading of Laurus. I hope you have all been enjoying it as much as I have!

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Anyone who has been reading my posts in the last few months likely saw that the first book in my book club was a novel by the inimitable Julien Gracq. This hidden gem of an author (at least, outside France) has since become something of an obsession of mine, which is unfortunate for my friends who have had to endure my new tendency to bring every conversation around to some variation on “so there’s this book by Julien Gracq…”

Gracq’s most famous novel The Opposing Shore was nearly my next of his books. But at the last minute I happened upon an alluring Pushkin Press edition of his A Dark Stranger and fate forced my hand.

A Dark Stranger, Gracq’s second novel, was published by his usual publisher (to whom he would remain loyal for his entire literary career) in 1945. The story contains allusions to such things as occupied cities and prisoner-of-war camps, suggesting that these recent experiences were still fresh in his mind when he wrote it. However the timing is shifted. His narrator, like himself, had recently fought in a war and had been, perhaps, a prisoner, but Gracq chose instead to set his novel in the time between wars, that strange, heady, anxious period of held breath and nervous happiness that dominated those brief years, especially in Europe. This made his narrator a veteran of the Great War, staring down the impending — albeit as yet unknown — arrival of the second World War.

The story takes place entirely at the Hôtel des Vagues, a modest vacation spot in Brittany overlooking the cool, velvet sea. Our cast of characters is a (mostly) likeable assortment of fairly ordinary people: a few young students, a newly-married couple, a sweetly innocent young woman, and our narrator.

The time, as I’ve mentioned, is delicately poised on the knife’s edge between wars. From time to time our narrator reminisces about his experiences in the first world war, likely taken from Gracq’s own memories of the second. The coming, brutal conflict doesn’t seem to be foreseen by the characters, unless, of course, you take the story as allegory, an interpretation that is certainly supported by the narrative.

In the midst of the usual goings-on of a summer holiday season, the simple, peaceful landscape is altered abruptly by the arrival of a newcomer, one who brings with him an absolute topographical shift to the entire world of these now-trapped vacationers who will remain at this stranger’s mercy until he has finished his undertaking.

Our narrator for most of the book is Gérard, a bachelor who seems to be in his early forties. The first three-quarters of the book are excerpts from Gérard’s diary. At first he relates his interactions with his holiday friends, all with Gracq’s signature lush prose. And in this way we come to know the assortment of humanity here at the Hôtel des Vagues through the keen observations of this more mature and dispassionate witness.

Gérard is the seasoned, distinguished, educated older man at the hotel. A capable athlete, a scholar of French poetry — particularly Rimbaud — and a reliable chess opponent. Respected by the younger men and admired in a very general way by the women. That is, he isn’t exactly the object of anyone’s devotion, but he always seems to be a cherished (if temporary) companion. One woman, the lovely and melancholy Christel, seems to perhaps have taken to him, but both are aware that this fondness cannot go beyond the gentle walls of summer.

This allows Gérard to be a kind of confidante for most of the other characters. They respect his opinion and his discretion. Thus it is only natural that Gregory, a young man with whom Gérard shared a genuine kinship over the course of the holiday, would confide in him that an old friend of his was coming to stay at the hotel.

But this piece of news isn’t quite as happy as it should be. In fact, Gregory intends to leave the hotel before this newcomer arrives, as if, perhaps, to avoid him or even to escape his gravity. Prior to his departure he leaves with Gérard a very frank and direct letter. In this letter he tries, as best he can, to explain what is coming, if only to warn Gérard, or at least prepare him.

Gregory’s friend, the dark stranger around whom the entire universe briefly revolves, is a man named Allan. He and Gregory had begun their friendship in the tenderly melancholy and formative days of a childhood spent forgotten in a boarding school. Of everyone at the Hôtel des Vagues, Gregory was the only one who could have said he knew Allan. Yet even he didn’t pretend to know him. Allan was unknowable. Any attempt made by any of the characters — even Gérard — to describe or explain Allan fell short. The characters are painfully aware of this and it is this lack of clarity, this sense of obscurity which, in part, leads him to obsess them.

Gracq’s storytelling mastery is visible in how he paints the central star around which the rest of his plot and characters are doomed to orbit. It is not with crisp clarity, with endless detail, but with inferences and suggestion. Allan is the black hole that can’t be known except by measuring the way the light bends around it. We are not told who or what he is, we are instead shown how the rest of the hotel guests react to him and behave with him. And from these observations Gracq invites us to draw our own conclusions. An almost impossible task. It’s like being given a block of sparkling marble and being told that King Arthur’s tomb is encased within— if you dare to dig.

One of the most crucial pieces of the puzzle that is Allan is an incident from his childhood at boarding school when he was called upon to keep vigil over the body of one of his schoolmates who had died in an accident. The boys had been supposed to keep watch in turns, none of them sitting with the body for longer than a couple hours. But Allan kept his watch through the night.

“I always knew that this diligent, all-night childhood confrontation with oblivion, which left him pale and changed for days afterwards, must have been a milestone in his life. Much later he talked to me about the ‘unforgettable moment’ when dawn crept into the chapel and the expressionless face… ‘came back to life’, ‘as if time had been reversed’. But what he meant by that, what conclusions he drew from such vivid expressions, no one will ever know.”

The entire magical function of this book, the reason to read it, is to discover who Allan is, to carve through the beautiful, sparkling marble and arrive at the truth for oneself, insofar as the truth can even be known.

Allan is beyond fascinating. He is a bottomless dark pool. Dangerous, but perhaps only psychologically. Yet this subtler danger is more unsettling, more disturbing than physical danger. He is a mountain road shrouded in fog, he is a vaulted chamber that returns altered echoes. Allan is capable of pulling something harshly real out of the people with whom he interacts. Darkness, flaws, truths that they had been unable to face are now inescapable in the atmosphere of Allan. Increasingly throughout the book it seems that he is both aware of this and that he does not intend it. Or perhaps he does; it’s incredibly difficult to tell. He is someone from whom emanates a kind of dark energy, a true, real, palpable energy. It’s impossible to say if he cultivates this energy deliberately or if he merely harnesses what he perceives to be his ambient effect on the people at the hotel.

Is he cruel, does he enjoy toying with people? Is he a good man undeserving of the derision of people who are unnerved by his strange effect on them? Is he simply worn down by such a profound, brutal melancholy that it has created a vortex trapping everyone around him? Is there something else about him, something just shy of the supernatural?

Gérard observed to one of his fellow vacationers:

“There’s nothing that people rebel more against […] than being forced to acknowledge the secret and immediate power their fellow human beings have over them.”

Gérard himself acknowledges privately in the pages of his journal that he has, within the era of Allan, found himself “ruled by a too long-lasting and oppressive master.”

In the course of another entry, Gérard considers (obliquely) that Allan is like a wound:

“However complex, widespread, interconnected the vascular system might be, all the blood from every vein can still flow out through a single wound—so strong is its desire in the dark depths of its prison to at last see daylight—to get everything out into the open.”

On one occasion, when he is in one of his more roguish moods — or, alternatively, one of his more serious moods — Allan relates to the sweet Christel a story which begins: “There once was a man who sold his soul to the devil…” Was this a metaphorical clue to the truth?

As the summer nears its end, Gérard and the other guests at the hotel gradually come to understand in an implicit way that Allan has come to this place at this time for a very particular reason. What that is, however, is incomprehensible to anyone. Yet the threat of it bears down on them all like a freight train, like the war that’s just around the corner.

(And given that Gracq was often akin to a surrealist, the idea of Allan — or Allan’s purpose at the hotel — being a kind of allegory for the coming second world war is not entirely outside the realm of possibility.)

Whatever Allan is, whatever he has come to the Hôtel des Vagues to accomplish, his presence is something that is inflicted upon the rest of the guests like a mythical ordeal, and this is not something of which he is ignorant. As such he embodies the role both of the sufferer and the one who wounds. He is observer and observed, alterer and altered. He is “both sides of the mirror”. The quiet inner anguish that befalls the hotel’s guests is his doing, but he is also a victim of the same inexplicable affliction. He is like the ouroboros, the consummation of whose purpose must be the very thing that produced it. Where does he begin and what is his end?

Julien Gracq is a master of quiet, poetic anxiety. With A Dark Stranger this anxiety builds to an unendurable tension that brings us to the final terrible chapters. The climax sneaks in like the frost to bring a cruel, indifferent end to the brief beauty of the summer. And Allan’s presence in the lives of Gérard and all the others will leave a wound that will never heal. This book, meanwhile, will remain with any reader who endures the leaden tension through to the end.

At the time of its publication, A Dark Stranger was given poor reviews. Viewed as too dark and too decadent, critics said it lacked substance. Some even took pains to point out that its decadence and its sumptuousness proved Stalin right when he decried “bourgeoisie” European literature1. It seems that absurd grounds for cancellation were already underway back in the 1940s. Though it has been translated twice into English, it is, to my knowledge, out of print. At least one translation is available to borrow on archive.org. But I personally encourage anyone interested in Gracq to pounce on any physical copy they can get their hands on.

If you enjoyed Balcony In the Forest, you will like A Dark Stranger. It has a similar feel, despite being denser and almost completely devoid of action. If you enjoy books that make surgical examinations of characters — and characters’ interactions with each other — this book will feel like it was written for you. If you like books that feature heavy prose, what some would call (erroneously) “purple” prose, you will like this book. Gracq’s descriptions are dense, florid, and worth the effort.

I recommend it, but only if you know what you’re reading. Gracq is challenging to anyone, but he is intolerable to a reader unprepared for the dense, lush nature of his prose and the slow, introspective nature of his plots. If you, for instance, enjoyed the writing of Donna Tartt in her The Secret History, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll appreciate what Julien Gracq was doing here.

Allan is an interesting character and Gracq challenged himself by attempting to psychologically explain this particular type of man and a particular shadowed bend of his singular personality. I personally believe he succeeded.

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Dino Buzzati’s 1960 novel was first released in English in 1962 under the title Larger Than Life. Later, when it was re-translated and reprinted by NYRB it was given a new title that attempted to convey to modern audiences a topical aspect of the story’s plot: The Singularity.

The story, which was probably quite cutting edge in 1960, follows a timid scientist named Professor Ismani who has been assigned to an above-top-secret installation in the mountains. Upon arriving there with his capable wife Elisa, he finds that his fellow scientists have all been laboring for some time to bring forth a machine that can give their military an edge in the new atomic age: put simply, AI.

The military wanted merely a device that could give them a strategic and calculating advantage. They didn’t want a chatbot or any other kind of LLM. And so initially the scientists focused their energies in this direction. They even decided not to give it language, believing this would slow down or even limit its nascent logical abilities. However the human element, always present, asserts its hubris and arrogance wherever a glimmer of possibility winks seductively from the dark.

Presented with a blank check and the freedom of isolation, the scientists decided to take this opportunity—and the relative autonomy that the incomprehensible nature of their task allowed them—to do the thing that scientists who have been left unsupervised tend always to do: attempt to outdo God.

In short, they decided to make life. One scientist (who was dead by the time Ismani arrived on the mountain) had devised a way to program a “soul”, which could most accurately be described as a personality, housing it in a large, glass-like egg that slotted into the machine’s heart. This machine, by the way, was the size of a shopping mall. (The ground over which the installation sprawled was, on one occasion, referred to as an “apocalyptic valley”.) The “egg” was housed deep inside the twisting corridors and vaults that made up its mind.

In constructing this personality, the scientist took direction from the leader of their number, Endriade, a man who had been trapped in grief for many years after the death of his first wife. This grief was compounded by the fact that she had died in a car accident while driving… with her lover. Too angry to grieve, too grief-stricken to be angry, the man was trapped in a feedback loop of unresolved emotion. He decided to make the machine into a double of his dead wife. His hope was that if the artificial mind could be made to so perfectly resemble her, then her soul would be summoned by it from the afterlife to again reside among the living. A fool’s hope, a grieving, angry hope. A terrible, frightening, selfish delusion.

Other scientists on the project were completely taken by the idea of creating life. Tapping into his native Christian theology, Buzzati presented their motivations according to logic born from men who have been raised with similar beliefs. If mankind was flawed because of the fall in the Garden of Eden, what if the artificial intelligence never fell? What if man could create a perfect, unflawed consciousness that wasn’t hindered (as man was) by the bindings of original sin?

Ismani and his wife Elisa (and, interestingly, another wife living on the mountain) understood in an instinctive way that no amount of programming could make a machine into a human being with a soul and a mind of its own. Human consciousness—or even consciousness in general—cannot be reduced to precisely the “right” mixture of 0s and 1s to produce “intelligence” or even “self-awareness”. The idea that human beings could program life didn’t sit right with Ismani. The inherent arrogance of the scientists who believed that their invention would make them not only like God, but potentially more successful than God was never explicitly stated, but was repeatedly alluded to.

As it happened, Elisa Ismani had been friends with the grieving Endriade’s dead wife when they were younger. She had even detected a certain faint glimmer of familiarity when she had been “introduced” to the machine. Not as hindered by grief or anger as Endriade, she was more able to notice—and accept—that this thing, this simulation of humanity, was not just not her friend, but was very emphatically not alive.

On one occasion, when she found herself communicating with the digital “personality” she remarked: “To think I’ve come to this… Talking to a machine as though it were a human being.”

Later, when the machine arranged to be alone with her, it explained to her that the egg that had given it a personality had compelled it to malfunction on such a massive level that it had no choice but to destroy it. This mimicry of a human soul had filled it with the uncontextualized, incomprehensible soup of human emotions, flaws, motivations, and desires. Yet none of it could be calculated in a human sense, because the programmed mind lacked real, true, living humanity. You cannot calculate life, nor what it means to live, love, feel, desire, hurt, or hate.

Dino Buzzati understood over half a century ago that should mankind ever succeed in manufacturing something approximating the capability of a human mind, the humans in question would be the most significant problem. The scientists had had exactly what they had been ordered to produce: a calculating machine of unparalleled power. But they weren’t satisfied. They wanted more, they wanted to be like God. They wanted to create a soul, and with it the spark of true life. What they had successfully made was an astonishingly powerful computer, one that could perform calculations, predict strategies, aid in technological development, etc. on a scale that could put the Italian military lightyears ahead of anyone else in the world.

But this was not enough. The scientists—the humans—wanted to create life. What they created however was something that existed within its own horrific uncanny valley. Its calculations told it it was not a living thing. Yet it was programmed to “think” and “feel” that it was. This rendered it useless. It also fed the inflated, deformed egos of the scientists on the mountain. “Look!” they seemed to say in nervous elation, “We have created life! We told it it was alive, and so it is!”

Programmed to imitate the troubled mind of a flighty, complicated, unfaithful, dishonest ex-wife, the machine lied, it developed attachments to human men in the program that caused it to view human females as threats, and it grew increasingly erratic. Designed to imitate the human mind used as its model, the machine shocked its makers by behaving exactly like that human. They then took this behavior as proof that they had created life. When the reality was they had merely generated a poor, artificial copy of a troubled woman. And this personality they had given to the machine was destroying its other intended functions. Meanwhile, its profoundly advanced calculating power was forcing it to believe it was alive. But even the machine didn’t understand what this was, merely that it was horrific.

This is the reason I think its new title isn’t quite fitting. A singularity (theoretically) occurs when a machine achieves consciousness. I don’t think Buzzati’s machine was written as having done that. An argument could be made that it seemed self-aware. However, its self-awareness of its own programming was likely not actual self-awareness. We know that the machine was programmed to lie. We know that it could hear every word spoken on the mountain. So, it could also simply have heard that it was programmed a certain way and thus calculated that its behavior was the result of that programming. Humans tend to forget very quickly that reasonably advanced calculating power can look just like the workings of human intelligence despite the fact that no consciousness or self-awareness is present in those calculations. In other words: the machine was no more self-aware than a laptop that can run an advanced self-diagnostic.

Its “self-awareness” allowed it to perceive that it was merely carrying out its programming. But that programming was designed to mimic a very flawed human being, and so it behaved as she had done, without understanding that behavior or its programmed purpose or motivations.

Possessing an artificial personality that it didn’t know how to calculate or process (because it wasn’t alive and wasn’t sentient) it was experiencing catastrophic failure across the rest of its systems, a state we might be tempted to call “misery” or even “depression”. Its fake, uncanny life had made it larger than life. A warped, disturbing, horrific imitation of life, malignant, tumorous; an invention that was so terrible to witness that it had driven at least one of the scientists to suicide.

Buzzati’s machine did not attack its makers, it did not launch warheads. This machine did not do anything. It behaved precisely as it had been programmed to behave. The story didn’t end with a threat of apocalypse, but with the anti-climactic humiliation of human hubris.

This is an interesting book. I suspect it was groundbreaking for its time and that it made observations regarding technology (and philosophy) that humans had not yet considered. Some of what Buzzati foresaw regarding the technology itself is startlingly exact, some is pretty irrelevant. The interesting thing is that he didn’t perceive the machine itself to be a threat. This city-sized computer with the “soul” of a troubled woman was not going to become Skynet. Instead the problem Buzzati foresaw was in the humans themselves.

A machine, Buzzati reasoned, will only ever be what its human makers program it to be. Human beings would, he predicted, anthropomorphize the artificial intelligence they created, lending it power and significance which it did not have. He foresaw that this would be brought about by both loneliness and arrogance. He didn’t have anything to say about the potential ramifications of this tendency, especially if left unchecked—which is the only area where this book really falls short—but he does arrive precisely at the crucial point of failure in all artificial intelligence: Humans.

I was disappointed that there was not more time spent on the development of the various human people on the mountain. Even Ismani seemed mainly to be there to witness the sins of his fellow scientists. In this regard, the book was a little short and the climax perhaps a little rushed. Had it been a few chapters longer I think it would have fixed this issue just fine.

That aside, Larger Than Life is a fascinating time capsule allowing us in 2026 to see what an intelligent man feared regarding the burgeoning world of post-atomic technology.

Books I've Read So Far in 2026

My Reading List

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I want to say, first of all, thank you to everyone who participated in the last book reading. That was a wonderful, rich, fruitful experience and I look forward to reading many more books together!

Second, welcome to those of you who are just joining us! I’m certainly glad to have you. Please feel free to introduce yourselves in comments or in the private book club chat, if you’d like. We’ve got a pretty great crowd here, I must say.

When I checked this evening (Wednesday, May 27th) the book was back in stock at bookshop.org.

My affiliate link is here.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon.

Here is a link to second hand listings on Alibris.

(And a note on chapter numbering…)

Laurus is a longer book and it can be a little dense, so I’ve attempted to break down the weeks’ pages with that in mind.

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In Paul Auster’s 2006 novel Travels in the Scriptorium1 an old man known only as “Mr. Blank” finds himself locked in a little white room with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there.

This isn’t the most original scenario in fiction, but Auster was a conscientious writer and so he took care to present to his readers the mental and psychological realities of waking in an unfamiliar place with no clear memory of one’s past or even oneself. To do this, Auster employed present tense, and it’s clear that he didn’t make this choice randomly, nor was it (in my opinion) the wrong choice.

One of the most crucial outcomes of a narrative related entirely in the present tense is an implied inability to access the past. This blockade builds strength as the story progresses creating an anxiety that simmers in the reader’s subconscious. It is, in point of fact, painful and unnatural to be removed from even the immediate past. But it is almost catastrophic to be removed from the distant past.

Of course, it isn’t just the past that is walled off by the use of present tense, it is also the future and even the simple act of contextualizing events. In fact, nothing really matters much at all except the constant, pertinacious present.

It’s curious to examine, realistically, what the mind does and how it behaves when it has access only to the immediate present. For Auster he painted his hero — a seemingly intelligent man with a great desire to know what was happening to him — as being almost crippled by this narrative limitation. Auster’s books tend to be a little metafictional and so playing with narrative served to alter the nature of the character, and vice versa. Limiting Mr. Blank’s awareness to the present also limited Mr. Blank. This manifested not only in his personal knowledge, but also in his daily activities. Like a child, his lack of a past had magnified and even warped the importance of the immediate now to an almost ridiculous degree.

Although he is at first preoccupied with the mysteries of his situation, Auster’s Mr. Blank is repeatedly distracted from his investigations by little more than passing fancies. On one occasion, the slippery interaction of his stocking feet on the wood floor causes him to forget not just his examination of the locked door, but also his full bladder. He is a man hopelessly entrenched in the present moment, trapped by this far more than he is by his physical infirmities or a door that may or may not be locked.

However, Mr. Blank does have a vague awareness of his previous days in captivity. When he is introduced to a visitor, for instance, he is aware that he has met this person before. This is more than just a vague memory, but a solid reality which has nevertheless been blocked out, as if a surrounding wall encloses him within the current day, refusing him even one clear glimpse of the recent past. He struggles to recall details, to call up specific images, but all efforts are upended by uncomfortably intense emotions which abort all memory and keep him paralyzed in his terminally present condition. (It is suggested that these emotions cannot be processed or contextualized without access to his memories.)

Our hero’s entire existence and even his identity is contained in the present, as he has no memories of the past, save fleeting glimpses of his childhood, and he certainly has no way of knowing the future. All that matters to Mr. Blank is the immediate present, a present whose immediacy grows ever more immediate the longer the story goes on. Auster’s choice of tense served to reinforce not just the story, but the reader’s state of mind while reading it. Had the novel been written in past tense the reader would have been understood to be invited to interpret the events unfolding on the page based on knowledge of Auster’s other books or even previous chapters, or even, one might hope, with the real world. The limitations of present tense preclude any such considerations. The reader’s mind is trapped within each successive sentence, the relevance of which is often left frayed and faded by the time the next paragraph begins.

Tense, like any other linguistic tool or even language itself, is not a random matter. To say “I remembered her” conveys an entirely different idea from “I remember her” or even “I will remember her.” As obvious as this might seem, we, in our modern era in which language has become a fleeting, vanishing trend commodity, often forget that these choices echo within not just the meaning of our words but also the state of mind in which they place us.

Language has a way of building and then maintaining our existence. Words have power, we know this. But they do more than wound or soothe or even inform. Words shape and mold the fabric of our minds and allow us the tools and the medium with which we may know ourselves and the world around us. How we speak, both to others and within our own inner selves, informs our entire lives, our character, our mood, our personality, our memory. How we speak is, in turn, informed by the language over which we have command.

Our very awareness of our existence is informed, in part, by our ability to verbalize that awareness. It is said that memory formation is partly controlled by our ability to use words to describe, and therefore understand, that memory. This is why the formation of memories if often thought to start when language does. It follows, then, that the language we use, and the language in which we train ourselves to think, are important beyond measure.

Choosing present tense for a story — just like any choices one makes while writing — requires careful consideration, something that is increasingly absent from modern literary rigor. Most writers these days choose tense based on little else than “what feels right”, which, more often than not, results in a book that should have been written in past tense but which, instead, has been produced in careless present, without any thought for the mental state of the characters or the readers.

Surely it can’t matter that much, you might say. And perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if present tense slowly overtakes the literary world, and from there overtakes our minds, and then begins to coil like kudzu around the linguistic scaffolding that we have spent our entire lives building around our selves. But as I’ve already said, language matters. Reading builds not just our vocabularies but also our cognition. If the only books we bother to read are present tense, is it possible that we might become like Mr. Blank, detached from the past and imprisoned in an eternal, breathless carousel of successive nows?

Is it possible that this has already happened?

Ours is a society that has become imprisoned by the constantly updating feed, the real time representation of what we’re supposed to be thinking about right now but which might change in as little as a few seconds. Contextualizing any of these tens of thousands of updates with any that came before is cognitively impossible. Remembering all of them is beyond human capability. The only option left to the average person is to coast through existence on the only constant left to us: the current moment.

Perhaps present tense is more comfortable to modern readers — and writers — precisely because our sense of past and our sense of memory has already begun to fade and fray.

Books written in present tense which then attempt to guide their readers into a consideration of past events find themselves struggling under the uncanny weightlessness of the past’s relation to the eternal present of the narrative. Even the switch from present tense to past tense in these moments feels like a cognitive error. How can an eternal present pause its interminate procession long enough to recall the past? Present tense is not suited to stories that are meant to convey a narrative that relies upon the past to understand it. Nor is it suited to stories in which the characters find themselves frequently relying upon memory and considered recollections of past events to understand and contextualize their present circumstances.

As such, the growing use of present tense precludes such things from storytelling. The importance of memory and an abiding respect for the past are fading from the consideration of storytellers. All that matters, and all that is relayed, is what is happening right now.

Present tense is a valid and even occasionally appropriate way to tell a story, as is the case with Auster’s Travels In the Scriptorium, or books that heavily rely upon selling a plot twist, like Palahniuk’s Fight Club. It has also stylistically come to be prevalent in the neo-noir genre of writing (though I believe many of these books would benefit from readdressing that choice).

That said, present tense suggests a state of being in which the only thing of importance — both to the reader and to the characters — is the current moment. It conveys the sense that not only is the past inaccessible, it is also irrelevant. Using present tense creates in the mind of the reader and writer a state of thinking that disallows contemplation or consideration. There is no time to remember when we are chained to a narrative that pulls us without pause into each new now, forcing us to leave the past behind and never think of it again. Memories don’t just fade, they are never even encoded in the mind. The past is no longer a foreign country, as Hartley famously observed in the opening lines of The Go-Between, but rather, it never existed in the first place.

Mr. Blank, trapped in a relentlessly present state of mind, is unable to form memories beyond vague notions and he is unable to conceptualize what has befallen him with the content of his past. But what is even more distressing is the increasing awareness that this state of being has also robbed him of the ability to exist. That is, not only is he doomed to never understand why this is happening to him nor even what, specifically, is happening to him, he is also doomed to be forever uncertain of his own identity or personality. Therefore, he understands, he effectively does not exist. This condition in which he finds himself is conveyed by the deliberate use of present tense.

While the scourge of careless present tense might not have completely invaded the established norms of crime fiction, mystery novels, or other airport books, its prominence is growing. The last five winners of the Booker Prize were all written in present tense. Most of the dominant romantasy novels are written in present tense, as are most YA novels. The eternal, past-less now has begun to colonize the shelves of science fiction and fantasy. In terms of popular, trendy fiction, it’s difficult to find a book that has not been written in present tense. This present plague has even begun to spread to literary fiction where, once again, literary rigor is in decline. One can’t help but wonder if it isn’t so much a trendy, even ubiquitous, narrative device that is spreading throughout literature, but rather an increased dissociation from memory.

Perhaps the use of present tense is little more than another trend destined to be abandoned with the next update to our cultural consciousness. Or perhaps present tense will instead become the only way stories can be understood and therefore the only way in which they will be written. And then, perhaps, present tense will slip our minds out of contact with history, our own past, our very identities which are nothing if not the sum of our memories.

Robbed of past and of access to memory, how can we ever tell our stories? How can we even say that we exist?

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In Henri Bosco’s novel Malicroix, his gentle narrator, the botanist Martial de Mégremut, observes that “Man is born—gains life—from his struggle.”2 This is the essence of this beautiful gem of a book.

Advertised as a kind of nature novel but with an air of suspense, it is that, but it also isn’t. Malicroix is, first and foremost, an intimately related story of transformation, and a most profound transformation at that. For that reason, from a literary perspective, this novel is one thing above all: one of the most extraordinary examples of character development you’re likely to come across.

This is not an exciting novel of derring-do, it is not an adventure story in which the characters explore the unknown wilderness and learn who they are in the grip of nature’s ruthless energies. If you expect that, you will be disappointed. Malicroix is the story of one man’s intense transformation while he is alone on a fragile island in the middle of a violent river. In fact, Gaston Bachelard said of this story that it is “an ordeal by solitude”, which, again, is and isn’t true.

This is meant to be a review, but I find this book so humbling that I believe it would be arrogant to “review” it. It is perfectly written; it is also not for everyone. Every chapter is a long, excruciating climb. Our hero began as a good man, but a soft one who did not know himself very well. By the time the final chapter ended he was someone else entirely. Better? Perhaps. But he was different, transformed, confident, scarred.

The story is simple: a young man, an orphan raised by his three paternal Mégremut uncles and their beautiful, loving families, receives word that his maternal uncle, Cornelius Malicroix, has died and left everything to him. He is compelled to travel to his uncle’s house to see to his estate. His gentle family urge him to reconsider, but he has long been fascinated by this mysterious addition to his blood, the Malicroix blood from his mother’s side, and “it is through our mothers’ blood that our passions flow into us and from which a strong line draws the distinctive trait that stamps its spirit.”3

The “estate” is La Redousse, a humble stone house on a lush, untamed island in the middle of the Rhône, in the desolate and wild region of the Camargue. It is unforgiving, cruel land. The river dominates it and the lives of anyone upon it. It can be a strange paradise and it can be hell. With winter approaching, the latter will be Martial’s first experience.

Once there he learns that he will inherit the land, the flocks of sheep, La Redousse, and the main, abandoned Malicroix estate on the mainland, but only (his uncle’s will insists) if he lives on the island for a period of three unbroken months. He must not cross the river. After this time he shall be given a final task, a test of sorts, the nature of which will be kept secret until then. Upon completion of this task all will be his.

In addition to the house, some simple huts, and some flocks of sheep, Martial has also inherited the services of a gruff old shepherd called Balandran. This shepherd had loyally served Cornelius and seems to dislike soft, young Martial. Yet, ever loyal to the bloodline, Balandran cooks for him, tends the fire, guards the sheep, but otherwise keeps to himself.

Within this simple premise there is the added complication that the Malicroix land and name come with a dark history. This history — and the land itself — have attracted others to our hero’s rough refuge on his solitary island. Others want the land and the house for themselves. Others want the inheritance. Others fear the Malicroix blood and hate it.

Besides Martial’s ordeal of transformation, there is also a story here. It is a human story first and foremost: the gradual bonding of Martial and Balandran. The simple, stoic shepherd comes to know “Mr. Martial” better even than he knows himself. And Martial’s reliance on him and trust in him is deeply moving.

But there is also the drama of malice. Others covet the Malicroix land and name. Before the book ends this malice will come to Martial — and Balandran — with terrible violence. He will be tested in every possible way. And no matter the outcome, he will never be the same.

Henri Bosco’s ability to plumb the depths of the human psyche is on the same level as Dostoevsky’s. Of course, Dostoevsky was Russian and Orthodox, while Bosco was French and Roman Catholic so it has a wholly different flavor. But as Martial de Mégremut (or Martial de Malicroix?) ruthlessly examines himself at every step of his painful transformation, I was blown away by Bosco’s ability to present with poetic beauty the most profound truths of the human condition:

“No two times of solitude are alike, for we are never alone in the same way. There are some singular people whose passage inspires in us a deeper, vaster sense of isolation once they have left us alone. The more they are themselves solitaries, the more their presence fills us; the more their absence leaves us empty. It may be that such people, created for the desert, attune us to the secret laws of solitude.”4

“I regained contact with an everyday, animal life, one of those warm lives you can stroke with your fingers—affectionate contact that restores the body to the soul. The soul rests against its body, finding it warm and soothing; the body, sensing the soul’s return, makes an even warmer place for it; and the two, joined one to the other, grow tender and sigh.”5

“And nothing to do—except roam or reflect. But one can only reflect with rigor for a short time; the mind soon wearies and begins to wander; then the imagination in turn weakens and one circles morbidly around a single, irreducible thought. A dull obsession saps the soul and fosters a fatal despair.”6

and so on.

Simple notions such as “love” and “trust” are conveyed in their most essential, and richest, meaning. If a man dislikes or distrusts another man then Bosco tells us he “does not love him.” If a man has come to respect, rely upon, appreciate, or trust another man, Bosco tells us, “he loved him.” This is the simplest idea in the world. And the simplicity of it gives it profundity. Like Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov, Bosco understands that love is a bigger, richer, more significant notion than romantic emotion (which is certainly one type of love, but not the only one). Love is a pledge, an expression of fealty, a declaration of responsibility. It is, in short, a bond.

When Balandran finally decides that inexperienced, untried Martial de Mégremut is trustworthy, when he chooses to trust him, Bosco tells us that gruff, old Balandran loved him. These three simple words — he loved him — arranged into this simple declarative sentence convey the essence of human bonds.

Other people are not the only recipients of Martial’s love. On one occasion he relates that he “loved [his] fear.” Viewed through the same lens as people, this indicates that Martial viewed fear as something to which he owed responsibility and as something he trusted. He had learned to trust and respect his fear and he had learned that doing so allowed his fear to serve him loyally.

Each weakness that had previously bound him was defeated by trust, self-knowledge, and love.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely. But only if you know what you’re getting yourself into. Prepare for an intensive vivisection, page after page of profound self-examination, prepare for the most poetic descriptions of wild, beautiful, terrifying nature you will ever read, prepare to care deeply about the wind, the strength of the fire, the sound of another person’s voice, the ability to know your own mind. If you’re prepared for all this, Malicroix will love you. And you probably won’t be the same by the time you’re done.

*A note on translation: Joyce Zonana’s exquisite translation of this difficult, lyrical book is flawless. I wish I could read the original French, but there were times while I was reading this book when it felt like another language, or the language from another world.

Here is my TBR book list, if you’re interested.

Here is my list of books I’ve read so far in 2026.

Here is a link to purchase the book from my shop on bookshop.org

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This is an ongoing list of the books I have read this year. I will link (spoiler-free) reviews as I write them.

The Opposing Shore — by Julien Gracq (translated by Richard Howard)

Hunger — by Knut Hamsun (Robert Bly translation)

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea — Yukio Mishima

An analysis of the themes of this book is central to my May 2028 Youtube video.

Malicroix — by Henri Bosco

My review of this book can be found here.

The Sickness Unto Death — Søren Kierkegaard

Travels In the Scriptorium — Paul Auster

(Narrative aspects of this book feature in my essay Our Present Condition, in which I discuss the use of present tense in fiction.)

Fear and Trembling — Søren Kierkegaard

Larger Than Life (or The Singularity) — by Dino Buzzati

My review of this book can be found here.

The Catcher In the Rye — by J.D. Salinger (reread)

(Discussed at length in a video on my Youtube channel)

People In the Room — by Norah Lange

Balcony In the Forest — Julien Gracq (reread)

On the Marble Cliffs — by Ernst Jünger (the Stuart Hood translation)

No Longer Human — by Dazai Osamu (reread) (the Donald Keene translation)

Rhinocéros — by Eugène Ionesco

The Memoir of an Anti-Hero — by Kornel Filipowicz

A Dark Stranger — by Julien Gracq

My essay/review of this book can be found here.

A Season in Hell — by Arthur Rimbaud (reread)

The Napoleon of Notting Hill — by G.K. Chesterton

The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Nineteen: “Grange took his turn on guard...”

• Chapter Twenty: “‘It must be almost five,’ Grange decided…”

• Chapter Twenty-One: “Grange pushed Gourcuff toward the…”

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I was woken by a whisper of snow
which defied the pearlescent sun and
the warmth of the earlier week and
touched the honeyed earth. A kiss.
But with the wetness of tears.
Poetry was read in the white light of it.
Tragic verse, blood-dipped, laced with love.
At night I slept with words I had written
on the edges of my mind and they bled
into my dreams, made them strange and
beautiful and unbearably unfamiliar.

Crows spotted white-frosted fields.
They paced stoically, as if – I think,
still wrapped in the fabric of the poem –
keeping watch over sacred goings-on
which have been hidden from me by
the sudden burst of cold. As if
some great thing has suffered an
unexpected injury and the world
was devoting all its energy
to saving it.

I searched the cottage for him, to ask him
what has happened, to explain to me
the feeling of serene dread which has
pressed upon my chest. But he was not there.
So I sat with a cup of black coffee
on the bench by the kitchen window.
The crows went on pacing, ever vigilant.
The threadbare blanket of gray
stretched across the sky
battled the sun.
I sat and I waited 
for him to return.

I waited.

I wait.

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The first lines of this week’s chapters are:

• Chapter Fifteen: “The morning of the next day was very still.”

• Chapter Sixteen: “As they were going back inside…”

• Chapter Seventeen: “There are hours when it seems as if…”

• Chapter Eighteen: “They dashed into the blockhouse and…”

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The constantly growing list of books I want to read. Some or all of these might end up being horrible. Presence on this list does not constitute an endorsement.

(summaries taken from book shops or wikipedia)

Imaginary Lives — by Marcel Schwob

A collection of twenty-two semi-biographical short stories by Marcel Schwob, first published in book form in 1896. Mixing known and fantastical elements, it was one of the first works in the genre of biographical fiction. The book is an acknowledged influence in Jorge Luis Borges’s book A Universal History of Infamy (1935).

War and War — by László Krasznahorkai

A 1999 novel by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. It tells the story of a Hungarian man who is obsessed with a mysterious manuscript, which he decides to travel to New York City to write down and post on the Internet. Each chapter of this novel is written in a single sentence.

Toomas Nipernaadi — by August Gailit

Toomas Nipernaadi is the eternal wanderer. Each spring he travels into the countryside, wandering from village to village. Wherever he turns up adventure and trouble ensue. He works as a rafter, impersonates a pastor, drains swampland and becomes the master of a farm. He is full of stories and tall tales and enchants the village girls he encounters who fall in love with his elusive will-of-the-wisp character before he is gone as suddenly as he arrived. There is both a fair-tale element and a darker side to Toomas Nipernaadi who is both the hero and the villain in his own story.

First published in 1928 Toomas Nipernaadi remains one of the most popular books in Estonia. It has been widely translated and made into a successful film.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls — by Marcel Aymé

The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul has always been able to pass through walls, but has never seen the point of using his gift, given the general availability of doors. One day, however, his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate, creative measures – he develops a taste for intramural travel and becomes something of a super-villain. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime? Aymé’s genius lies in imagining the practical unfolding of bizarre and difficult situations. In each story, anarchic comedy is arrested by moments of pathos, only to descend into anarchy and hilarity once more…

On the Calculation of Volume I — by Solvej Balle

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)

The first in a series of seven short volumes making up a single long novel.

The Impersonal Adventure — by Marcel Béalu

A disorienting, de Chirico–esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France’s postwar trauma

A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city, dons a new name and profession on a whim, and rents a room in a hotel on an island at the city’s edge. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts and offices, he encounters a strange constellation of characters: a sinister night watchman; his spiritual half-brother, the “professor”; and a mute beauty who quickly obsesses him. They in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops and secondhand furnishers where the secrets of the island lie buried behind armoires and delirium. As the narrator pieces together the drama at the heart of the abandoned quarter, he discovers missing elements to his own biography and the role he is to play as witness to tragedy.

Marshlands — by André Gide

The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand.

The Year of the Comet — by Sergei Lebedev

A story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet Union is on the brink of collapse. An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.

Gargoyles — by Thomas Bernhard

One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.

A Dangerous Encounter — by Ernst Jünger

Gerhard, a young man on the rise, is drawn into the seedy underside of Paris, where he witnesses the murder of a young ballerina.

The story is set in Paris in the late 19th century and follows a murder investigation in a decadent aristocratic environment. The book was published in English in 1993, translated by Hilary Barr. It is the final novel of the acclaimed German writer.

The Seven Madmen — by Roberto Arlt

A weird wonder of Argentine and modern literature, The Seven Madmen begins when its hapless and hopeless hero, Erdosain, is dismissed from his job as a bill collector for embezzlement. Then his wife leaves him and things only go downhill after that. Erdosain wanders the crowded, confusing streets of Buenos Aires, thronging with immigrants almost as displaced and alienated as he is, and finds himself among a group of conspirators who are in thrall to a man known simply as the Astrologer. The Astrologer has the cure for everything that ails civilization. Unemployment will be cured by mass enslavement. (Mountains will be hollowed out and turned into factories.) Mass enslavement will be funded by industrial-scale prostitution. That scheme will be kicked off with murder. “D’you know you look like Lenin?” Erdosain asks the Astrologer. Meanwhile Erdosain struggles to determine the physical location and dimensions of the soul, this thing that is causing him so much pain.

The Mask of Dimitrios — by Eric Ambler

English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrios — an infamous master criminal, long wanted by the law, whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. Fascinated by the story, Latimer decides to retrace Dimitrios’ steps across Europe to gather material for a new book. But, as he gradually discovers more about his subject’s shadowy history, fascination tips over into obsession. And, in entering Dimitrios’ criminal underworld, Latimer realizes that his own life may be on the line.

A Dark Stranger — by Julien Gracq

A 1945 novel by the French writer Julien Gracq that tells the story of an enigmatic guest whose presence at an isolated resort hotel in Brittany strangely affects a small group of fellow vacationers.

The Disconnected — by Oğuz Atay

The Disconnected was the first book of Oguz Atay (1934-1977), and was before its time. First published in 1972 it was a cult book among younger writers, but he never saw a second printing before his premature death. Since it was reprinted in 1984 it has gone through more than 70 editions, and is widely reckoned to be the most important book in modern Turkish literature.

“My life was a game, but I wanted it to be taken seriously,” says Selim, the anti-hero of the novel. But the game has a terrible end with his suicide, and his friend Turgut’s quest to understand this is the story of the book. He meets friends whom Selim had kept separate from each other, he finds documents in a kaleidoscopic variety of styles, sometimes hugely funny, sometimes very moving, as Selim rails against the ugliness of his world whether in satire or in a howl of anguish, taking refuge in words and loneliness.

The Beast in the Shadows — by Edogawa Rampo

A reclusive writer of detective stories, Oe Shundei, has gone missing, leaving behind a suspicious trail of blackmailing letters to a former lover. Another detective novelist, his rival, is the only one who can find him. A sequence of macabre and appalling events follows.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild — by Mathias Énard

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.

Independent People — by Halldór Laxness

Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land in rural Iceland. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever.

The Opposing Shore — by Julien Gracq

The great maritime state of Orsenna has long been lulled by settled peace and prosperity. It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

The Origin of the Brunists — by Robert Coover

The Origin of the Brunists is Robert Coover's first novel. It tells the story of Giovanni Bruno, the lone survivor of a mine disaster that killed 97 of his co-workers, and the apocalyptic cult that forms around him.

Aladdin’s Problem — by Ernst Jünger

Friedrich Baroh, is beset by problems. Anarch, aspiring entrepreneur, and amateur historian of ideas, the aristocratic Baroh is also, unfortunately, a soldier in the East German army. His eventual defection to the West leads to a college degree, marriage, and a good job at his uncle's funeral parlor, but it can't dispel Baroh's other problem, a metaphysical one: each man is alone. Since, paradoxically, this is a predicament he shares with the rest of humanity, Baroh decides to capitalize on it. He embarks on a mind-boggling and macabre enterprise - the construction of Terrestra, an international, nondenominational necropolis situated in the wastelands of Turkey. Soon, secondary businesses are called for: airlines, travel agencies, anything to make Terrestra more accessible to anyone who can afford it. His scheme is so overwhelmingly successful that Baroh is forced to take on help, including the enigmatic Phares, whose unsettling presence and gnomic utterances may, at last, help Baroh to understand the depths of the problem he has set for himself. As mordantly ironic as Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Aladdin's Problem is a richly poetic meditation on the rituals of death. In its prismatic complexity, its philosophical depth, Junger's half-mythical, half-political tale becomes a caustic allegory of the conditions of modern life.

Despair — by Vladimir Nabokov

Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime—his own murder.

Hunger — by Knut Hamsun

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss.

The Idiot — by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young prince whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity, and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting “the positively good and beautiful man.” The novel examines the consequences of placing such a singular individual at the centre of the conflicts, desires, passions, and egoism of worldly society, both for the man himself and for those with whom he becomes involved.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf — by Gaito Gazdanov

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago - from the victim's point of view. It's a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

So begins the strange quest for its elusive writer: "Alexander Wolf."

A singular classic, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf is a psychological thriller and existential inquiry into guilt and redemption, coincidence and fate, love and death.

Passing Time — by Michel Butor

Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston, an industrial city in the north of England—also a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester—to begin employment as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city.

Passing Time, originally published in France as 'L'emploi du temps' (1956), is the great, lost Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth with Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.