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Five Strange Languages #3
Weak in Comparison to Dreams
For years, Samuel Emmer has monitored bacteria levels in drinking water for the small city of Guelph.
He is content to focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his grasp on his own life recedes—and with it, family and friends. To be sure, it is more than a little surprising when Samuel learns that he has been appointed to the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee. Even more so, that he is being tasked with interacting not just with animals, but human beings. His travel to zoos around the world and gather information on the stereotypical behavior of animals in their enclosures—the city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if naively, to a cruelty-free habitat for its animals. It is in Tallinn, Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way…
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, by the historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no other novel you have ever read, even as certain inspirations, from Sebald to Tokarczuk, are clear. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites our love for the ambitious novel with experimentation that never lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest aspects of our individual humanity.
He is content to focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his grasp on his own life recedes—and with it, family and friends. To be sure, it is more than a little surprising when Samuel learns that he has been appointed to the city’s Zoo Feasibility Committee. Even more so, that he is being tasked with interacting not just with animals, but human beings. His travel to zoos around the world and gather information on the stereotypical behavior of animals in their enclosures—the city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if naively, to a cruelty-free habitat for its animals. It is in Tallinn, Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way…
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, by the historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no other novel you have ever read, even as certain inspirations, from Sebald to Tokarczuk, are clear. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites our love for the ambitious novel with experimentation that never lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest aspects of our individual humanity.
576 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 5, 2023
113 people are currently reading
11694 people want to read
About the author
James Elkins
101 books223 followersJames Elkins (1955 – present) is an art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also coordinates the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
March 8, 2024
Marvelous. Frighteningly so, and for at least two reasons. Frightening, I mean. Each chapter ends with a dream sequence consisting of a series of photos of forest fires with a short text. As soon as I figured out that the images were of an approaching fire, I started to feel uneasy, because it can only mean that something momentous is about to happen. And it does happen. The second source of fright is the description of the zoos and the animals in them. The description of a blue monkey almost made me cry, but all other animals are in awful condition too (how wouldn't they be all locked up?). These are just two aspects of the novel, which is dizzyingly complex in its weaving of meta, para, inter, and non-textual elements. Perhaps the most frightening thing of all is that it all actually works. I also have to mention all the summarized "scientific articles" that sound like complete and utter crackpots wrote them (I haven't googled them yet, hopefully they're fictional), and the last part about the music. I really need to hear those compositions because some of them sound like what I've been looking for (becoming a machine as a solace, indeed). I'd go back and read it all again in a heartbeat, only if I had more time.
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April 11, 2024This is a novel that expands what is possible in the form. It is a novel written by an academic, someone who has studied the history of art (and written about it), and who is a deep reader and astute critic of literature and art more broadly construed. So, it is no surprise that is a work that anticipates its criticism, and incorporates them into the work. A work of art aware of its working as the work of art working. Difficult to execute.
For example, the use of the landscape and fire images in the dreams (I will not cover the use of the musical notation, which problematizes everything I am about to write here—the musical curation, emotional evocation, suggestiveness, location within music history, the music as image—like a word also being a picture of the word, the music as paratext, the author’s own alterations of the original scores, etc, etc.).
Elkins is aware of the use of the visual image embedded into a text. This is straight up stated. He’s an authority on this via studies on W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole. So, if he’s going to be faithful to his own “Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel” then he is going to be in conversation with these and contribute something new. (here’s a link to the referenced article/manifesto: https://www.academia.edu/116188791/Fo...)
You should read his “manifesto” yourself, but an important line that will serve this review is: “A complex novel is one that keeps you wondering, keeps you working to understand what the author thinks they're doing, and does not ever answer your questions. When you finish a genuinely complex novel, all the guesses you had while you were reading will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other novel.”
I think Elkins has done this in this work. I finished the novel feeling like new capacities were opened. Language mutates.
For me, this novel is a little like “bad code” in that it sets off the interpretation function but then undermines working theories and is ultimately left irresolvable, which fuels a renewed sense of trying to find patterns, and failing again. Except that in code, the script attempts to run and when faced with a problem, or an infinite loop, an error code is produced. But there’s no fixing Elkins novel. Each interpretive failure on the reader’s part somehow invigorates.
So, back to the images in the text. At first, they appear as a strange sort of astute ekphrasis. This is at odds with Sebald, whose images (in the works I’ve read) function more as suggestive spectres or mood casters, and are varied. The images are mostly barren landscapes, in black and white. And they’re a series. They build. Fires smolder and only eventually appear. The reader must ask, why this particular empty landscape. The writing shows you how they’re not empty at all. The reader asks, how did the writer gather these set of images. The dullness of the early images suggest the author traveling into a locale and taking them himself. But this is undermined as the fires grow fierce. There are so many. Over time. Perspectives vary. How were these compiled? How do they, once compiled act on the viewer?
The images accompany the “dreams” which, usually are a bad topic to write about. Have you ever listened to someone talk about their dreams? They are almost always of interest to the dreamer alone. They fade and can have always only have been experienced by the dreamer. They are the most boring inside joke. Dreams are weak in comparison to reality. But this is again undermined by the narrator’s life. He tests water for contaminants. Again undermined when the zoo visits begin to resemble dreams themselves, in which one lives out the fantasy of saying whatever you want to people that you meet. Using the expectations of professionalism and role to see how far you can go. These become almost fantasies. Day dreams. But this is again undermined in that there are “real” consequences for the narrator-character.
Maybe I’ll add more here about the diagrams and extreme data capture calling free will, sanity and levels of consciousness into question.
There’s a lot more to discuss. But I’ll just skip ahead to part where the narrator character is 90 ish. The introduction of the musical notation section brings in lacunae and the experience of multiple media categories. And things here exceed the scope a reaction review.
I know a book is extremely good when it leaves me wanting to write an extended study or monograph on it.
I’ll leave you with this quote from the book: “I only write the reports. I have no control over where they go.” (303)
For example, the use of the landscape and fire images in the dreams (I will not cover the use of the musical notation, which problematizes everything I am about to write here—the musical curation, emotional evocation, suggestiveness, location within music history, the music as image—like a word also being a picture of the word, the music as paratext, the author’s own alterations of the original scores, etc, etc.).
Elkins is aware of the use of the visual image embedded into a text. This is straight up stated. He’s an authority on this via studies on W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole. So, if he’s going to be faithful to his own “Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel” then he is going to be in conversation with these and contribute something new. (here’s a link to the referenced article/manifesto: https://www.academia.edu/116188791/Fo...)
You should read his “manifesto” yourself, but an important line that will serve this review is: “A complex novel is one that keeps you wondering, keeps you working to understand what the author thinks they're doing, and does not ever answer your questions. When you finish a genuinely complex novel, all the guesses you had while you were reading will be wrong, and the novel will only be like itself, and not like any other novel.”
I think Elkins has done this in this work. I finished the novel feeling like new capacities were opened. Language mutates.
For me, this novel is a little like “bad code” in that it sets off the interpretation function but then undermines working theories and is ultimately left irresolvable, which fuels a renewed sense of trying to find patterns, and failing again. Except that in code, the script attempts to run and when faced with a problem, or an infinite loop, an error code is produced. But there’s no fixing Elkins novel. Each interpretive failure on the reader’s part somehow invigorates.
So, back to the images in the text. At first, they appear as a strange sort of astute ekphrasis. This is at odds with Sebald, whose images (in the works I’ve read) function more as suggestive spectres or mood casters, and are varied. The images are mostly barren landscapes, in black and white. And they’re a series. They build. Fires smolder and only eventually appear. The reader must ask, why this particular empty landscape. The writing shows you how they’re not empty at all. The reader asks, how did the writer gather these set of images. The dullness of the early images suggest the author traveling into a locale and taking them himself. But this is undermined as the fires grow fierce. There are so many. Over time. Perspectives vary. How were these compiled? How do they, once compiled act on the viewer?
The images accompany the “dreams” which, usually are a bad topic to write about. Have you ever listened to someone talk about their dreams? They are almost always of interest to the dreamer alone. They fade and can have always only have been experienced by the dreamer. They are the most boring inside joke. Dreams are weak in comparison to reality. But this is again undermined by the narrator’s life. He tests water for contaminants. Again undermined when the zoo visits begin to resemble dreams themselves, in which one lives out the fantasy of saying whatever you want to people that you meet. Using the expectations of professionalism and role to see how far you can go. These become almost fantasies. Day dreams. But this is again undermined in that there are “real” consequences for the narrator-character.
Maybe I’ll add more here about the diagrams and extreme data capture calling free will, sanity and levels of consciousness into question.
There’s a lot more to discuss. But I’ll just skip ahead to part where the narrator character is 90 ish. The introduction of the musical notation section brings in lacunae and the experience of multiple media categories. And things here exceed the scope a reaction review.
I know a book is extremely good when it leaves me wanting to write an extended study or monograph on it.
I’ll leave you with this quote from the book: “I only write the reports. I have no control over where they go.” (303)
February 1, 2026
I wasn’t interested, but this was my life now, catapulting from one zoo to the next, meeting miscellaneous people, talking about disconnected things, jumbling everything into balls of memory.
Weak in Comparison to Dreams is volume 3 of a five volume, and so far quite brilliant, experimental novel by James Elkins. Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, was published after this and the first book, Stories, like Illnesses, is due in Autumn 2026.
Elkins general manifesto: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1afoC...
Notes and material for the project (which Elkins plans to publish when the project is complete): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P...
This book begins:
That winter ruined any hope I had of experiencing my life as a story, beginning with a cry in a hospital and developing right up to the latest click of the plastic second hand on the large wall-mounted, battery-operated clock that I bought because, as I once said to Adela, I need to keep better track of time: that year I lost the capacity to manage my days, keep my mind on my job, keep on good behavior, keep hold of my family, attend to what people were actually saying, distinguish animals from humans, day from night. That winter tore me from myself and pushed me into a world of dreams.
As with A Short Introduction to Anneliese we are both reading an account written, some time later, by Samuel Emmer of events in late 2019 and into 2020, when he was in his 50s; and we also get the account of the much older Samuel's reaction, 40 years later when he comes across the manuscript, in the form of Notes added to the original manuscript.
Where in A Short Introduction to Anneliese the Bernhardian mania comes from the titular character, here it is Samuel himself, travelling around various world zoos to study animals with problematic behaviour as part of a Zoo Feasibility study by the Canadian city of Guelph where he is employed. But Samuel's speciality and interest are in ameobas, and the presence of parasites in the city's water supply, not zoology, and, armed with various studies, often of a mathematical nature, of repetitive patterns in animal behaviour, sent to him by his over-keen research students, this a 1939 study of animals at Zurich zoo by Monika Woodapple:
"It is possible that these paths might be modeled by mathematical equations. There are several figure-eight curves in mathematics that fit the data I have observed. One figure-eight is called the Devil's Curve. Its equation is as follows:
y² (y² - a²) = x² (x² - b²)
for -1 ≤ x≤1.
The nearest fit to the hyena's path is when a = 2 and b = 4.
"This ideal figure-eight is also called the Devil on Two Sticks, because there is an Italian children's game called Diabolo, which uses two sticks and strings to manipulate a figure-eight toy. If animals who pace follow this curve, it means they are manipulated by forces outside the curve. This is compatible with telescopic pacing.
"There is also the lemniscate, a figure eight that has the beautiful equation
(x² + y²)² = a² (x² − y²)
The product of the distances of any point on the curve from the points (-a, 0) and (a, 0) is a².
If animals that pace follow this curve, it means they instinctively manage their distance from two fixed points that they avoid, one in each of its loops. I leave this for others to explore.
But he starts to act increasingly erractically in the zoo visits, inventing even more outlandish theories of his own and exaggerating his knowledge of zoology.
And at night he is visited by a series of not so much recurrent as developing dreams, in which he travels through a forest hilly landscape but with fires coming increasingly close as each nightly dream progresses - from smoke spotted in the distance to flames surrounding him.
And the elder Samuel, as in the second novel, has little direct memory of the events described, Samuel himself suggesting that Proust's view of memory, where the madeleine dipped in the tisane provokes a flood of memories, is that of a younger man.
This morning I am looking out the window, where an untrimmed hedge blocks my view of the uncertain distance. Can you say your life is your own when your childhood has gone so far away into the past that the boy with your name seems like someone else's child? When you read about your own life and there's no glow of recognition, no pleasure in revisiting scenes that had been long forgotten? I have added these Notes to explain, possibly to someone, how that feels
For the nonagenarian Samuel, he can only associate the re-discovered, but not remembered, events of his past with his present day interest in atonal modernist music.
When I read this book, I hear these composers. They retell the book's stories as music. For me, the music is just as detailed as the events I described so long ago. Music is strange portraiture: it preserves every nuance of mood and light, but the faces are hard to see. The feelings are exact, but the people are gone.
Elkins own description of the novel:
"Samuel is a civil servant in Guelph, Ontario. The city is planning to build a zoo, and he is sent to zoos in different countries to study animal welfare. He is besieged by the sufferings of zoo animals.
Each night he dreams of walking through an endless mountainous landscape. There are forest fires in the distance, and they get closer each night. He knows that the fires mean something is happening to him in real life, but he can’t understand what. In the zoos he behaves more and more erratically, lying and provoking his hosts. His assistant, a person of indeterminate gender named Viperine, sees that he is suffering and tries to help, but word of Samuel’s misbehavior reaches his supervisor, and he is fired.
As in all the novels in Five Strange Languages, there is actual sheet music in the book. In classical music, preludes and fugues often come in sets of twelve (or twenty-four, as in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier). In this book, the twelve chapters about Samuel’s days are like preludes, because preludes have no fixed form. The twelve nights are like fugues, because they weave ideas in and out, forming and unforming different patterns. As the book progresses, Samuel’s waking life falls apart, and each night he finds himself surrounded by fires. Before the end of the book, he burns, in his dreams, just as his waking life falls to pieces.
And as in the other novels, Weak in Comparison to Dreams has footnotes at the end, written by Samuel when he is over ninety years old. My original inspiration for Five Strange Languages was the idea of a narrator who has lived so long, and traveled so far in his imagination, that he has forgotten much of his earlier life. The older Samuel doesn’t have dementia, and his memory loss isn’t caused by trauma: he’s an example of a life that has effectively become two separate lives. In a sense I wrote this novel against Proust, for whom memory was a magically rich resource for the imagination, as it is for many novelists. I wanted to show what a life looks like without memory, but also without any desire to recover memory or even to experience life as a single coherent thing. And, in this book, I wanted to show what happens when waking life is not as strong as dreams."
Some more quotes
From his first zoo visit:
Lots of threads, I'd tell Dr. Tank, hard to count, hard to disentangle, hard even to breathe through them, what do you think of that?
She was chattering on about the exemplary treatment of animals at the Tallinn Zoo. Second to none in Europe, I heard her say, nearly a standard deviation above the EU line for median mammal health. It was what she thought I needed to hear. But I wanted to find out who was at home behind the zebra suit and turtle glasses. At the least, she needed to know I was not some commuting Canadian government rep easily distracted by borrowed Russian cuisine.
The day and the dreams of the night sees as preludes and fugues:
There is something tremendously sad about sets of preludes and fugues, because they forget each other. Just the way each day pretends the night before never existed, and each night imagines the world has always been dark.
A prelude is a day full of distractions, but then the sun goes down and the stars spin up and hang gleaming in the sky. The night may be soaked in moonlight, or dim and moor colored. Inside the fugue it is hard to recall the lovely clouds and sharp colors of the day. Each night gnaws at the day before it, ruining its shape and sense. Night insists it is all there is, that there has never been such a thing as day. You stare at the darkened sky and try to picture the bright blue. Then when the night is over, the landscape floods with light. Each day ignores the mindless destructions of the night before. It's as if nothing happened. The sun gazes blithely on the fields.
That spring, Samuel fell into a fugue state. He had been on the edge, in the twilight. In the course of the winter the world stopped working the way it is supposed to. It was occupied by things that made no sense. He no longer knew what the world was. He lived in it, but he didn't recognize it. When he gave up his job, he fell. His life became weightless, as you do when you fall. He was like one of those divers who go underwater without oxygen, just holding their breath. They stand in the blue half-light, in twenty or thirty feet of water, their toes lightly touching the sand on the sea floor. They hover there, on the edge of an underwater chasm, the brink of an undersea cliff that could be hundreds, thousands of feet deep. Instead of swimming for the surface, they push off lightly and dive, in slow motion, an underwater swan dive, downward into the dark.
An example of the elder Samuel's associations, here his rather chaotic zoo adventures with pieces by Sergei Protopopov:
Listening to Protopopov is like watching a slow river of magma pour out of a mountain, spitting and burping and tumbling over itself. It's compelling, and then, after a while, it's boring. It is fascinating because it's so alien-rock that glows, that looks alive-but it's inert. It has no connection to life.
This is the music of all the strange things Samuel saw and heard on those tours. Viperine's letters, the scientific essays, the poor animals. The twitches and sudden shakes, the pacing and staring. The platypus, madly scratching. That white animal in the dark room, in the cage with no label. Mushka, the morose Pallas's cat. Pekka's strawberry face. Dr. Tank's fortified life. Sirje, with her double haircut and fangs sharpened like steel. Preteen, swaying as he walked, telling the story of blood gushing out of Ellie's mouth. Even the little Chinese quail, without a thought in its head. And for some reason Jaagup, who stared at trees, and Melinda the fennec, who stared at flies or flecks in the air, and that tiger, gazing up at the wall that was always too high to scale, and Monika's hyena, looking blankly at Mercury in the predawn sky, and Betty the black bear, blinking into its haze of drugs, and Owole the blue monkey, no longer looking, no longer seeing, its eyes no longer turning, no longer needed.
Elkins claims for his series of novels
'I claim several things as innovations:
1. A life experienced as divided, without explanation or trauma. The notes in each book, written by the narrator in old age, present an experience of aging so extreme that the bonds of memory are broken, naturally, apart from the usual incremental losses of memory and without injury or dementia. This goes against the assumption that a life is a whole, or it can be mended.
2. Multi-volume novel comprised of disparate parts. The five books have different structures and styles, unlike multivolume novels by Balzac, Dickens, Proust, etc. There are parallels between this and the first point. Examples of multivolume novels where each book has a different style or format: Agustin Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy, Philipp Weiß’s Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen, Beckett’s trilogy, Tom LeClair’s Passing novels, perhaps Alban Nikolai Herbst’s five novels (published by Elfenbein) and Marianne Fritz’s Fortress.
3. Music as memoir. The older narrator’s writing about music is a new kind of biography and autobiography. For him music retells the characters and places in the book better than memory.
4. Music in fiction. Before this project only a few novels had sheet music, for example Beckett’s Watt and Zukofsky’s “A”–24. Book 4 contains an extended musical composition, Twelve Variations and a Theme. The music is seen by the reader. It does not need to be played or heard.
5. Diagrams as emblems of irrationality. The diagrams, graphs, and mathematical formulas are legible but not useful. Like the music, they are images, signs of the narrator’s crisis.
6. A novel with nonfiction explanatory material. These “Ideas and Materials” were written with the books, as a parallel text. I hope they invite readers to move between different kinds of writing.'
Weak in Comparison to Dreams is volume 3 of a five volume, and so far quite brilliant, experimental novel by James Elkins. Book 2, A Short Introduction to Anneliese, was published after this and the first book, Stories, like Illnesses, is due in Autumn 2026.
Elkins general manifesto: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1afoC...
Notes and material for the project (which Elkins plans to publish when the project is complete): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P...
This book begins:
That winter ruined any hope I had of experiencing my life as a story, beginning with a cry in a hospital and developing right up to the latest click of the plastic second hand on the large wall-mounted, battery-operated clock that I bought because, as I once said to Adela, I need to keep better track of time: that year I lost the capacity to manage my days, keep my mind on my job, keep on good behavior, keep hold of my family, attend to what people were actually saying, distinguish animals from humans, day from night. That winter tore me from myself and pushed me into a world of dreams.
As with A Short Introduction to Anneliese we are both reading an account written, some time later, by Samuel Emmer of events in late 2019 and into 2020, when he was in his 50s; and we also get the account of the much older Samuel's reaction, 40 years later when he comes across the manuscript, in the form of Notes added to the original manuscript.
Where in A Short Introduction to Anneliese the Bernhardian mania comes from the titular character, here it is Samuel himself, travelling around various world zoos to study animals with problematic behaviour as part of a Zoo Feasibility study by the Canadian city of Guelph where he is employed. But Samuel's speciality and interest are in ameobas, and the presence of parasites in the city's water supply, not zoology, and, armed with various studies, often of a mathematical nature, of repetitive patterns in animal behaviour, sent to him by his over-keen research students, this a 1939 study of animals at Zurich zoo by Monika Woodapple:
"It is possible that these paths might be modeled by mathematical equations. There are several figure-eight curves in mathematics that fit the data I have observed. One figure-eight is called the Devil's Curve. Its equation is as follows:
y² (y² - a²) = x² (x² - b²)
for -1 ≤ x≤1.
The nearest fit to the hyena's path is when a = 2 and b = 4.
"This ideal figure-eight is also called the Devil on Two Sticks, because there is an Italian children's game called Diabolo, which uses two sticks and strings to manipulate a figure-eight toy. If animals who pace follow this curve, it means they are manipulated by forces outside the curve. This is compatible with telescopic pacing.
"There is also the lemniscate, a figure eight that has the beautiful equation
(x² + y²)² = a² (x² − y²)
The product of the distances of any point on the curve from the points (-a, 0) and (a, 0) is a².
If animals that pace follow this curve, it means they instinctively manage their distance from two fixed points that they avoid, one in each of its loops. I leave this for others to explore.
But he starts to act increasingly erractically in the zoo visits, inventing even more outlandish theories of his own and exaggerating his knowledge of zoology.
And at night he is visited by a series of not so much recurrent as developing dreams, in which he travels through a forest hilly landscape but with fires coming increasingly close as each nightly dream progresses - from smoke spotted in the distance to flames surrounding him.
And the elder Samuel, as in the second novel, has little direct memory of the events described, Samuel himself suggesting that Proust's view of memory, where the madeleine dipped in the tisane provokes a flood of memories, is that of a younger man.
This morning I am looking out the window, where an untrimmed hedge blocks my view of the uncertain distance. Can you say your life is your own when your childhood has gone so far away into the past that the boy with your name seems like someone else's child? When you read about your own life and there's no glow of recognition, no pleasure in revisiting scenes that had been long forgotten? I have added these Notes to explain, possibly to someone, how that feels
For the nonagenarian Samuel, he can only associate the re-discovered, but not remembered, events of his past with his present day interest in atonal modernist music.
When I read this book, I hear these composers. They retell the book's stories as music. For me, the music is just as detailed as the events I described so long ago. Music is strange portraiture: it preserves every nuance of mood and light, but the faces are hard to see. The feelings are exact, but the people are gone.
Elkins own description of the novel:
"Samuel is a civil servant in Guelph, Ontario. The city is planning to build a zoo, and he is sent to zoos in different countries to study animal welfare. He is besieged by the sufferings of zoo animals.
Each night he dreams of walking through an endless mountainous landscape. There are forest fires in the distance, and they get closer each night. He knows that the fires mean something is happening to him in real life, but he can’t understand what. In the zoos he behaves more and more erratically, lying and provoking his hosts. His assistant, a person of indeterminate gender named Viperine, sees that he is suffering and tries to help, but word of Samuel’s misbehavior reaches his supervisor, and he is fired.
As in all the novels in Five Strange Languages, there is actual sheet music in the book. In classical music, preludes and fugues often come in sets of twelve (or twenty-four, as in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier). In this book, the twelve chapters about Samuel’s days are like preludes, because preludes have no fixed form. The twelve nights are like fugues, because they weave ideas in and out, forming and unforming different patterns. As the book progresses, Samuel’s waking life falls apart, and each night he finds himself surrounded by fires. Before the end of the book, he burns, in his dreams, just as his waking life falls to pieces.
And as in the other novels, Weak in Comparison to Dreams has footnotes at the end, written by Samuel when he is over ninety years old. My original inspiration for Five Strange Languages was the idea of a narrator who has lived so long, and traveled so far in his imagination, that he has forgotten much of his earlier life. The older Samuel doesn’t have dementia, and his memory loss isn’t caused by trauma: he’s an example of a life that has effectively become two separate lives. In a sense I wrote this novel against Proust, for whom memory was a magically rich resource for the imagination, as it is for many novelists. I wanted to show what a life looks like without memory, but also without any desire to recover memory or even to experience life as a single coherent thing. And, in this book, I wanted to show what happens when waking life is not as strong as dreams."
Some more quotes
From his first zoo visit:
Lots of threads, I'd tell Dr. Tank, hard to count, hard to disentangle, hard even to breathe through them, what do you think of that?
She was chattering on about the exemplary treatment of animals at the Tallinn Zoo. Second to none in Europe, I heard her say, nearly a standard deviation above the EU line for median mammal health. It was what she thought I needed to hear. But I wanted to find out who was at home behind the zebra suit and turtle glasses. At the least, she needed to know I was not some commuting Canadian government rep easily distracted by borrowed Russian cuisine.
The day and the dreams of the night sees as preludes and fugues:
There is something tremendously sad about sets of preludes and fugues, because they forget each other. Just the way each day pretends the night before never existed, and each night imagines the world has always been dark.
A prelude is a day full of distractions, but then the sun goes down and the stars spin up and hang gleaming in the sky. The night may be soaked in moonlight, or dim and moor colored. Inside the fugue it is hard to recall the lovely clouds and sharp colors of the day. Each night gnaws at the day before it, ruining its shape and sense. Night insists it is all there is, that there has never been such a thing as day. You stare at the darkened sky and try to picture the bright blue. Then when the night is over, the landscape floods with light. Each day ignores the mindless destructions of the night before. It's as if nothing happened. The sun gazes blithely on the fields.
That spring, Samuel fell into a fugue state. He had been on the edge, in the twilight. In the course of the winter the world stopped working the way it is supposed to. It was occupied by things that made no sense. He no longer knew what the world was. He lived in it, but he didn't recognize it. When he gave up his job, he fell. His life became weightless, as you do when you fall. He was like one of those divers who go underwater without oxygen, just holding their breath. They stand in the blue half-light, in twenty or thirty feet of water, their toes lightly touching the sand on the sea floor. They hover there, on the edge of an underwater chasm, the brink of an undersea cliff that could be hundreds, thousands of feet deep. Instead of swimming for the surface, they push off lightly and dive, in slow motion, an underwater swan dive, downward into the dark.
An example of the elder Samuel's associations, here his rather chaotic zoo adventures with pieces by Sergei Protopopov:
Listening to Protopopov is like watching a slow river of magma pour out of a mountain, spitting and burping and tumbling over itself. It's compelling, and then, after a while, it's boring. It is fascinating because it's so alien-rock that glows, that looks alive-but it's inert. It has no connection to life.
This is the music of all the strange things Samuel saw and heard on those tours. Viperine's letters, the scientific essays, the poor animals. The twitches and sudden shakes, the pacing and staring. The platypus, madly scratching. That white animal in the dark room, in the cage with no label. Mushka, the morose Pallas's cat. Pekka's strawberry face. Dr. Tank's fortified life. Sirje, with her double haircut and fangs sharpened like steel. Preteen, swaying as he walked, telling the story of blood gushing out of Ellie's mouth. Even the little Chinese quail, without a thought in its head. And for some reason Jaagup, who stared at trees, and Melinda the fennec, who stared at flies or flecks in the air, and that tiger, gazing up at the wall that was always too high to scale, and Monika's hyena, looking blankly at Mercury in the predawn sky, and Betty the black bear, blinking into its haze of drugs, and Owole the blue monkey, no longer looking, no longer seeing, its eyes no longer turning, no longer needed.
Elkins claims for his series of novels
'I claim several things as innovations:
1. A life experienced as divided, without explanation or trauma. The notes in each book, written by the narrator in old age, present an experience of aging so extreme that the bonds of memory are broken, naturally, apart from the usual incremental losses of memory and without injury or dementia. This goes against the assumption that a life is a whole, or it can be mended.
2. Multi-volume novel comprised of disparate parts. The five books have different structures and styles, unlike multivolume novels by Balzac, Dickens, Proust, etc. There are parallels between this and the first point. Examples of multivolume novels where each book has a different style or format: Agustin Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy, Philipp Weiß’s Am Weltenrand sitzen die Menschen und lachen, Beckett’s trilogy, Tom LeClair’s Passing novels, perhaps Alban Nikolai Herbst’s five novels (published by Elfenbein) and Marianne Fritz’s Fortress.
3. Music as memoir. The older narrator’s writing about music is a new kind of biography and autobiography. For him music retells the characters and places in the book better than memory.
4. Music in fiction. Before this project only a few novels had sheet music, for example Beckett’s Watt and Zukofsky’s “A”–24. Book 4 contains an extended musical composition, Twelve Variations and a Theme. The music is seen by the reader. It does not need to be played or heard.
5. Diagrams as emblems of irrationality. The diagrams, graphs, and mathematical formulas are legible but not useful. Like the music, they are images, signs of the narrator’s crisis.
6. A novel with nonfiction explanatory material. These “Ideas and Materials” were written with the books, as a parallel text. I hope they invite readers to move between different kinds of writing.'
Read
December 24, 2023I’ve been following Jim Elkins’ intelligent reviews of formally challenging literature on Goodreads for a few years. I always find them insightful and thought-provoking, so I was eager to read his own novel. Folllowing Elkins’ practice, I choose not to give this book a star rating, which is essentially a way of providing data for popularity contests. I will assume that its effects are intentional, and that those who don’t care for them simply aren’t its intended audience. I’ll try to describe it objectively, making a variety of observations without passing final judgment.
When acute critics try to create their own fiction, the first obstacle may be their own judgment, which is so sharp it can create fatal writer’s block. If they do produce something, the text may strain so hard to be original and intellectually challenging that it becomes a gigantic cryptic crossword with no accessible human motives—no emotional grip. (Finnegans Wake is arguably the ultimate example.)
Elkins’ 600-page novel avoids these traps. The book keeps the reader’s mind engaged, but I was surprised by how accessible most of its vocabulary is (there are some exceptions, such as “anankastic” and “candent”). The reader is rarely left in the dark about what is happening, although of course the deeper meaning of the action is debatable. The novel’s structure is also straightforward—at first, anyway: the narrator visits a series of zoos (which he could have visited in a somewhat different order); his accounts of his visits alternate with his descriptions of a series of imagistic dreams that bring him closer and closer to wildfires. As for emotion, the main focus of the book is the narrator’s wrenching existential crisis. The causes of this crisis remain somewhat obscure to him and to the reader, but that is not unrealistic.
Literary fiction has more antiheroes than popular fiction, since literary authors may feel free to break rules such as “save the cat” (have protagonists do something kind early on, to make the reader identify with them). An early example is the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. An extreme case is William Gass’s The Tunnel, a formally inventive book narrated by a revolting antisemite. Elkins’ narrator, Samuel Emmer, is hardly so bad, but he does not do much to endear himself to the reader. Since his backstory is sketchy, we learn about him mostly from his rude behavior in the zoos and his thoughts during those visits, which are mostly harsh (though often amusing) fantasies about his tour guides. Then again, he gets increasingly exercised about the sad lives of the zoo animals, which could be seen as a huge way of “saving the cat,” or at least wishing you could. Emmer is also characterized as obsessive-compulsive and inconsiderate: he has an assistant whom he carelessly describes as Vietnamese at one point, though later in the book he correctly calls him Thai.
Dreams, as represented in fiction and film, are usually strange stories that link bizarre events and things. The dreams here are different: a series of visions, with little narrative context and a clear content that is frightening but not weird. (I have had both kinds of dreams.) The narration includes many comments on the nature of dreaming, so either the dreams are lucid, or the narrator is analyzing them from a later, waking standpoint. Given the all-too-real effects of climate change, these visions of wildfires would be strong and disturbing without any symbolic supplement. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to read them symbolically, especially since the narrator bluntly concludes that they represent the collapse of his own mind. The dilapidated zoos and the compulsive behavior of their animals are also obvious parallels to Emmer’s own mind and acts.
After the collapse of Emmer’s sanity and career, we are surprised by a new voice in the last portion of the book: Emmer as an old man, some forty years after the crisis. The nonagenarian Emmer says he is not the same person as the one who experienced a breakdown, and he’s right: his tone, mood, and concerns are quite different. It also turns out that he’s a highly skilled pianist and a connoisseur of twentieth-century avant-garde music; oddly, there was no hint of this earlier.
The formal characteristics of this novel, such as the inclusion of photographs, diagrams, scientific texts, and musical scores, make it unusual, though not pioneering. An obvious predecessor is W. G. Sebald, but some of these techniques were introduced long before Sebald, even in nonfiction and popular fiction: W. E. B. Du Bois begins every chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with a melody, and in 1936, mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler published the experimental “documented novels” The Marceau Case and X. Jones of Scotland Yard, which include photos, diagrams, and a variety of other elements.
The use of images to accompany text affects the reading experience. The reader is likely to go back and forth between pictures and words, judging whether the author’s descriptions fit the images (I thought they did). Readers are also discouraged from forming their own mental images, and this effect can create a certain distance from the story. In McLuhan’s terms, the images make the book “colder” than it would be without them, because the reader’s imagination is activated less; we are not engaged as much in fleshing out the novel’s world. In an interesting move, Elkins withholds any images of zoo animals until the main narrative is over, and then presents them in their own, wordless section. This creates effects that I’m still considering. One is, perhaps, an immersion in the non-linguistic life of animals.
The final section of the book is packed with musical scores and descriptions of music, which lead us to a further element: YouTube. At least, it must be the rare reader who is familiar with all the music Elkins discusses, or who would resist going online to listen to it (almost all the composers and pieces described in the book are real). I did the same while reading Richard Powers’ Orfeo. The reader now triangulates among text, score, and recording. Or should I say quadrangulates? For Elkins tells us in a final note that he has altered the original composers’ scores. Is his purpose to avoid copyright problems? Or to encode secret messages in the alterations? If it’s the latter, this would be the kind of “cryptic crossword” approach I first mentioned, and so far I am not enough of a musician, or not patient enough, to discover the messages. In any case, the reader of this final section is provoked to ask a series of questions:
Does the narrator’s description of the music match the score and the recording?
How does the score in the book differ from the actual score? (Many videos on YouTube show you the original score, so a comparison is possible.)
The narrator claims that the moods of these pieces fit the feelings he had during his middle-age experiences. Do they?
The narrator claims that the prelude-fugue structure matches the structure of the earlier part of the novel. In a general way this is obviously true, but does the parallel work out in detail?
This is starting to look like a set of book-club questions, or suggested essay topics in a college course. I’ll close by thanking Jim Elkins for a thought-provoking novel that deserves to be read not only in college courses, but by many readers looking for an unusual and challenging experience in fiction.
When acute critics try to create their own fiction, the first obstacle may be their own judgment, which is so sharp it can create fatal writer’s block. If they do produce something, the text may strain so hard to be original and intellectually challenging that it becomes a gigantic cryptic crossword with no accessible human motives—no emotional grip. (Finnegans Wake is arguably the ultimate example.)
Elkins’ 600-page novel avoids these traps. The book keeps the reader’s mind engaged, but I was surprised by how accessible most of its vocabulary is (there are some exceptions, such as “anankastic” and “candent”). The reader is rarely left in the dark about what is happening, although of course the deeper meaning of the action is debatable. The novel’s structure is also straightforward—at first, anyway: the narrator visits a series of zoos (which he could have visited in a somewhat different order); his accounts of his visits alternate with his descriptions of a series of imagistic dreams that bring him closer and closer to wildfires. As for emotion, the main focus of the book is the narrator’s wrenching existential crisis. The causes of this crisis remain somewhat obscure to him and to the reader, but that is not unrealistic.
Literary fiction has more antiheroes than popular fiction, since literary authors may feel free to break rules such as “save the cat” (have protagonists do something kind early on, to make the reader identify with them). An early example is the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. An extreme case is William Gass’s The Tunnel, a formally inventive book narrated by a revolting antisemite. Elkins’ narrator, Samuel Emmer, is hardly so bad, but he does not do much to endear himself to the reader. Since his backstory is sketchy, we learn about him mostly from his rude behavior in the zoos and his thoughts during those visits, which are mostly harsh (though often amusing) fantasies about his tour guides. Then again, he gets increasingly exercised about the sad lives of the zoo animals, which could be seen as a huge way of “saving the cat,” or at least wishing you could. Emmer is also characterized as obsessive-compulsive and inconsiderate: he has an assistant whom he carelessly describes as Vietnamese at one point, though later in the book he correctly calls him Thai.
Dreams, as represented in fiction and film, are usually strange stories that link bizarre events and things. The dreams here are different: a series of visions, with little narrative context and a clear content that is frightening but not weird. (I have had both kinds of dreams.) The narration includes many comments on the nature of dreaming, so either the dreams are lucid, or the narrator is analyzing them from a later, waking standpoint. Given the all-too-real effects of climate change, these visions of wildfires would be strong and disturbing without any symbolic supplement. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to read them symbolically, especially since the narrator bluntly concludes that they represent the collapse of his own mind. The dilapidated zoos and the compulsive behavior of their animals are also obvious parallels to Emmer’s own mind and acts.
After the collapse of Emmer’s sanity and career, we are surprised by a new voice in the last portion of the book: Emmer as an old man, some forty years after the crisis. The nonagenarian Emmer says he is not the same person as the one who experienced a breakdown, and he’s right: his tone, mood, and concerns are quite different. It also turns out that he’s a highly skilled pianist and a connoisseur of twentieth-century avant-garde music; oddly, there was no hint of this earlier.
The formal characteristics of this novel, such as the inclusion of photographs, diagrams, scientific texts, and musical scores, make it unusual, though not pioneering. An obvious predecessor is W. G. Sebald, but some of these techniques were introduced long before Sebald, even in nonfiction and popular fiction: W. E. B. Du Bois begins every chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with a melody, and in 1936, mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler published the experimental “documented novels” The Marceau Case and X. Jones of Scotland Yard, which include photos, diagrams, and a variety of other elements.
The use of images to accompany text affects the reading experience. The reader is likely to go back and forth between pictures and words, judging whether the author’s descriptions fit the images (I thought they did). Readers are also discouraged from forming their own mental images, and this effect can create a certain distance from the story. In McLuhan’s terms, the images make the book “colder” than it would be without them, because the reader’s imagination is activated less; we are not engaged as much in fleshing out the novel’s world. In an interesting move, Elkins withholds any images of zoo animals until the main narrative is over, and then presents them in their own, wordless section. This creates effects that I’m still considering. One is, perhaps, an immersion in the non-linguistic life of animals.
The final section of the book is packed with musical scores and descriptions of music, which lead us to a further element: YouTube. At least, it must be the rare reader who is familiar with all the music Elkins discusses, or who would resist going online to listen to it (almost all the composers and pieces described in the book are real). I did the same while reading Richard Powers’ Orfeo. The reader now triangulates among text, score, and recording. Or should I say quadrangulates? For Elkins tells us in a final note that he has altered the original composers’ scores. Is his purpose to avoid copyright problems? Or to encode secret messages in the alterations? If it’s the latter, this would be the kind of “cryptic crossword” approach I first mentioned, and so far I am not enough of a musician, or not patient enough, to discover the messages. In any case, the reader of this final section is provoked to ask a series of questions:
Does the narrator’s description of the music match the score and the recording?
How does the score in the book differ from the actual score? (Many videos on YouTube show you the original score, so a comparison is possible.)
The narrator claims that the moods of these pieces fit the feelings he had during his middle-age experiences. Do they?
The narrator claims that the prelude-fugue structure matches the structure of the earlier part of the novel. In a general way this is obviously true, but does the parallel work out in detail?
This is starting to look like a set of book-club questions, or suggested essay topics in a college course. I’ll close by thanking Jim Elkins for a thought-provoking novel that deserves to be read not only in college courses, but by many readers looking for an unusual and challenging experience in fiction.
Read
March 8, 2024"Why do caged animals pace? Because if they stopped, they’d see their cages clearly, they’d see their lives passing." This is an observation by Dr. Samuel, the protagonist in James Elkin’s astonishing, esoteric, and experimental novel Weak In Comparison to Dreams. Samuel is a civil water biologist assigned, despite having no expertise, to travel internationally to deteriorating and winter-lonely zoos and observe the behaviors of mentally ill animals. Diagnosed with zoochosis, some captive animals manifest abnormal stereotypies–pacing, punding, rocking, staring, scratching, self-mutilating, obsessive, repetitive, physical actions that serve no natural purpose in unnatural environments. Samuel observes at a zoo in Helsinki, a black leopard constantly pacing madly in figure-eight loops inches from the front of its cage. In Estonia, a Chinese quail continually jitters and shakes its head at a fence as if to tell the fence, “No, no, no, you don’t exist.” A pair of otters at the Salt Lake City zoo routinely perform a neurotic choreography of twitches, jerks and somersaults. And at the Zoo in Knoxville, a blue monkey trapped in an endless psychophysical tic, paces on a platform high in her cage, curling her arm over her ear, pulling her head into a twisting flip, then, taking four steps to the other end of the board, repeats the motions again and again, all day long, forever. As Elkin’s writes, “[the monkey] was protesting her intolerable existence… If she did the same thing over and over, each time identically, then time would have to stop.”
Samuel is anguished by the suffering of these animals, the apparent incompetence or denials of the suffering on behalf of the zookeepers, and by the abstracted conditions of captivity itself. He begins the job feeling lost in his own life, but now, cataloging the sensory deprivations of the animals, he sees what being lost really is. He begins to display erratic and difficult behavior toward the human animals on the outside of the cages. He lies about his ethnological credentials, cites made-up absurd scientific research to intimidate the zookeepers, and swears at oblivious zoo patrons. The compulsive behaviors of the animals become parallels to Samuel’s own sense of captivity and hopelessness in his cascading professional and personal life. Samuel's life in the conscious world is a mental cage in which he is losing control. At night, after the contentious zoo visits, he retreats to a strange serenity in his turbulent dreams, although his dreams, poetically described and concretely photographed in the pages of Elkin's book, are of walks through a hellish landscape of forest fires engulfing a North American frontier abandoned by people. Presumable nightmares to us as readers, are to Samuel a disentanglement, an escape to a realm where the impossible expectations and responsibilities of modern adult life are burning to cinders.
Between zoo visits, Samuel studies the broken behavior patterns of zoo animals, depicted in the novel in habitat maps, movement diagrams, tables, equations, and scientific articles. The novel is about Samuel's identification with the caught animals, he is as far from mental health and help as they are, but also more broadly about the intersection of natural order and human culture. The novel suggests how much of our lives are developed routines of repeated actions practiced to distract our human psyche from the terrifying reality that our time is passing and that we have no more control over our future than we do of the moment. Samuel’s disorderly behavior leads him to semiconsciously lose his job, and his life crescendos as he loses his mind. But his failures and losses are also the catalyst to his finding the way out of the pacing figure-eights of his species and out of the self-locked cage. Eventually Samuel finds the paths and lines and equations are not a maze of secret signs but a less complicated, and sometimes beautiful fabric of meaning. Maybe we should all learn to abandon the fear of unfulfillment and find serenity in stretching out on real grass and accepting the peaceful emptiness of the dark but open sky.
Samuel is anguished by the suffering of these animals, the apparent incompetence or denials of the suffering on behalf of the zookeepers, and by the abstracted conditions of captivity itself. He begins the job feeling lost in his own life, but now, cataloging the sensory deprivations of the animals, he sees what being lost really is. He begins to display erratic and difficult behavior toward the human animals on the outside of the cages. He lies about his ethnological credentials, cites made-up absurd scientific research to intimidate the zookeepers, and swears at oblivious zoo patrons. The compulsive behaviors of the animals become parallels to Samuel’s own sense of captivity and hopelessness in his cascading professional and personal life. Samuel's life in the conscious world is a mental cage in which he is losing control. At night, after the contentious zoo visits, he retreats to a strange serenity in his turbulent dreams, although his dreams, poetically described and concretely photographed in the pages of Elkin's book, are of walks through a hellish landscape of forest fires engulfing a North American frontier abandoned by people. Presumable nightmares to us as readers, are to Samuel a disentanglement, an escape to a realm where the impossible expectations and responsibilities of modern adult life are burning to cinders.
Between zoo visits, Samuel studies the broken behavior patterns of zoo animals, depicted in the novel in habitat maps, movement diagrams, tables, equations, and scientific articles. The novel is about Samuel's identification with the caught animals, he is as far from mental health and help as they are, but also more broadly about the intersection of natural order and human culture. The novel suggests how much of our lives are developed routines of repeated actions practiced to distract our human psyche from the terrifying reality that our time is passing and that we have no more control over our future than we do of the moment. Samuel’s disorderly behavior leads him to semiconsciously lose his job, and his life crescendos as he loses his mind. But his failures and losses are also the catalyst to his finding the way out of the pacing figure-eights of his species and out of the self-locked cage. Eventually Samuel finds the paths and lines and equations are not a maze of secret signs but a less complicated, and sometimes beautiful fabric of meaning. Maybe we should all learn to abandon the fear of unfulfillment and find serenity in stretching out on real grass and accepting the peaceful emptiness of the dark but open sky.
Read
January 5, 2026Almost counted for my 2025 reads but I was 30 pages short lol. This book is so interesting and weird and trippy. I heard about it through the Inklings podcast where Jacob Elordi (the actor who plays the Creature in Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein) recommended it as one he read during filming. The writing structure follows music patterns and each chapter contains a real world plot and a dream sequence. It combines science, music, zoo ethics, visual storytelling, and dreams in a fascinating take on fiction.
Samuel Emmer, the main character, visits different zoos for a work project. His life and mental health are crumbling and he begins to dream. In his sleep, he wanders through landscapes and sees smoke on the horizon. As his mental world begins to implode, the smoke becomes fire in his dreams-- and it keeps coming closer.
After finishing the book, I checked out more of James Elkins' work. Apparently this is book 3 in a 5 book experimental novel. I just started book 2 and book 1 is coming out this fall. The whole series spans the life of the aforementioned Samuel Emmer. This book is about his mental collapse while others focus on other themes and aspects of his life. (The last book is apparently going to be completely obituaries.) Elkins' website is interesting to check out--he posts grafts and timelines and updates of his work. https://jameselkins.com/
Weak in Comparison to Dreams captured my attention enough to start book 2 so I'll see how that goes.
Samuel Emmer, the main character, visits different zoos for a work project. His life and mental health are crumbling and he begins to dream. In his sleep, he wanders through landscapes and sees smoke on the horizon. As his mental world begins to implode, the smoke becomes fire in his dreams-- and it keeps coming closer.
After finishing the book, I checked out more of James Elkins' work. Apparently this is book 3 in a 5 book experimental novel. I just started book 2 and book 1 is coming out this fall. The whole series spans the life of the aforementioned Samuel Emmer. This book is about his mental collapse while others focus on other themes and aspects of his life. (The last book is apparently going to be completely obituaries.) Elkins' website is interesting to check out--he posts grafts and timelines and updates of his work. https://jameselkins.com/
Weak in Comparison to Dreams captured my attention enough to start book 2 so I'll see how that goes.
February 6, 2025
WEAK IN COMPARISON TO DREAMS
James Elkins
@unnamedpress 12/2023
An incredible work of brilliant art, WICTD follows Samuel Emmer, a washed-up burnt-out parasitologist newly thrust into a new career of international zoo inspection, in spite of his lack of experience with or interest in more “charismatic megafauna.”
He is somewhat of a self-made or self-proclaimed expert in animal stereotypical behaviors typically diagnosed in psychiatrically unwell animals living in enclosures, but his lack of expertise in human interaction makes for a fascinating and hilarious storytelling experience by a narrator who is quite reliably unreliable, and becoming moreso all the time. Unhinged burnt-out amoeba nerd? Count me in.
Interspersed with dream sequences featuring wildfire photography, Emmer passes back and forth from his waking life to his sleeping/dreaming one until the two become somewhat indistinguishable. This allows for profound, simply explained meditations on humanity’s own daily “enclosure” within our lives and our minds, and a exploration of the gray area between Truth and Falsehood, Fiction and Dreams, and where madness lives in the middle of it all.
Elkins is a bit of a synesthete with a massive diorama of fields of interest displaying a deep understanding of human psychology, mammalian behavioral sciences, ecology, parasitology, astronomy, music theory, art theory, medicine, and more. (Honestly, is any of it true???) This lends for a complex, but never uninteresting novel that features all of the above plus an incredible sense of humor.
I loved this book. It’s part one of a five part mega novel series with book two coming out this summer by @unnamedpress — and I cannot even WAIT.
Fan of Bolaño, Labatut, Ed Park or Catherine Lacey? Try this out.
“You have never seen this.” - James Elkins
James Elkins
@unnamedpress 12/2023
An incredible work of brilliant art, WICTD follows Samuel Emmer, a washed-up burnt-out parasitologist newly thrust into a new career of international zoo inspection, in spite of his lack of experience with or interest in more “charismatic megafauna.”
He is somewhat of a self-made or self-proclaimed expert in animal stereotypical behaviors typically diagnosed in psychiatrically unwell animals living in enclosures, but his lack of expertise in human interaction makes for a fascinating and hilarious storytelling experience by a narrator who is quite reliably unreliable, and becoming moreso all the time. Unhinged burnt-out amoeba nerd? Count me in.
Interspersed with dream sequences featuring wildfire photography, Emmer passes back and forth from his waking life to his sleeping/dreaming one until the two become somewhat indistinguishable. This allows for profound, simply explained meditations on humanity’s own daily “enclosure” within our lives and our minds, and a exploration of the gray area between Truth and Falsehood, Fiction and Dreams, and where madness lives in the middle of it all.
Elkins is a bit of a synesthete with a massive diorama of fields of interest displaying a deep understanding of human psychology, mammalian behavioral sciences, ecology, parasitology, astronomy, music theory, art theory, medicine, and more. (Honestly, is any of it true???) This lends for a complex, but never uninteresting novel that features all of the above plus an incredible sense of humor.
I loved this book. It’s part one of a five part mega novel series with book two coming out this summer by @unnamedpress — and I cannot even WAIT.
Fan of Bolaño, Labatut, Ed Park or Catherine Lacey? Try this out.
“You have never seen this.” - James Elkins
February 3, 2026
That winter ruined any hope I had of experiencing my life as a story, beginning with a cry in a hospital and developing right up to the latest click of the plastic second hand on the large wall-mounted, battery-operated clock that I bought because, as I once said to Adela, I need to keep better track of time: that year I lost the capacity to manage my days, keep my mind on my job, keep on good behavior, keep hold of my family, attend to what people were actually saying, distinguish animals from humans, day from night. That winter tore me from myself and pushed me into a world of dreams.
(first sentence)
*
so beyond in love with this book! kept me up late on this winter nite, so more soon!! it is truly a WORK OF ART.
from the author’s instagram: “Experimental novel, told in dreams and photos, with 200 images, diagrams, equations, and sheet music (playable on piano). It's dreams within dreams, and they all end badly.
(Of course: what other kind of book would be worth writing.)”
this novel is SO experimental & full of literary ambition, really challenging what the perimeters of a novel can be, with existential philosophical depth & also how it incorporates visual elements so brilliantly… & a look into the uncanny intersection of human & animal worlds… examining the ache of isolation/disconnection & the hunger to fully be present/alive…
incredibly meditative & engaging & haunting experience (with some lovely humor too!!)… truly speechless. just…
WOW.
[please do not let the page count influence your decision to read this!! there are lots of photos (& graphs, sheet music, etc :) throughout the book!! also, I saw someone recommend that they be read in the order the first two books have been published, so that influenced my decision to start here!!]
only very familiar with Elkins’ work in art theory / history / crit, originally from another top person in the field gifting me a copy of his book “What Photography Is” while in graduate school. so absolutely love that Elkins is venturing into fiction (& diving in so completely with this ambitious project) much like another art theory favorite—& famous Booker winner & controversy—John Berger!! (https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...) curious now if Berger’s writings on art came before &/or alongside &/or after his fiction works, but that is a rabbit hole for another day!
also, a complete photo nerd note: I have both of the two volumes that are currently available, & the visual differences between the two covers were driving me mad, as someone who originally learned photography by darkroom only processes, both b&w & color (as photoshop & digital cameras technically existed but film was still king among all levels)… &, they are not true black & white. this one has a cyan heavy green tint to it & the other a magenta heavy purple… there’s a couple short phrases that might explain the choice for this book which have appeared so far, but curious about the other plus the three additional (yet to be published) ones!!
*
“Elkins is aware of the use of the visual image embedded into a text. This is straight up stated. He's an authority on this via studies on W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole. So, if he's going to be faithful to his own "Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel" then he is going to be in conversation with these and contribute something new.” (here's a link to the referenced article/manifesto)
https://www.academia.edu/116188791/Fo...
(first sentence)
*
so beyond in love with this book! kept me up late on this winter nite, so more soon!! it is truly a WORK OF ART.
from the author’s instagram: “Experimental novel, told in dreams and photos, with 200 images, diagrams, equations, and sheet music (playable on piano). It's dreams within dreams, and they all end badly.
(Of course: what other kind of book would be worth writing.)”
this novel is SO experimental & full of literary ambition, really challenging what the perimeters of a novel can be, with existential philosophical depth & also how it incorporates visual elements so brilliantly… & a look into the uncanny intersection of human & animal worlds… examining the ache of isolation/disconnection & the hunger to fully be present/alive…
incredibly meditative & engaging & haunting experience (with some lovely humor too!!)… truly speechless. just…
WOW.
[please do not let the page count influence your decision to read this!! there are lots of photos (& graphs, sheet music, etc :) throughout the book!! also, I saw someone recommend that they be read in the order the first two books have been published, so that influenced my decision to start here!!]
only very familiar with Elkins’ work in art theory / history / crit, originally from another top person in the field gifting me a copy of his book “What Photography Is” while in graduate school. so absolutely love that Elkins is venturing into fiction (& diving in so completely with this ambitious project) much like another art theory favorite—& famous Booker winner & controversy—John Berger!! (https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booke...) curious now if Berger’s writings on art came before &/or alongside &/or after his fiction works, but that is a rabbit hole for another day!
also, a complete photo nerd note: I have both of the two volumes that are currently available, & the visual differences between the two covers were driving me mad, as someone who originally learned photography by darkroom only processes, both b&w & color (as photoshop & digital cameras technically existed but film was still king among all levels)… &, they are not true black & white. this one has a cyan heavy green tint to it & the other a magenta heavy purple… there’s a couple short phrases that might explain the choice for this book which have appeared so far, but curious about the other plus the three additional (yet to be published) ones!!
*
“Elkins is aware of the use of the visual image embedded into a text. This is straight up stated. He's an authority on this via studies on W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole. So, if he's going to be faithful to his own "Four Sour and Stringent Proposals for the Novel" then he is going to be in conversation with these and contribute something new.” (here's a link to the referenced article/manifesto)
https://www.academia.edu/116188791/Fo...
January 23, 2026
this novel bravely asks the question "what if we are the animals trapped in the zoo" 🤔
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Jokes aside, I suppose I'll start this by disclaiming that trying to describe this book feels like a disservice. I'm not exactly a literary mind so not only did this book challenge me from a breadth of knowledge perspective, but emotionally I feel like I lack the words to even attempt to describe how it made me feel.
(That said, it is not lost on me how a novel detailing a listless and neurotic microbiologist studying animals might appeal to me)
All that said, it's a marvel how this book managed to have me not only achingly empathize over pages on pages of graphs and diagrams detailing the minutae of stereotypies of captives animals, but, as the microscope of the novel gradually and suddenly panned around to both narrator and audience, wove disciplines and topics as seemingly disparate as psychology and trauma, astronomy, music theory, art theory, and ecology.
Deeply existential book that is not only a literary feat but an achingly human story of isolation, madness, repetition, time, loss, and meaning.
-------
Jokes aside, I suppose I'll start this by disclaiming that trying to describe this book feels like a disservice. I'm not exactly a literary mind so not only did this book challenge me from a breadth of knowledge perspective, but emotionally I feel like I lack the words to even attempt to describe how it made me feel.
(That said, it is not lost on me how a novel detailing a listless and neurotic microbiologist studying animals might appeal to me)
All that said, it's a marvel how this book managed to have me not only achingly empathize over pages on pages of graphs and diagrams detailing the minutae of stereotypies of captives animals, but, as the microscope of the novel gradually and suddenly panned around to both narrator and audience, wove disciplines and topics as seemingly disparate as psychology and trauma, astronomy, music theory, art theory, and ecology.
Deeply existential book that is not only a literary feat but an achingly human story of isolation, madness, repetition, time, loss, and meaning.
January 23, 2024
This book was terrible, saved from a 1 star only because of some interesting images and setups. I had to skim the last 1/3rd because I just could not finish it. This took me 3 weeks! And it’s not even that long. If I hadn’t have gotten this in hardcover, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. I don’t feel like writing much about it, but would not recommend.
October 24, 2025
This was very good. I particularly like the sections of the book having to do with fake/real science and music. All the studies that Vipesh and Viparine send to Samuel are a lot of fun. All the photographs, tables, charts, etc add to the story in a way that reminds me a little of Sebald. I will certainly be reading the other books in this series as they come out.
December 17, 2023
Rounded up. Ambitious, haunting, and experimental. Art vs artifice with no clear winner at times.
August 22, 2024
Fugues in fugues and a lonely dingo mirroring a lonely hyena mirroring the cosmos. This was a whole cartographic system. Hoooooly shit
January 11, 2025
neededddd this!! strange and unsettling and unlike any other book ive ever read <3
QUOTES:
"Something was wrong with me. I took wrong turns without knowing why. When I got lost, I stayed in place, wondering at the world that mirrored itself endlessly around me. I watched bemused as my relationships faltered."
"Let us call this flight in place. The animal wishes to run. Each observer frightens it, but it has nowhere to go. Forces impinge on it from all sides. Flight in place is a crushing fear that results in no movement whatsoever. If we look closely, we observe the animal is not actually sitting still. It is in motion, because all its muscles are working at once. It shakes and trembles, but it does not move."
"The point was just to remain in motion. The path was the shape of its unhappiness."
"Imagine loving nothing in the world except an animal as hideous as a hyena. Then being spurned. Then being abandoned. You'd have nothing. You wouldn't know what to do with yourself....Maybe stereotypical pacing is a kind of memory, a trauma that has no end. Each despairing animal learns from the ones before it. Their paths are diagrams of their memories."
"Then another part, less sunk down in sleep, a remnant of my waking self, thought: no, this is not a place, but a state of mind. It is a feeling of disturbed calm. Something is going wrong."
"This is what it is like to get older: the details of the world get confused and feeble. The mood of the world becomes strong and insistent. The image of the world grows powerful, it ruins your mind."
"A person like me likes to tell himself he's a secret to himself. It's a point of pride, as if it's an accomplishment not to understand yourself, it makes you deep and fascinating and helps you ignore the fact that you're anankastic, that you have a disorder which requires professional attention."
"The days were too strong."
"Does it matter if your mind becomes disarranged? If you dream about a lonely world where fires burn for no reason? If you get to actually like that world? Even prefer it to the other one?"
"Allende's pieces are sad in the complex way that only isolated people can be."
"Memories like Phorid flies swarmed over Samuel's ruined life and overwhelmed his thoughts."
QUOTES:
"Something was wrong with me. I took wrong turns without knowing why. When I got lost, I stayed in place, wondering at the world that mirrored itself endlessly around me. I watched bemused as my relationships faltered."
"Let us call this flight in place. The animal wishes to run. Each observer frightens it, but it has nowhere to go. Forces impinge on it from all sides. Flight in place is a crushing fear that results in no movement whatsoever. If we look closely, we observe the animal is not actually sitting still. It is in motion, because all its muscles are working at once. It shakes and trembles, but it does not move."
"The point was just to remain in motion. The path was the shape of its unhappiness."
"Imagine loving nothing in the world except an animal as hideous as a hyena. Then being spurned. Then being abandoned. You'd have nothing. You wouldn't know what to do with yourself....Maybe stereotypical pacing is a kind of memory, a trauma that has no end. Each despairing animal learns from the ones before it. Their paths are diagrams of their memories."
"Then another part, less sunk down in sleep, a remnant of my waking self, thought: no, this is not a place, but a state of mind. It is a feeling of disturbed calm. Something is going wrong."
"This is what it is like to get older: the details of the world get confused and feeble. The mood of the world becomes strong and insistent. The image of the world grows powerful, it ruins your mind."
"A person like me likes to tell himself he's a secret to himself. It's a point of pride, as if it's an accomplishment not to understand yourself, it makes you deep and fascinating and helps you ignore the fact that you're anankastic, that you have a disorder which requires professional attention."
"The days were too strong."
"Does it matter if your mind becomes disarranged? If you dream about a lonely world where fires burn for no reason? If you get to actually like that world? Even prefer it to the other one?"
"Allende's pieces are sad in the complex way that only isolated people can be."
"Memories like Phorid flies swarmed over Samuel's ruined life and overwhelmed his thoughts."
January 23, 2026
This is the first book to pull me into the world of actually writing reviews rather than settling for a simple star rating.
What a new experience.
Dreams, memories, symbols, the conscious and unconscious mind, perception, instincts, science as virtue and the scientification of being, music theory, and the appreciation and domination of animals and environments. All of this unravels while being accompanied by various media that expand the idea of what a novel could be, while also narrowing and closing in on little Sam / Dr. Emmer / old man Sam. I didn’t find myself relating to him too much, and for that I am (for the most part) glad.
What hooked me early on was a snapshot of one of the dreams with the accompanying caption: “you have never seen this.” It was Sam realizing he was not reliving a memory, but standing in an unfamiliar, empty, new world. It was also speaking to myself as the reader, as I had never seen that image before either. And zooming even further out, each time I will return to it, I will have never seen it. Not in the same way at least. Myself, my situation in the world, and the changing background that accompanies my viewing will continue to unravel and keep it new.
I highly recommend listening to the major avant-garde compositions mentioned while reading the final sections. It allowed me not only to relate more deeply to that time, but also to place the proper lens on the previous few hundred pages.
Now, to practice my own piano chops and fully immerse myself.
What a new experience.
Dreams, memories, symbols, the conscious and unconscious mind, perception, instincts, science as virtue and the scientification of being, music theory, and the appreciation and domination of animals and environments. All of this unravels while being accompanied by various media that expand the idea of what a novel could be, while also narrowing and closing in on little Sam / Dr. Emmer / old man Sam. I didn’t find myself relating to him too much, and for that I am (for the most part) glad.
What hooked me early on was a snapshot of one of the dreams with the accompanying caption: “you have never seen this.” It was Sam realizing he was not reliving a memory, but standing in an unfamiliar, empty, new world. It was also speaking to myself as the reader, as I had never seen that image before either. And zooming even further out, each time I will return to it, I will have never seen it. Not in the same way at least. Myself, my situation in the world, and the changing background that accompanies my viewing will continue to unravel and keep it new.
I highly recommend listening to the major avant-garde compositions mentioned while reading the final sections. It allowed me not only to relate more deeply to that time, but also to place the proper lens on the previous few hundred pages.
Now, to practice my own piano chops and fully immerse myself.
January 14, 2026
This is the first "difficult" book I've read in a while. What made this one different to me is that directly following some of the esoteric passages, dream sequences, and discussions of animal studies, we often got a very plain-language explanation of what those things meant. I'm not sure what to think of that, and it's possible I misread it a bit. On one hand I'm grateful for having clarity added to what is sometimes a densely veiled read. On the other, it somewhat steals from trying to glean my own meaning. It's ok either way. I think reading this type of book is a good reminder to me that I don't need to feel like I deeply understand what the author is "trying" to do or say.
In any case, a worthwhile read, and some real banger lines and paragraphs.
The introspective nature of this book forces you to think about your own life and experience of the world in a way that most novels do not. Which can be good, bad, or neutral. I found it mostly good.
At times, it's funny and has an obvious narrative. Some of the blunt/that's-kinda-mean-to-say dialogue when the main character is spiraling reminds me of Ignatius from "A Confederacy of Dunces".
The "second book" to close this out is a notable change of pace and tone, and I like the "reveal" that helps explain the "first book". The reflections on living different lives was especially relatable.
In any case, a worthwhile read, and some real banger lines and paragraphs.
The introspective nature of this book forces you to think about your own life and experience of the world in a way that most novels do not. Which can be good, bad, or neutral. I found it mostly good.
At times, it's funny and has an obvious narrative. Some of the blunt/that's-kinda-mean-to-say dialogue when the main character is spiraling reminds me of Ignatius from "A Confederacy of Dunces".
The "second book" to close this out is a notable change of pace and tone, and I like the "reveal" that helps explain the "first book". The reflections on living different lives was especially relatable.
January 22, 2026
I was engrossed in this read first because I was just curious, then because I was getting concerned, and eventually because I was so captured by the way that the story explains and (kind of) resolves itself. From page 400 or so, the tension was physically palpable.
I also think the amount of scientific, musical, and general knowledge that was obviously so closely researched and incorporated into the novel was really impressive. It held back or slowed the development of the plot at times, but it also contributed to how vividly you can feel the overwhelmed/overstimulated reality of the narrator.
There were a lot of perfectly articulated lines or paragraphs that made me pause and read them over again. Even in the moments where I wasn't sure where the story was going, the text itself was emotionally moving. I'll be ruminating on this one!
I also think the amount of scientific, musical, and general knowledge that was obviously so closely researched and incorporated into the novel was really impressive. It held back or slowed the development of the plot at times, but it also contributed to how vividly you can feel the overwhelmed/overstimulated reality of the narrator.
There were a lot of perfectly articulated lines or paragraphs that made me pause and read them over again. Even in the moments where I wasn't sure where the story was going, the text itself was emotionally moving. I'll be ruminating on this one!
January 14, 2026
A pretentious, lonely, middle-aged man is assigned to observe and report about the ethics of zoos and the treatment of their animals.
This book isn't poorly written but rather just oddly constructed. Riddled with blurry photos that do nothing to further the plot. Scientific diagrams. Musical notes. 1/4 of this book is zoo observations, 1/4 is a science textbook. Then there's the fourth about ancient/religious art and how it relates to/depicts Samuel Emmer as a person and then there's the last 100 plus pages that are just all about music and obscure composers.
This just didn't work as a novel for me because even though it was 600 pages long, nothing ever really happened.
This book isn't poorly written but rather just oddly constructed. Riddled with blurry photos that do nothing to further the plot. Scientific diagrams. Musical notes. 1/4 of this book is zoo observations, 1/4 is a science textbook. Then there's the fourth about ancient/religious art and how it relates to/depicts Samuel Emmer as a person and then there's the last 100 plus pages that are just all about music and obscure composers.
This just didn't work as a novel for me because even though it was 600 pages long, nothing ever really happened.
January 4, 2026
not sure what I just read but I know how it made me feel
September 8, 2024
Unbelievable. So impossibly good, how does someone write this f*cking well. I’ve never read anything like this. Actual pure genius. Like what? So original, somehow underrated. Should’ve won the ManBooker Prize by a LONG MARGIN. Hands down easily indisputably and irrevocably among the top 5 best books I’ve read, cannot wait for his next novel.
May 17, 2024
“I am a forest fire
And I am the fire and I am the forest
And I am a witness watching it” mitski
And I am the fire and I am the forest
And I am a witness watching it” mitski
May 16, 2025
What a tediously surreal book. I will be thinking about it and its cosmic unpleasantness for awhile.
January 19, 2025
This was unlike any book I've ever read. I went to my local bookstore almost weekly for the past few months and every single time I would gravitate towards this book. I would take it off the shelf and then inevitably place it back, feeling a weird anxiety about pulling the trigger on it. I just finished it last night and I need more time to think about it. This is a book that I'll think about for a long time. It gave me multiple nightmares, and in one instance I was so unsettled that I couldn't fall asleep because I thought of the ramifications of what the protagonist was going through psychologically and applied that possibility to myself. At any point in this book, I can truly say I had no idea how it was going to end. All I knew for certain was an inescapable dread of total dissociation or as I now know- a fugue state. Totally surreal.
January 23, 2025
Truly a one-of-a-kind book. I haven't ever read anything like this that I can recall. The writing is fantastic. The linkage to music and scientific studies is totally cool - especially the music. I've been talking about learning to play piano for a few years but haven't done so. It would be awesome to be talented enough to play the music incorporated into the book. The author even suggests how you should do that.
If you're interested in reading something like you probably have never done before, I'd pick this up.
If you're interested in reading something like you probably have never done before, I'd pick this up.
April 27, 2024
Sebald descent into madness this book keeps its pace and then floors it until the end. Elkins driving faster and faster looks at you as you break the safety barrier of the mountains you have climbed. Somehow you survive the crash and are only left limping in the woods trying to identify some semblance of reality only to realize there is none. Bought the record, can’t wait to listen to it too.
July 1, 2025
If you care about what imaginative literature is capable of in the 21st-Century, ESPECIALLY, in the United States, you MUST read this book:
there are still boundaries to push, there are still original yarns to be spun.
full review:
https://haroldrogers.substack.com/p/d...
there are still boundaries to push, there are still original yarns to be spun.
full review:
https://haroldrogers.substack.com/p/d...
July 20, 2025
Veery good stuff, typos on pp157, 354 and 547. There also seems to be a line break problem on p.458 probably due to a misaligned image on the previous page.
I found this hugely enjoyable and intriguing. It might get a bit heavy-handed with the musical notation stuff at the end but it's definitely worth a read. The pagecount is misleading because there's a lot of images breaking up the text.
I found this hugely enjoyable and intriguing. It might get a bit heavy-handed with the musical notation stuff at the end but it's definitely worth a read. The pagecount is misleading because there's a lot of images breaking up the text.
January 7, 2026
i liked this but it was a long slog to read. first section with the zoos/dreams was definitely the highlight. latter part of the book was a great study into hyperfixation / special interest - all encompassing for the hyperfixee but a struggle to remain engaged for the listener/reader
January 15, 2026
I’m not sure how to feel about this one. Sometimes it was a slog and I had to force myself to pay attention, but at other points I was enthralled. I’m pretty fascinated by its structure and I do keep bringing up diagrams in my day to day conversations.
January 15, 2024
3.5 stars
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