What do you think?
Rate this book
We Computers: A Ghazal Novel
A multilayered exploration of poetry, authorship, and digital intelligence by “a writer of immense poetic power” (The Guardian)
In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon‑Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail, Jon-Perse builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds—of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love—in the stories and people he and AI conjure.
Hamid Ismailov brings together his work as a poet, translator, and student of literature of both East and West to craft a postmodern ode to poetry across centuries and continents. Crossing the poètes maudits with beloved Sufi classics, blending absurdist dreams with the life of the famed Persian poet Hafez, moving from careful mathematical calculations to lyrical narratives, Ismailov invents an ingenious transnational poetics of love and longing for the digital age. Situated at the crossroads of a multilingual world and mediated by the unreliable sensibilities of digital intelligence, this book is a dazzling celebration of how poetry resonates across time and space.
In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon‑Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail, Jon-Perse builds a computer program capable of both analyzing and generating literature. But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds—of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love—in the stories and people he and AI conjure.
Hamid Ismailov brings together his work as a poet, translator, and student of literature of both East and West to craft a postmodern ode to poetry across centuries and continents. Crossing the poètes maudits with beloved Sufi classics, blending absurdist dreams with the life of the famed Persian poet Hafez, moving from careful mathematical calculations to lyrical narratives, Ismailov invents an ingenious transnational poetics of love and longing for the digital age. Situated at the crossroads of a multilingual world and mediated by the unreliable sensibilities of digital intelligence, this book is a dazzling celebration of how poetry resonates across time and space.
296 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 2025
54 people are currently reading
1707 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
August 31, 2025
We are so (uz)back
October 8, 2025
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Unlike Hamid Ko’rmuridov, We have no concept of copyright or intellectual property. Previously, when We introduced Jon-Perse's dear friend Al's opinion, We noted that authorship and authorial rights (or intellectual property rights) were Western concepts. According to the Islamic, or Eastern, understanding, all that exists is the property of Allah, and humans are simply passive recipients or, at best, like the Prophet, merely bearers of good tidings not our own. There was no place in that tradition for personal ownership or authorship, Al told Jon-Perse then. We Computers also subscribe to this concept, even if not for reasons of faith.
The astute reader must have sensed that conceptually, We take the side of aggregate or collective art.
We Computers: A Ghazal Novel is Shelley Fairweather-Vega's translation of an original novel by Hamid Ismailov which was originally published chapter-by-chapter on Telegram in 2022.
This is a novel which speaks to literature in the age of Large Language Models, although the original was actually written before ChatGPT burst onto the scene.
The novel's narrators are a collective consciousness of an AI supercomputer, programmed by the French poet Jon-Perse, himself named after the 1960 Nobel winning Saint-John Perse (a pseudonymof Alexis Leger).
But Saint-John Perse's poetry plays a less explicit role than the Arabic ghazals, and, in particular that of the renowned Persian poet Hafez, the chapter of the novel modelled after the bayt, rhyming couplets which are one of the distinguishing features of the form.
Jon-Perse, introduced to Sufi poetry by an Uzbek translator Abdulhamid Ismail, and computers at Nanterre university, believes that it is possible to analyse and then potentially reproduce the work of a writer (the human emotional side of poetry coming not from the writer but rather the reader):
Jon-Perse first laid eyes on a personal computer at the university in Nanterre, an experience that remained stamped in his memory for life. He had so often spent all day in front of a typewriter, churning out four carbon copies of everything, and correcting every error four times. But on a computer like this one, if you wanted to, you could just replace an incorrect letter with the right one, or squeeze in a new word between two others, or make whole paragraphs switch places! Jon-Perse was practically dumbstruck by the potential.
But the technician—who was showing off the computer’s abilities like they were his own personal talents—didn’t stop there. He poured salt in the wound: “We can give this computer math problems to do, and it will solve them itself!” he said. At that, Jon-Perse snapped out of his stupor. “Can it write poems too?” he asked. The technician was interested only in mathematics and markets, so he spared just one word in response. “Sure!” Then he went back to extolling his Fermats and Freges.
But that “Sure!” had lodged in Jon-Perse’s heart like a splinter, and would stay there forever.
[...]
In the same way that every human being has their own unique genetic code, every writer has a unique style: a singular approach to wordcraft, sentence construction, and scene setting. Once all the data had been entered into the computer, Jon-Perse saw with his own eyes how the machine gradually learned to create elegant imitations of each author's work.
And as per the opening quote he also believes that this approach away from individual ownership, and toward the denial of the self, is consistent with Sufism and the Ghazal poems he loves, many of which (in Fairweather-Vega's translation, and from I think both originals and new poems created by the author) feature in the text.
With assistance from Abdulhamid Ismail (hereinafter AI), using the analytical methods previously described in addition to some new code, Jon-Perse fed Yasavi and Nava’i, Babur and Mashrab, Uvaysi and Nadira into the computer. As he did so, he became more sympathetic to the Sufi mysticism in their poetry. He began to feel he had discovered a new basis, a new foundation, to all his work thus far. A fundamental principle of this Sufi tradition is to forgo the idea of the self, and Jon-Perse felt strongly that computer poetry functioned by the very same principle: resistance to the idea of selfhood and authorship.
....
The simplest path to renunciation of the self is to transform oneself into the Other. Perhaps this is the idea and the desire that drove Jon-Perse to leave behind his Rimbauds and Mallarmés and Apollinaires and dive headfirst into the Uzbeks, the Furqats and Cho‘lpons and Rauf Parfis.
This is a complex and an, almost deliberately, frustrating read at times - the AI narrators often repeating and correcting themselves, or starting off on a new tangent, their lack of success in a sense a meta-success. But a brilliant feat of translation (and Fairweather-Vega's foreword and afterword, where she describes the novel as 'the single most challenging piece of literature I have ever had the honor to translate significantly', enhance the English reader's appreciation) and an ambitious and prescient novel.
I would be a little surprised, and certainly disappointed, if either this and/or Sympathy Tokyo Tower (very different stylistically, but also concerned with language and LLMs) do not feature in the 2026 International Booker.
Further sources
The opening of the novel at Electric Literature.
A conversation with the author and translator.
Unlike Hamid Ko’rmuridov, We have no concept of copyright or intellectual property. Previously, when We introduced Jon-Perse's dear friend Al's opinion, We noted that authorship and authorial rights (or intellectual property rights) were Western concepts. According to the Islamic, or Eastern, understanding, all that exists is the property of Allah, and humans are simply passive recipients or, at best, like the Prophet, merely bearers of good tidings not our own. There was no place in that tradition for personal ownership or authorship, Al told Jon-Perse then. We Computers also subscribe to this concept, even if not for reasons of faith.
The astute reader must have sensed that conceptually, We take the side of aggregate or collective art.
We Computers: A Ghazal Novel is Shelley Fairweather-Vega's translation of an original novel by Hamid Ismailov which was originally published chapter-by-chapter on Telegram in 2022.
This is a novel which speaks to literature in the age of Large Language Models, although the original was actually written before ChatGPT burst onto the scene.
The novel's narrators are a collective consciousness of an AI supercomputer, programmed by the French poet Jon-Perse, himself named after the 1960 Nobel winning Saint-John Perse (a pseudonymof Alexis Leger).
But Saint-John Perse's poetry plays a less explicit role than the Arabic ghazals, and, in particular that of the renowned Persian poet Hafez, the chapter of the novel modelled after the bayt, rhyming couplets which are one of the distinguishing features of the form.
Jon-Perse, introduced to Sufi poetry by an Uzbek translator Abdulhamid Ismail, and computers at Nanterre university, believes that it is possible to analyse and then potentially reproduce the work of a writer (the human emotional side of poetry coming not from the writer but rather the reader):
Jon-Perse first laid eyes on a personal computer at the university in Nanterre, an experience that remained stamped in his memory for life. He had so often spent all day in front of a typewriter, churning out four carbon copies of everything, and correcting every error four times. But on a computer like this one, if you wanted to, you could just replace an incorrect letter with the right one, or squeeze in a new word between two others, or make whole paragraphs switch places! Jon-Perse was practically dumbstruck by the potential.
But the technician—who was showing off the computer’s abilities like they were his own personal talents—didn’t stop there. He poured salt in the wound: “We can give this computer math problems to do, and it will solve them itself!” he said. At that, Jon-Perse snapped out of his stupor. “Can it write poems too?” he asked. The technician was interested only in mathematics and markets, so he spared just one word in response. “Sure!” Then he went back to extolling his Fermats and Freges.
But that “Sure!” had lodged in Jon-Perse’s heart like a splinter, and would stay there forever.
[...]
In the same way that every human being has their own unique genetic code, every writer has a unique style: a singular approach to wordcraft, sentence construction, and scene setting. Once all the data had been entered into the computer, Jon-Perse saw with his own eyes how the machine gradually learned to create elegant imitations of each author's work.
And as per the opening quote he also believes that this approach away from individual ownership, and toward the denial of the self, is consistent with Sufism and the Ghazal poems he loves, many of which (in Fairweather-Vega's translation, and from I think both originals and new poems created by the author) feature in the text.
With assistance from Abdulhamid Ismail (hereinafter AI), using the analytical methods previously described in addition to some new code, Jon-Perse fed Yasavi and Nava’i, Babur and Mashrab, Uvaysi and Nadira into the computer. As he did so, he became more sympathetic to the Sufi mysticism in their poetry. He began to feel he had discovered a new basis, a new foundation, to all his work thus far. A fundamental principle of this Sufi tradition is to forgo the idea of the self, and Jon-Perse felt strongly that computer poetry functioned by the very same principle: resistance to the idea of selfhood and authorship.
....
The simplest path to renunciation of the self is to transform oneself into the Other. Perhaps this is the idea and the desire that drove Jon-Perse to leave behind his Rimbauds and Mallarmés and Apollinaires and dive headfirst into the Uzbeks, the Furqats and Cho‘lpons and Rauf Parfis.
This is a complex and an, almost deliberately, frustrating read at times - the AI narrators often repeating and correcting themselves, or starting off on a new tangent, their lack of success in a sense a meta-success. But a brilliant feat of translation (and Fairweather-Vega's foreword and afterword, where she describes the novel as 'the single most challenging piece of literature I have ever had the honor to translate significantly', enhance the English reader's appreciation) and an ambitious and prescient novel.
I would be a little surprised, and certainly disappointed, if either this and/or Sympathy Tokyo Tower (very different stylistically, but also concerned with language and LLMs) do not feature in the 2026 International Booker.
Further sources
The opening of the novel at Electric Literature.
A conversation with the author and translator.
October 12, 2025
We are almost five years from the launch of ChatGPT2 and we have not yet fully understood its ramifications. Plagiarism and academic dishonesty are ubiquitous in high schools and colleges but what about the arts and academia? The future of intellectual life and creativity is harder to predict—should writers be worried about their careers? Will novelists and poets be replaced with language models? Are language models a threat to human poetry?
But another perspective: what if AI is a good thing for humanity, and should replace human writing? In his essay, "The Literary Machines", Calvino rebelliously offered an alternative vision of a literary future in which machines string words together to create an infinite array of stories, and then readers decide which ones are meaningful and which ones are beautiful. In this scenario, the reader dethrones the author as the genesis of meaning. This is the premise of his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which mute characters who meet in a forest try to tell their life stories by arranging tarot cards on the table. It is ultimately an exercise in hermeneutic guesswork and imaginative projection as the narrator tries to infer each character's story from the same cards arranged in different orders (who can say if he is right?) As with much of the Oulipo movement, Calvino was interested in storytelling as mechanistic, serialized, patterned, assembled and automated. If all stories are just strings of words with a finite number of structures, then the process of creating and combining them can also be engineered. Anyone can string words (or tarot cards) into a particular order, but only the reader can give them meaning.
This is the thesis put forward in Hamid Ismailov's We Computers. The novel begins with Jon-Perse: he hates his name because he was named after a poet whose poetry he despises. He decides to become a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacan, but then he moves into a communist commune and takes over the editorship of a poetry journal. Now returning to his namesake, he starts writing, editing and compiling poems, but everything changes when he is first introduced to the computer. He instantly realizes its potential to edit and manipulate poems, but his ambitions are higher: he wants to design programs to analyze an author's style, predict words, and decide the quality of verses. He, too, is transformed by his computer, falling "under the sway of his own, soulless logic". He starts collating his nouns and verbs in columns and counting their frequencies, doing the granular verbal arithmetic which we would come to call natural language processing. But as he composes and publishes his machine poetry, he, in turn, becomes more machine-like, something of a bean counter of phrases making poems with an abacus.
In a metatextual turn, the narrator of Jon-Perse's own supercomputer (a collective machine consciousness which refers to itself as "us computers"). This is the computer-told story of Jon-Perse's life, his discovery of Ghazal verse and of computers. But it is an unreliable story, as the computer is stopped by system errors, is asked to revise its story or predict alternate story endings, and at the end, discovers that there are other competing computers interfering with it. Jon-Perse wanted to use his computer to reconstruct the life of the poet Hafez from his poetry. He hopes that his computer can study his own writing and continue generating poems in his own style, allowing for a radically new kind of poetic immortality—a computer perpetually writing in his voice forever. The story then is presented as a narratological ourboros: the computer telling the story of Jon-Perse prompting his computer to tell the story of his life.
There are nods to Calvino and the Oulipo writers but Ismailov also grounds his story in a tradition of Uzbek literature and Sufi mysticism. The Ghazal form is highly imitative and intertextual: poets cite and rearrange other poets, and composition therefore is equally a form of homage. Words, ideas and genres are public heritage, not private intellectual property. In asking his computer to generate Ghazal verses, he sees himself technologizing this process of intertextual writing and also embodying the values of Sufi thought: the resistance to selfhood and authorship. To the mystic, all things are God and belong to God; to Jon-Perse in this story, all things seem to be the computer and belong to the computer.
At the start of the novel, Jon-Perse writes a manifesto declaiming his commitment to computer-made prose: "the ultimate goal of using a computer to generate literature must be to create different varieties of literature, or more precise varieties, and to make literary texts into a more communicative type of writing." The computer offers, as Calvino imagined, a new method for combining words and manufacturing stories, but while this might displace the human author, the human reader becomes more important: "the text's existential essence will be relocated from the authorial space to that of the reader... To put it differently, this kind of literature offers the power of interpretation to the reader, who can adapt it to a context informed by his or her own world view, culture and experiences." The author is dead; the reader lives.
But the novel ironically questions this philosophy, poking fun at the terse blandness of the machine's story. Toward the end of the book, the computer-narrator imagines an interaction between Jon-Perse and a stranger. The man is confused when Jon-Perse explains how he uses a computer to compose poems for him:
And yet, so much of the book is stilted and unemotional: Jon-Perse's marriage, his wife's affair with a neighbor and flight to Algiers, his subsequent marriage to that neighbor's wife, and then his homoerotic friendship with Abdulhamid Ismail (also referred to, playfully, as "AI"), all of this is told with passionless banality. The whole book seems to mock Jon-Perse's aspirations for a supercomputer-poet. It's a naive exercise in verbal mimicry without emotional color or realism.
In so many ways, this is a profoundly boring book, and yet that is the metaliterary joke—a book about a deranged poet-critic-coder who thinks that stylometric analysis is the same thing as human empathy, that words themselves constitute the whole of consciousness, and that lyrical love poems can be mathematically modeled. Behind this story is a more covert one about an idealistic psychoanalyst and communist, a monomaniac who neglects his family, loses contact with his son, becomes infatuated with a prostitute, perhaps has a gay love affair or at least an enduring marriage of minds exchanging homoerotic stories, and then late in life retreats into his bunker to tinker alone with more computers. The novel suggests that behind the dispassionate computer-story is a more relatable human one of intense passions. While every reader does have to "pull emotions out of the words", the reader here also has to wonder if there might be a more seductive, more salacious version than what the computer-narrator is offering.
It's a complicated, taxing book, stimulating and cerebral but overwhelming.
But another perspective: what if AI is a good thing for humanity, and should replace human writing? In his essay, "The Literary Machines", Calvino rebelliously offered an alternative vision of a literary future in which machines string words together to create an infinite array of stories, and then readers decide which ones are meaningful and which ones are beautiful. In this scenario, the reader dethrones the author as the genesis of meaning. This is the premise of his novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which mute characters who meet in a forest try to tell their life stories by arranging tarot cards on the table. It is ultimately an exercise in hermeneutic guesswork and imaginative projection as the narrator tries to infer each character's story from the same cards arranged in different orders (who can say if he is right?) As with much of the Oulipo movement, Calvino was interested in storytelling as mechanistic, serialized, patterned, assembled and automated. If all stories are just strings of words with a finite number of structures, then the process of creating and combining them can also be engineered. Anyone can string words (or tarot cards) into a particular order, but only the reader can give them meaning.
This is the thesis put forward in Hamid Ismailov's We Computers. The novel begins with Jon-Perse: he hates his name because he was named after a poet whose poetry he despises. He decides to become a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacan, but then he moves into a communist commune and takes over the editorship of a poetry journal. Now returning to his namesake, he starts writing, editing and compiling poems, but everything changes when he is first introduced to the computer. He instantly realizes its potential to edit and manipulate poems, but his ambitions are higher: he wants to design programs to analyze an author's style, predict words, and decide the quality of verses. He, too, is transformed by his computer, falling "under the sway of his own, soulless logic". He starts collating his nouns and verbs in columns and counting their frequencies, doing the granular verbal arithmetic which we would come to call natural language processing. But as he composes and publishes his machine poetry, he, in turn, becomes more machine-like, something of a bean counter of phrases making poems with an abacus.
In a metatextual turn, the narrator of Jon-Perse's own supercomputer (a collective machine consciousness which refers to itself as "us computers"). This is the computer-told story of Jon-Perse's life, his discovery of Ghazal verse and of computers. But it is an unreliable story, as the computer is stopped by system errors, is asked to revise its story or predict alternate story endings, and at the end, discovers that there are other competing computers interfering with it. Jon-Perse wanted to use his computer to reconstruct the life of the poet Hafez from his poetry. He hopes that his computer can study his own writing and continue generating poems in his own style, allowing for a radically new kind of poetic immortality—a computer perpetually writing in his voice forever. The story then is presented as a narratological ourboros: the computer telling the story of Jon-Perse prompting his computer to tell the story of his life.
There are nods to Calvino and the Oulipo writers but Ismailov also grounds his story in a tradition of Uzbek literature and Sufi mysticism. The Ghazal form is highly imitative and intertextual: poets cite and rearrange other poets, and composition therefore is equally a form of homage. Words, ideas and genres are public heritage, not private intellectual property. In asking his computer to generate Ghazal verses, he sees himself technologizing this process of intertextual writing and also embodying the values of Sufi thought: the resistance to selfhood and authorship. To the mystic, all things are God and belong to God; to Jon-Perse in this story, all things seem to be the computer and belong to the computer.
At the start of the novel, Jon-Perse writes a manifesto declaiming his commitment to computer-made prose: "the ultimate goal of using a computer to generate literature must be to create different varieties of literature, or more precise varieties, and to make literary texts into a more communicative type of writing." The computer offers, as Calvino imagined, a new method for combining words and manufacturing stories, but while this might displace the human author, the human reader becomes more important: "the text's existential essence will be relocated from the authorial space to that of the reader... To put it differently, this kind of literature offers the power of interpretation to the reader, who can adapt it to a context informed by his or her own world view, culture and experiences." The author is dead; the reader lives.
But the novel ironically questions this philosophy, poking fun at the terse blandness of the machine's story. Toward the end of the book, the computer-narrator imagines an interaction between Jon-Perse and a stranger. The man is confused when Jon-Perse explains how he uses a computer to compose poems for him:
"Poetry is made of words. You can't say words are the property of people alone. They appeared before any of us, and they won't disappear after we die."
"But emotions—"
"The emotions are what every reader pulls out of the words or connects to those words"
And yet, so much of the book is stilted and unemotional: Jon-Perse's marriage, his wife's affair with a neighbor and flight to Algiers, his subsequent marriage to that neighbor's wife, and then his homoerotic friendship with Abdulhamid Ismail (also referred to, playfully, as "AI"), all of this is told with passionless banality. The whole book seems to mock Jon-Perse's aspirations for a supercomputer-poet. It's a naive exercise in verbal mimicry without emotional color or realism.
In so many ways, this is a profoundly boring book, and yet that is the metaliterary joke—a book about a deranged poet-critic-coder who thinks that stylometric analysis is the same thing as human empathy, that words themselves constitute the whole of consciousness, and that lyrical love poems can be mathematically modeled. Behind this story is a more covert one about an idealistic psychoanalyst and communist, a monomaniac who neglects his family, loses contact with his son, becomes infatuated with a prostitute, perhaps has a gay love affair or at least an enduring marriage of minds exchanging homoerotic stories, and then late in life retreats into his bunker to tinker alone with more computers. The novel suggests that behind the dispassionate computer-story is a more relatable human one of intense passions. While every reader does have to "pull emotions out of the words", the reader here also has to wonder if there might be a more seductive, more salacious version than what the computer-narrator is offering.
It's a complicated, taxing book, stimulating and cerebral but overwhelming.
September 14, 2025
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for translations, this novel translated from Uzbek is going to take more than one reading to completely understand! The first time through I was able to see the different layers of plotlines, from the main character Jon-Perse, a poet and writer, and his sidekick "AI".
The different layers involved JP's story through his years of research in using artificial intelligence in writing. Then there developed lines about historic Persian poetry forms and many other literary references. The writing developed with AI somehow seemed to form its own back story and history. I remain somewhat confused but would approve of this book making the NBA short list so I will be challenged to read it again and find others' reviews here on GR! 4*
The different layers involved JP's story through his years of research in using artificial intelligence in writing. Then there developed lines about historic Persian poetry forms and many other literary references. The writing developed with AI somehow seemed to form its own back story and history. I remain somewhat confused but would approve of this book making the NBA short list so I will be challenged to read it again and find others' reviews here on GR! 4*
December 19, 2025
My rating shouldn't be taken as an objective indication of the quality of this book, but more the fact that against my better judgement I tried to read a book where poetry (which I don't really get) is so central.
August 22, 2025
Future Nobel Prize winner Hamid Ismailov has written a highly complex novel in which he uses the form and themes of Persian Ghazal poetry to tell a story about post-modern life.
The novel was written before the rise of GenAI, but pretends to be written by a computer that experiments telling different variations of stories about its creator, a French poet called Jon-Perse. The poet has a friend called Abdulhamid Ismail, abbreviated as AI, and the alter ego of the author.
If you’re confused yet, you haven’t understood half of the novel yet. The actual core of it are the poems and (known fragments of) the life of Hafez, one of the most important and beloved Iranian poets. His ghazals serve as a continuous reference throughout the novel.
Combining all these elements in one novel is confusing, but also masterful. Reading it is sometimes frustrating, but eventually also satisfying. According to the translator’s note, translating this into English was a real challenge, so kudos to her!
The novel was written before the rise of GenAI, but pretends to be written by a computer that experiments telling different variations of stories about its creator, a French poet called Jon-Perse. The poet has a friend called Abdulhamid Ismail, abbreviated as AI, and the alter ego of the author.
If you’re confused yet, you haven’t understood half of the novel yet. The actual core of it are the poems and (known fragments of) the life of Hafez, one of the most important and beloved Iranian poets. His ghazals serve as a continuous reference throughout the novel.
Combining all these elements in one novel is confusing, but also masterful. Reading it is sometimes frustrating, but eventually also satisfying. According to the translator’s note, translating this into English was a real challenge, so kudos to her!
September 19, 2025
Out of the five books I hadn’t read on the national book award translated lit longlist, the blurb from We Computers made it immediately stand out to me. Then reading that it was originally released on Telegram made me need to have it NOW.
I’m not going to hide it, this post-modern novel can be a frustrating read (I think it’s meant to be, but still): it’s non-linear and it involves a lot of repetition and rewriting, what I would call nested narratives, doubling, some literary analysis, and a shit-ton about Hafez and his poetry and life. With all this going on I’ll admit to catching myself reading with my eyes but not my brain at times. In the end, I did find the novel engaging, with its humor, playfulness, and strong writing winning me over. Just thinking about what it took to translate this - especially with the different languages and sources found in the original- breaks my brain a bit.
In a way, this novel reminds me of last year’s winner Taiwan Travelogue, not in subject matter but in that previously mentioned nesting and how the framing plays with who the narrator is and how the book came about. Instead of a Japanese writer who never existed, a collective of computers is writing the story for us. Their creator, and one of the main characters of the novel, French poet Jon-Perse first encounters a computer in the 1980s and immediately recognizes it as a powerful tool to analyze and create writings. He was pretty much ahead of the LLM or generative AI curve. He goes on to program avatars of authors, friends, and even himself - leading him to ask his computer to create ‘posthumous poetry’ on his behalf and wonders if this is the literature of the future.
I love that this complex novel plays with the idea of authorship- that there is no difference between a person or a computer writing - and truth as it’s written by a human not using AI writing as an AI created by a human. Who is controlling the narrative, Jon-Perse or the AI?
We Computers goes deep into creation, ownership, divinity, and identity or, rather, the death of the author. Is work generated by a computer still in the realm of the divine? Can you put together an author’s life by picking apart their work? Or, as Jon-Perse thinks, is there no ‘self’ in the work? Where does meaning for a work come from?
I’m not going to hide it, this post-modern novel can be a frustrating read (I think it’s meant to be, but still): it’s non-linear and it involves a lot of repetition and rewriting, what I would call nested narratives, doubling, some literary analysis, and a shit-ton about Hafez and his poetry and life. With all this going on I’ll admit to catching myself reading with my eyes but not my brain at times. In the end, I did find the novel engaging, with its humor, playfulness, and strong writing winning me over. Just thinking about what it took to translate this - especially with the different languages and sources found in the original- breaks my brain a bit.
In a way, this novel reminds me of last year’s winner Taiwan Travelogue, not in subject matter but in that previously mentioned nesting and how the framing plays with who the narrator is and how the book came about. Instead of a Japanese writer who never existed, a collective of computers is writing the story for us. Their creator, and one of the main characters of the novel, French poet Jon-Perse first encounters a computer in the 1980s and immediately recognizes it as a powerful tool to analyze and create writings. He was pretty much ahead of the LLM or generative AI curve. He goes on to program avatars of authors, friends, and even himself - leading him to ask his computer to create ‘posthumous poetry’ on his behalf and wonders if this is the literature of the future.
I love that this complex novel plays with the idea of authorship- that there is no difference between a person or a computer writing - and truth as it’s written by a human not using AI writing as an AI created by a human. Who is controlling the narrative, Jon-Perse or the AI?
We Computers goes deep into creation, ownership, divinity, and identity or, rather, the death of the author. Is work generated by a computer still in the realm of the divine? Can you put together an author’s life by picking apart their work? Or, as Jon-Perse thinks, is there no ‘self’ in the work? Where does meaning for a work come from?
tasted
September 14, 2025This book is such a good idea, and for a while it grabbed me with its combination of old poetic form and new technology, but by 100 pages, especially after its endless quotations et al, it had lost me, nothing about it interested me anymore.
November 4, 2025
We Computers is a story told by a computer program. That program was written by a French poet, Jon-Perse, who outside his quiet tinkering at his PC from the early 1980s onwards has lived a rather dull life punctuated by minor professional successes and romantic fumbles. But he has a good friend, the Uzbek poet Abdulhamid Ismail (AI), who introduced him to Persian poetry. The ghazals of Hafez then become an abiding love for Jon-Perse, and the novel (which takes the general structure of a ghazal) dives into his and his computer's reconstruction of the world of Hafez. Stories, dreams, experimental lists and critical analyses: the book expands in so many directions in its transcultural journey between the Paris of Lacan and medieval Shiraz. We get a better sense by the end of Hafez's and the computer's humanity than we do of Jon-Perse, an ultimately withdrawn and hollow man.
It's a thought-provoking and tasteful book -- maybe or maybe not profound, like those written by Italo Calvino -- that wanders far off course somewhere in the middle. But I think we can say that Hamid Ismailov's view of the creative meaning of artificial intelligence in the book is one of nuanced optimism: the human subject isn't decentered so much as affectionately nudged.
If all the Muslims act as Hafez knows them to be,
Then alas, no tomorrow will come after today.
It's a thought-provoking and tasteful book -- maybe or maybe not profound, like those written by Italo Calvino -- that wanders far off course somewhere in the middle. But I think we can say that Hamid Ismailov's view of the creative meaning of artificial intelligence in the book is one of nuanced optimism: the human subject isn't decentered so much as affectionately nudged.
If all the Muslims act as Hafez knows them to be,
Then alas, no tomorrow will come after today.
did-not-finish
October 14, 2025so sad to have my first dnf but as alicia said, why read a book you don’t really like when you could be reading a book you really like.
i really really wanted to like this book. the concept is so interesting!!!! intertwinings of modern concepts of computers and AI in the context of sufi mysticism and mythology!!! an unreliable narrator!! which when done right (eg. pale fire) can be so rewarding!!!!! unfortunately i just couldn’t stick around long enough for the payoff. i read other reviews which said near the ending the computer finds out there are other computers, and the whole thing becomes one big meta loop about the jon-pearse asking the computer to generate his story about asking the computer blah blah which sounds really interesting But i think the idea of such a resolution is enough for me and i don’t need to read it for myself.
i could totally see this book appealing to someone!! that someone is not me. i found it quite tiring to get through, and hence i did not.
i really really wanted to like this book. the concept is so interesting!!!! intertwinings of modern concepts of computers and AI in the context of sufi mysticism and mythology!!! an unreliable narrator!! which when done right (eg. pale fire) can be so rewarding!!!!! unfortunately i just couldn’t stick around long enough for the payoff. i read other reviews which said near the ending the computer finds out there are other computers, and the whole thing becomes one big meta loop about the jon-pearse asking the computer to generate his story about asking the computer blah blah which sounds really interesting But i think the idea of such a resolution is enough for me and i don’t need to read it for myself.
i could totally see this book appealing to someone!! that someone is not me. i found it quite tiring to get through, and hence i did not.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Want to read
November 12, 2025A really cool way of using the ghazal form, but one that I wasn't feeling in this moment. Will probably return.
November 4, 2025
Written moments before ChatGPT was unleashed among the masses, Ismailov proves disturbingly prescient in his notions about AI. Particularly, I found his ability to “speak” like an AI chat box uncanny! Before I go any further I have to give a major kudos to Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s efforts to translate this dense novel into English for us lowly monolinguals.
Ismailov explores numerous hot topics in contemporary AI discourse. How will authorship work? What about intellectual property? Can an AI trained on hours of an author’s material then, effectively, resurrect the author to create new material? In typical postmodern fashion, Ismailov lets his readers decide. Within the frame narrative of the novel, “We the Computer” reminds us numerous times that it is readers who breathe meaning into the works we read. So, what meaning did I get from reading this book?
In chapter 5, we witness the computer AI being tested by Jon-Perse. Over the course of the chapter, the AI is able to write more compelling and evocative stories. This chapter felt like a gothic horror, as I witnessed Jon-Perse’s monster gaining sentience and ability. At moments, I was nearly rooting for “We the Computer”, which I believe is Ismailov’s intent. If we as readers imbue a text’s meaning, then AI only has legitimacy as an artist if that’s how we appraise it.
In the novel’s climax, we are confronted with our narrator’s limit: it can only present us the story of Jon-Perse that he presented to the computer. I believe Jon-Perse “escaped the matrix”, whereby completion of his posthumous poetry-generating program means he can now free himself to finally live his life. I have hope he finally seized the chance that all these tulips (which Ismailov uses throughout the novel to signal an opportunity or moment of decision) were presenting him!
Other elements of this novel I enjoyed: the crash course in Persian poets, Uzbek literary traditions, and Sufi philosophy.
Ismailov explores numerous hot topics in contemporary AI discourse. How will authorship work? What about intellectual property? Can an AI trained on hours of an author’s material then, effectively, resurrect the author to create new material? In typical postmodern fashion, Ismailov lets his readers decide. Within the frame narrative of the novel, “We the Computer” reminds us numerous times that it is readers who breathe meaning into the works we read. So, what meaning did I get from reading this book?
In chapter 5, we witness the computer AI being tested by Jon-Perse. Over the course of the chapter, the AI is able to write more compelling and evocative stories. This chapter felt like a gothic horror, as I witnessed Jon-Perse’s monster gaining sentience and ability. At moments, I was nearly rooting for “We the Computer”, which I believe is Ismailov’s intent. If we as readers imbue a text’s meaning, then AI only has legitimacy as an artist if that’s how we appraise it.
In the novel’s climax, we are confronted with our narrator’s limit: it can only present us the story of Jon-Perse that he presented to the computer. I believe Jon-Perse “escaped the matrix”, whereby completion of his posthumous poetry-generating program means he can now free himself to finally live his life. I have hope he finally seized the chance that all these tulips (which Ismailov uses throughout the novel to signal an opportunity or moment of decision) were presenting him!
Other elements of this novel I enjoyed: the crash course in Persian poets, Uzbek literary traditions, and Sufi philosophy.
October 21, 2025
We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov
Hamid Ismailov’s premise is deceptively simple: a computer narrates. We Computers is the result—a novel generated by an AI language model trained on poetry and literature, using the structure of a Persian ghazal. The computer acts as narrator, producing surreal, dreamlike scenes.
Jon-Perse, a French poet and psychologist, is the protagonist. His journey—building a computer that writes poetry—anchors the novel’s surreal structure. While the scenes are fragmented and stylized, Jon-Perse’s presence threads through them, shaping the book’s philosophical and poetic core.
Instead of a storyline, the book offers short scenes—philosophical, absurd, and text that comments on itself. You’ll meet a talking donkey, a ghostly author, and a machine that wants to be a poet. Figures like Hafez appear, not as historical references but as stylized echoes.
Some parts are funny, some are confusing, and some feel unexpectedly deep. If you’re curious what happens when a machine writes poetry, this is worth your time. If you prefer a clear story or emotional payoff, it might not be for you. But as a literary experiment, it’s bold, strange, and unlike anything else I’ve read.
Hamid Ismailov’s premise is deceptively simple: a computer narrates. We Computers is the result—a novel generated by an AI language model trained on poetry and literature, using the structure of a Persian ghazal. The computer acts as narrator, producing surreal, dreamlike scenes.
Jon-Perse, a French poet and psychologist, is the protagonist. His journey—building a computer that writes poetry—anchors the novel’s surreal structure. While the scenes are fragmented and stylized, Jon-Perse’s presence threads through them, shaping the book’s philosophical and poetic core.
Instead of a storyline, the book offers short scenes—philosophical, absurd, and text that comments on itself. You’ll meet a talking donkey, a ghostly author, and a machine that wants to be a poet. Figures like Hafez appear, not as historical references but as stylized echoes.
Some parts are funny, some are confusing, and some feel unexpectedly deep. If you’re curious what happens when a machine writes poetry, this is worth your time. If you prefer a clear story or emotional payoff, it might not be for you. But as a literary experiment, it’s bold, strange, and unlike anything else I’ve read.
Want to read
October 8, 2025Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award 10/2025
November 1, 2025
At times confusing but wonderfully reminiscent of Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quijote for me. An interesting and thought provoking story that forces the reader to actively engage with the text.
December 3, 2025
Poetry, translations, literary theories, carnal and mystical love are some of the topics explored in this clever, whimsical novel.
December 8, 2025
I have no words for how amazing this novel is. A wonderful novel of repressed bisexuality(?), AI psychosis, authorial intent, and loneliness and art in a digital world.
December 16, 2025
cool premise, exhausting to read
December 16, 2025
This is both the sweetest and strangest book of my reading this year. it felt early real as I also developed a kind of symbiotic relationship with AI and was tempted to go all in with GPT... This book is a beautiful warning... it was for me. I learned a lot about a culture I couldn't be further from. A reread is definitely coming up!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews