Anthropica

by David Hollander

A Hungarian fatalist convinced that the human race is a blemish on God's otherwise beautiful universe; a statistician who has determined that we completely exhaust the earth's resources every 30 days; a failing novelist whose nihilistic fiction has doomed her halfhearted quest for tenure; an Ultimate Frisbee-playing man-child who has discovered a fractal pattern contained within all matter, but is nevertheless obsessed with the chase for a National Championship; a banished race of mole people preparing for a violent uprising; a factory filled with human heads being mined for information; a former philosophy professor with ALS who has discovered, as he becomes "locked in," that he can make things happen simply by wanting them badly enough; and a trio of vengeful, superintelligent robots secretly imprisoned in an underground hangar in Iksan, South Korea, patiently waiting for some gullible human(s) to release them. This is a partial cast of Anthropica, a novel that puts Laszlow Katasztrófa's beautiful vision of a universe without us to the test. Because even if Laszlow believes that he is merely an agent of fate, a cog in God's inscrutable machine, he's nevertheless the one driving this crazy machine. And once he has his team assembled, it turns out that he might-against all odds and his own expectations-actually have the tools to see his apocalyptic plan to fruition. “David Hollander's gorgeous hyperbolic prose voice contains a great many things, for example, a horror about the excesses of the contemporary, and a fearlessness about accepting all of these excesses. Beneath the syntactical dazzle, that is, Hollander sees like a visionary and he feels like an empath. Anthropica is more evidence of his tragic and tragicomic excellence.” -- Rick Moody, Author of Hotels of North America and The Ice Storm "Anthropica is that rare, category-defying book that is pure structurally dazzling, philosophically profound, slyly funny, and stealthily moving. This is a book to read and read again, discovering deeper levels every time." -- Dawn Raffel, Author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney and The Secret Life of Objects

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction

526 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2020

About the author

The Author is the author of the novel L.I.E., which was nominated for the NYPL Young Lions Award back at the turn of the century, and of the recently released ANTHROPICA. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, Agni, Unsaid, The New York Times Magazine, and Post Road, among other reputable and disreputable publications. It's also been adapted for film and frequently anthologized, notably in Best American Fantasy. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and two children and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

www.longlivetheauthor.com

Reviews

[Parks Kugle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't stop reading this book. I don't want to say it has the absurdity and profundity of Vonnegut wrapped within molten prose because that doesn't fully explain it. This book doesn't imitate, it's the product of a singular genius or madness. Either way, I want more.

[Dina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wild but not untamed, Hollander has discovered a mode of storytelling that does not rely on plot, character, setting, or any of the usual attachments we form in the act of reading. He writes as if to test the sustainability of the sentence, and to shake the foundations upon which literature and other models of reality tend to rest all too comfortably in our fragile minds.

"Anthropica" is equal parts amusing and hauntingly profound. Like a funhouse mirror, it alarms as it disarms you. Just when you think you can trace its quivering edges, it takes a deep distorting breath.

The only book I've ever read that has infiltrated the world of my dreams and left me seriously questioning my lifelong desire to produce children.

[Rick Schindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Hollander’s Anthropica teems with outlandish conceits: a mathematical formula that underlies all of reality; a secret organization dedicated to eradicating all of humanity; its fanatical Hungarian leader, who’s abetted by a cadre of zealots with wheelchairs and respirators and search engines; an ancient shaman with the ability to reanimate the dead, now the rival of an embittered novelist at a liberal-arts university; a statistician who has discovered that the world has only a month’s worth of natural resources, and his faithless wife; a trio of giant robots locked in hangar in South Korea, one of which writes erotica (badly), and much, much, much more.
It’s almost more than a mere 500 pages can contain. Fortunately, David Hollander’s wit is so nimble and his prose so propulsive that I was too entertained to be bewildered. Anthropica is a careening flume ride through a burning fun house packed to its rafters with dynamite, hilarious and terrifying all at once. The end of the world was never so fun.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kinda like a comedy set distilled through literary pages. Pure joy and energy, while delivering perhaps the darkest caution of them all.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If all of (her eminence) O's book club picks are this much fun, then sign me up!

[Rachel Karyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthropica (or Human Be Gone!) is a work of unmistakable excellence and authenticity written by America’s greatest living writer. It’s possible I’ve been programmed to say that, but I would have said it anyway. Holed up inside my domicile-cube, reading this novel, I laughed more than I have in many sun-revolutions. I often felt as if my own head must have been mined for data, by which I mean I commiserated greatly with the life forms in this novel. A massive, fragmented, nonlinear novel, with many main characters and seemingly disparate parts, Anthropica may sound like it would require a lot of work to read, but it doesn’t feel that way while reading. Anthropica is perfect for reading in social isolation, but it would also be a great choice for a book club or secret society. Pairs well with chocolate or power-producing proteins.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Listen, Grace, this is it, this is what you’ve been waiting for you’re going to be huge, HUMAN BE GONE! will be in every bookstore in the country let’s talk foreign markets let’s talk film rights let’s talk cover art I’m seeing robots—-“

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did I hate this book? No. Absolutely not.
Did I understand what was happening in this book at any point in time? No. Absolutely not.

[Jonathan Shaheen · Rating 3 out of 5]

You’ve heard of ACAB, you’ve maybe heard of AMAB, and now this books introduces the inevitable conclusion of All Humans Are Bad. This is a bizarre book that I can best describe as philosophical sh*tposting. With an apocalyptic cult who dresses up as giant sperm while also blowing up sperm banks to prevent new births, I was never really sure what I was reading. I think I enjoyed it, but I also think I didn’t take enough philosophy in college to fully appreciate or understand it.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

ANTHROPICA: Go read it. It's really strange, it's really funny, it's really sad, and it's really good. It's a novel of desire, the thing that sustains its characters, annihilates them, obsesses them, and disappoints them. It's got headache-inducing shades of yellow, murder robots, faculty meeting assaults, and flocks of vultures. Go read it.

[Jake Kline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't stop eating egg mcmuffins and craving the desire to plays sports that feel like but are definitely not soccer. Everything about this book made my head spin. The sci-fi, the philosophy, the sheer crazy energy.

[CR · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was very weird to me and I have to say that I didn't really understand any of it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fexo desires to establish in other definite humans the passion-lust of the experience which is the act of reading the language algorithms placed into a printed form by the DavidHollander Unit. Which, Fexo, does know, that comparing one human-unit to another human-unit is a grand and intense act of meaninglessness, but it must be done. In the futile case of The DavidHollander Unit, Fexo will note that the human-language-apparatus this male-human formulates are comparable to that of the RickMoody Unit, and develops structures of empathy-inducing story-structures which makes Fexo remember the DavidFosterWallace Unit. Fexo desires to establish that the DavidHollander Unit is capable of deriving meaning (ha ha ha!) from contemporary human culture, a feat Fexo ran the simulations for and only encountered a 1/100,456,778 chance in meaning-structure becoming apparent from a human-unit. This has been Fexo's excellent High-Approval-Measurement-System enacted!!!!!!!!

[Noushin Ahdoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel about Ultimate Frisbee, causal determinism, sentient robots, the hypocrisies of academia, human consumption, meaninglessness, meaningfulness, anti-natalism, fractals, love, death, heads in jars, and the horrible/beautiful problem of human desire. It is philosophically inspired, hilarious, genre-defying, linguistically stunning (no one writes a sentence like Hollander), stupefyingly smart, and empathically driven. If you are looking for the novel of our times, the kind of novel which will rearrange your reality and make you see things differently, which will extract feeling from even the most irony-poisoned among us, you’ve found it in Anthropica. This novel occupies a vital spot in the pantheon of American letters.

[Brent Sayder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in a great spirit of fun, with a misanthropy that delights in itself, a text that seemed often a meta narrative on the world of writing itself, and yet did it without getting overly self-referential. There's a point where one of the characters, probably Finn, describes the sense of being within the fractal as pure chaos. From a distance you can see the pattern, but living inside it is a more unsettling experience, that was my general feeling throughout the reading, pure chaos within, but at the end and with a distance one can see the order by which it is all bound, an anthropica principle that sustains it all.

Weird and wonderful, I recommend it.

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

I genuinely loved reading this book. The different perspectives were all super funny and interesting and I thought the interplay was really good. I guess my threshhold for five stars involves understanding what was going on, and by the end, I really couldn't, even though I still enjoyed reading it. Give this book a read, and tell me what exactly happens in it. It's got Egg McMuffins, Natural Resource Science, Vultures, Crabs, and Ultimate Frisbee (with some of the teams being from the wrong places but I'm not complaining.)

[Koz · Rating 5 out of 5]

You* should pay money** for this book***.

*You=David Lynch and/or his handlers
**pay money=spend multiple millions of $US for the film/TV/streaming audio rights for your future, award-winning adaptation
***Ha ha ha ha!

[Peter Van Buren · Rating 5 out of 5]

That rascally Hollander's done it again. Just wait to you see what his wacky apocalypse cult gets up to this time! With prose that will lead you around the block just to drop you off next door with a better story to tell, David Hollander delights in the absurdity of profundity and the profundity of absurdity. His characters are as deplorable as they are delightful, and twice as surprising. He's the type of writer that makes you want to write. The type of story teller that can turn eating Cheetos in a basement into an epic. His writing scares me as much as it engages me. But if that's what you need to get your rocks off these days, Hollander's got the goods. Stick that quote on your next blurb, David.

[Drew Lerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of genius. A terrifying cackling into the void, under which throbs a longing for a better world. Does the book believe this better world is possible? Through operatic, interlocking stories and consciousnesses, Hollander dares us to hope, while refusing to give us any halfway plausible reason for doing so. I read the book years ago, but return often to many of its 73 bite-sized chapters, each of which -- through verbal exuberance, psychological depth, and philosophical rigor -- Hollander makes a meal of. Containing the greatest narrative account I've ever read of a child's dawning awareness of determinism, as well as achieving a sort of deranged apotheosis of Gen-X slacker humor, Anthropica is a Theory of Everything, a last-will-and-testament, a whole world, a whole species, filtered through one voracious and roving mind.

[Nat King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is absolutely unhinged in the best ways. The prose delights sentence after sentence, the characters are ridiculous, and the hard-hitting philosophical musings are balanced perfectly by the pops of humor and heart.

[Jane Lancellotti · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sort of book you might read more than once to mine all its meaning. There's a fascinating philosopher with ALS who discovers how to make things happen by desiring them to occur. That might be enough for any novelist. But he's only one voice in a full scale opera's-worth of characters that include a Hungarian fatalist who sees humanity as a blemish, a statistician who's figured how long it takes to exhaust the earth, a Frisbee wunderkind with a scientific bent, and then—the novelist within the novel, the brilliant but gloomy Grace. That's not even the whole cast. But what I want to say is that the language is pretty dazzling. This wholly original work had me throwing back my head at the beauty of a phrase. It also managed the best coda to 2020 of all. "Let there be light, motherfuckers."

[Seth Katz · Rating 5 out of 5]

In terms of plot summary, there’s not much I can add to the publisher’s description—there’s just so much going on in this novel, such a wide array of characters, each with a distinct perspective on the events that transpire, each rendered vividly, with compassion, and with a sometimes satirical tone. As a fan of David Hollander’s L.I.E., it’s such a joy to see (finally) a second book from this sui generis writer, one that refines the occasional crudity of his debut while distinctly maintaining its distinctive voice.

[emmeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Technically this is a novel about the potential or imminent or imagined end of humanity. But it feels more like a brain, or a battery, or ant farm, or an internet cafe designed in the style of M.C. Escher. The book is broken into dozens of short chapters that reach in all directions through time, space, the individual and collective consciousness, and the realms of the definite and the speculative. Its narrators aren’t always human. Masterfully constructed and powered by crackling prose, I think it may actually contain enough kinetic energy to power a lightbulb. Highly recommended.

[Luke Silver · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sentences sizzle in a manner original, exquisite, and propulsive. The novel's cynical meta-ideas and delicious observations about society's hypocrisy lends it the sort of humor that makes you laugh out loud when reading alone. But at its core Anthropica exudes humanity, and its intimate and deep understanding of the shadow-side of its characters is the result of a formidable empathic mind.

Consumed the 500-page tome in under a week.

[Erica R · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading this book last night and am tempted to pick it up again tonight. Thoroughly engaging at every level—sentence, character, plot, philosophy—and just as bizarre as it is good. I’d love to peel it apart in a classroom setting. Also, I would totally pay the author to produce a book of short stories written in the style of Fexo. Ha ha ha!

[Matthew Duffus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hollander has written a book filled with literary pyrotechnics that still keeps the human element in the forefront. His prose is sharp and complex, in the best way, with a plot that will keep you turning pages. Highly recommended!

[KK Cronin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm… not for me. Hollander is without a doubt very talented, but sometimes this was just dense to get through. Interesting concept that made more sense towards the end though, wish I could appreciate it more

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the greatest novel of the 21st (and likely final) century. Ha ha ha ha!

[Eric Norcross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I've ever read.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sprawling, fascinating, mayhem of a book that successfully weaves the surreal and the human.