The BURIED Book Club discussion

Too new for our normal purposes (current even) but check those low low ratings, and the fact that no one has bothered to translate her til this year.

I just randomly stumbled on her one English translated (just now, by the Otis University Press!?) work, We Are Not Here to Disappear, which is a very weird, unsettling collage novel(?) about loss and Alzheimer's disease, mixing fact, history, and true crime with fictionalized(?) interviews, stream-of-consciousness attempts to explore the actual sensation of losing everything around you to mental haze, and direct authorial address on writing about such things. It's all interleaved, nearly Jane Unrue-style, so that each paragraph diverges wildly from (or juxtaposes beautifully against) those before and after it, and some pages may devolve to a single line, for impact.

I found it misshelved on a bargain rack of sci-fi paperbackls and was drawn in by the nicely minimal book design and the complete lack of information provided as to what exactly it was, aside from this text on the back:

On July 6, 2004, Monsieur T. stabbed his wife five times with a knife. He then left the marital home and sought refuge in the neighbors’ yard. That’s where the police found him. During the interrogation, when Monsieur T. was asked why he did such a thing, he was unable to answer. He didn’t seem to understand the charges brought against him and didn’t remember attempting to kill his wife.

What’s your name?
Not me.
What’s your first name?
It doesn’t belong to me.
And your last name?

Olivia Rosenthal has written 13 books in the last decade and a half or so but has only 49 ratings and 16 reviews spread out over the lot of them. Perhaps if we all read We Are Not Here... more will appear in English from this mysterious Otis.