The Verificationist

Начало книги

Sometimes, writhing in pleasure on his back, a dog will pause to shoot a glance at his owner, as if to say: “Sorry, master. Just a bit, you know, lost in delight over here.”

Some form of writhing-in-the-grass will, I predict, be your response to The Verificationist, one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years. If my reaction is any indication, you will be drawn in immediately, sail through the novel with growing delight, thrilled by Antrim’s audacity, newly reminded that economy of means and largesse of spirit are not mutually exclusive.

But alas, when we humans get as pleasantly subsumed in a work of art as I predict you are about to get, we may, unlike that dog, distrust our pleasure and feel a need to analyze that which has given us pleasure, and, in more depraved cases, even write an introduction to it. Especially if the work generates that pleasure in some new and unexpected way (i.e., is original), we may come out of it feeling a bit … unhinged. Insecure, giddy, adrift—Jeez, we may feel, what just happened to me? How did a description of events that never occurred, and, in this case, could not possibly occur, make me feel so terrifyingly alive?

Читать дальше →