fieldus

Salon review
Diary - in the LRB
Observer review
New York Times review
Bookslut review
Lasdun interview @ identitytheory.com

Review by Scarlett Thomas in The Independent:

Nothing in this haunting novel is there by accident, just as no human behaviour, according to Freud, is truly “accidental” either. There is a reference to Freud’s notion of parapraxis (errors and slips created by the unconscious) on the very first page, and then the narrative unfolds like a shape emerging in a kaleidoscope.

The protagonist Lawrence Miller teaches Gender Studies and serves on his university’s Sexual Harassment committee. The novel begins as he loses his place in a book and, as a result, begins to notice odd changes occurring in his office. He then starts to suspect that he isn’t the only person using the room - that an insane sexual predator and misogynist, Bogomil Trumilcik, may be sleeping there at night. A lot of the mysterious goings- on in this novel occur at night, as though they were parts of a dream. And the novel is - in the truest, psychoanalytic sense of the term - dreamlike. We can learn from psychoanalysis that dreams are manifestations of unconscious thought and have their own poetic language of metaphor, metonymy and juxtaposition. This is a novel written in that language, almost geometrically so.

At one point in the novel Miller throws away a glass eye. His attempted disposal of this object (the eye/I) is a failure: “I took Mr Kurwen’s eye from my pocket and hurled it into the half-frozen lake. Instead of landing in the water, it embedded itself in a floating island of ice, staring skyward.” It is not enough to read this as a metaphor for attempted repression; the reader will also want to ask (but perhaps not want to know) what exactly the narrator is trying to repress.

This novel is so creepy because it is so clever. Only in the last few pages do you realise, or begin to realise, what you’ve read, and even then you’re not sure. Images from the book flicker in your mind like images from a forgotten, disturbing dream. And this isn’t even your own dream but someone else’s. You suddenly feel that you - and he - have been engaged in an act of vast, mutual misreading. It would take another book to explain the symbolism, coincidences and symmetries within this narrative. A brilliant novel that must be reread at least once, this is easy to follow, with clear, spare prose but the ultimate effect is a vast enigma, a puzzle with a troubling, instinctive conclusion.