Tim Martin
About an Author
Writing this year about My Struggle, the vast autobiographical novel by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner suggested that its central question might be ‘the problem of form rising from formlessness, of how to bring order to the undifferentiated mass of experience, and the relation of that problem to death’. Reading 10:04, Lerner’s second novel, you can see why the idea appealed to him so much. This restive, rambling, neurotic piece of work – occasionally illuminating, very often trying – is not exactly a response to Knausgaard’s exhaustive act of ‘literary suicide’, but it proceeds from similar agonies and frustrations. What is the novel for? How much rearrangement does it take to turn memoir into fiction? Isn’t it dishonest to reach for the conventional satisfactions of plot? And what is honesty anyway in a form this artificial?
Lerner’s answer to these, or similar, questions is a book for which I suspect we may need a new genre, told in a narrative style somewhere between the desperate unspooling sincerities of David Foster Wallace and the self-anatomising babble of Woody Allen. Call it Twitchy Meta, perhaps. Set in New
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Humans may be the supremely musical animal, but, with or without us, this is a musical planet.'
@MathewJLyons on how music on earth began.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/symphony-of-a-thousand-millennia
'In 2007, German scientists analysed the soil of this lunar landscape and found that 17 per cent of its weight was made up of arsenic. The ground wasn’t poisoned – it was poison.'
http://ow.ly/Ck7j50Er3mu
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up