In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Emerging Global Novel
  • Anis Shivani (bio)
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Robin Sloan. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. http://us.macmillan.com/FSG.aspx. 304 pages; cloth, $25.00, eBook, $11.99.

Some years ago, I started speculating about the possible emergence of the new global novel that would apply the best of modernism and postmodernism to the contemporary reality of information overload and hyperglobalization. I posited it as a genre that might leap over the dead-end literary fiction finds itself in after two decades of resurgent social realism. I wasn't sure what form the new global novel would take. I couldn't even come up with examples of what I was conceptualizing. Shortly thereafter, I read V. S. Naipaul's Half a Life (2002), which seemed to embody some of what I was talking about.

Then I struck gold. Rana Dasgupta's Solo (2009), which I believe to be the best book of the last decade, fit the bill precisely. It did everything I was hoping the novel as an art form would attempt to do again. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (2008) and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) also come to mind as 2 memorable recent books, but they're both still rooted in an acceptance of social reality at face value, and as living monuments within the bourgeois literary tradition, they do not fall within my definition. Their political tendencies may be enlightened, but they work with the grain, not against it. The remarkable feature of the new global novel is its transcendence, which makes the rest appear as little more than marginal commentary on an ossified heritage.

The remarkable feature of the new global novel is its transcendence.

Now I come across Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, and while it isn't in the same league as Solo (very little is), it has an uncanny similarity to the metaphysics of Dasgupta's book. In many ways, Penumbra is the mirror image of Solo. What could these two books, set in such disparate settings, have in common? What, indeed, do the authors have in common? Dasgupta is a British-born Indian author living in Delhi, while Sloan is a habitue of Silicon Valley, having experience with Current TV and Twitter.

Solo traverses the mind and soul of Ulrich, a 100-year-old Bulgarian who's experienced the ups and downs of the traumatic twentieth century, a chemist whose utopian dreams at the turn of the century turn to dust in the political extremism accompanying the managerial economy, as well as the epilogue, the post-communist embrace of vulgar capitalism which is supremely optimistic and cynical at the same time. Solo connects the before and after of utopia and dystopia, the life and dreamlife, the reality and fiction, to make us rethink the meaning of both tendencies.

Penumbra is about underemployed, geeky Clay Jannon's mind-bending adventures once he accepts a job as night clerk at the eponymous bookstore in San Francisco. The bookstore turns out to be a circulating library for a fellowship called the Unbroken Spine. These are men and women who devote their lives, in a chain going back five hundred years, to cracking the codes of a corpus of books, with the ultimate promise of immortality. Each member also writes a book encoding his or her own life in a comprehensive narrative. The holy grail is the codex vitae of Aldus Manutius—the historical Manutius popularized the printing press five centuries ago—which is deposited in the fellowship's branch in New York, whence Clay travels with his friends Kat (a Google executive) and school friend Neel (once a geek, now a Silicon Valley upstart).

Whereas the eccentric figures have been laboriously trying to decode the library with pre-technological methods, Clay is able to solve one of the preliminary puzzles very quickly with a basic visualization program. Later, as he gets Kat involved in solving the mystery of the fellowship, she puts all of Google's awe-inspiring resources to work in providing a definitive answer to the book of Manutius itself. In an exciting moment, Google's entire global network shuts down for...

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