Unfinishing the Unnameable

Page 8 American Book Review Experiments in Fiction Unfinishing the Unnameable Robert Glick aPosTroPhe/ParenThesis Frederick Mark Kramer Journal of Experimental Fiction 33 Depth Charge Publishing http://www.experimentalfiction.com 437 pages; paper, $25.00; download, $11.71 The back cover of Frederick Mark Kramer’s luminous and occasionally frustrating Apostrophe/ Parenthesis describes the novel simply as “The Grandson of the Man Without Qualities living in New York City.” In this single line, Kramer links his narrator/protagonist Federigo to The Man Without Qualities, the protagonist of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the same name. The connection between narrators parallels a relationship between authors: Kramer is Musil’s grandson. While Apostrophe/ Parenthesis shares with The Man Without Qualities a scathing wit and an obsession with the impossible construction of a unified reality, the layered, flowing first-person voice of Apostrophe/Parenthesis hardly resembles Musil’s distanced, faux-bourgeois narration . And unlike the nihilist strain that runs through The Man Without Qualities, the simultaneous death and celebration that marks the first and last scenes of Apostrophe/Parenthesis indicates a more playful and productive response to the potential meaninglessness of life. Federigo does not shy away from the potentially debilitating gaps between communication and perception, but embraces them through an emphasis on textual and corporeal play. The title of the novel foregrounds a consideration of how language illusorily presents itself as an unbroken surface. An apostrophe marks the absence of characters, while parentheses bracket off additional text from a primary thought. They disrupt the word or sentence, calling attention to gaps that may be struck from the text and overflows exterior to a primary thread. The book’s opening line, “Let’s go, lets go,” highlights the function of the contraction . The repetition of “lets go” calls attention to the absence of the apostrophe, a swallowing up of a sign that itself stands for something swallowed, and forces the reader to actively bridge the gap between the two almost identical phrases. Similar to the linguistic gaps signaled by the title, Federigo layers his narrative as a series of gaps, digressions, missteps, and revelations that highlight the disconnection between thought and speech or speech and understanding. Conveying the flow of uninterrupted thought, his narrative consists of a single chapter rarely broken by paragraphs and enigmatically split by a blank three-quarters of a page in the near-center of the book. He expresses himself in long, rambling sentences that break off, question their own assertions, move freely through time and space, and generally feel like a cacophonic consciousness represented linearly. The title of the novel foregrounds a consideration of how language illusorily presents itself as an unbroken surface. In an attempt to comprehensively capture twenty years of his life, Federigo employs text from his plays, inner speech, day and dream notebooks, dialogues with an imaginary rat named Behemoth, and the philosophy of musical interludes. His goal: to “figure out how it all comes together.” Utopia, for Federigo, consists of “getting down to the essence,” “bits that can be broken down and reconstructed without loss.” Despite the fact that Federigo, a selfdescribed New York City “rootless cosmopolitan dreck,” tries to bridge the space between thought, feeling, and speech, he recognizes that he is doomed to fail, and repeatedly laments his inability to translate thought or emotion into speech and action. “We are prisoners of our own thoughts,” he says, “and can’t break out of the cage that encompasses our words and all that is important now doesn’t get spoken aloud or even in inner dialogue.” Even if he could speak the right words, translation proves impossible. “I stayed up all night writing down all that I felt but words couldn’t express the feelings out there on the abyss and not being afraid.” In the abyss, in the empty space between parentheses , lurks the indescribable and inescapable specter of death. During the novel, Federigo’s wife Isabel dies, as do many of the main characters, including, perhaps, Federigo himself. Literally and linguistically , Apostrophe/Parenthesis becomes an extended meditation on death. According to Federigo, even with its implicit gaps, the act of communication forestalls death and compensates for the fact that death...