![]() ![]() ![]() 253, which is the last of twelve chapters. Chapter Six comprises two named characters. Proceed from there, filling in the chapter numbers beside the given name and page number. Begin with an introductory chapter (not listed in these “contents”), then go, first, to “Zariyah Zhadan,” p. In the front matter the author provides a kind of contents page-not labeled as such-listing names of characters as names of chapters, along with the pages where they start. There are chapters of sorts, but you have to figure them out yourself. Or, to put it in the fully neutered style in which the book is written, they are right. One blurber, Nicolette Polek, describes the novel as “a rare and brilliant pleasure, a coiling, searing fugue of a book that takes our deranged culture and pulls forth from it a box of stars.” She’s right. Reviewers have pointed to possible influences: Roberto Bolaño, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard, Italo Calvino. This wild gallimaufry of a novel, which runs a monologue through almost three hundred pages of text, without pauses for paragraphs or new chapters, is a tour de force of literary mania. ![]() Dead Souls (A Novel by Sam Riviere, NY: Catapult, 2021, 289 pp.) is a rare example of a book containing believable blurbs. ![]()
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