Reviewed by Nathan Knapp

This novel, Aphasia, mentions—and mentions is a very weak verb, better would be alludes, though alludes also fails, so instead we’ll say references, which points us in the right direction but also falls short, we suppose we will have to proceed anyway, knowing the reader gets the general idea—W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Robert Walser, Conjunctions, Arvo Pärt, Olivier Messiaen, Richard Greaves, Helen Schulman, László Krasznahorkai, Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, Mary Gaitskill, Grace Paley, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Adam Haslett, Stanley Elkin, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, The Silence by Ingmar Bergman, Michael Silverblatt, Bill Viola, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew by Dr. Seuss, others that I have missed, perhaps others that are not named but are alluded to, even if only stylistically, perhaps, like James Joyce’s Ulysses . . .