A feature by Mark Haber

Agustín Fernández Mallo’s most recent novel, The Things We’ve Seen, is hard to describe. I don’t mean it’s indescribable or obtuse, or a novel that’s difficult to approach; in fact, the novel virtually begs the reader to immerse themselves in the countless stories that cross borders and oceans and sometimes leave the earth’s atmosphere. Yet, like the best of Sebald or Krasznahorkai, any attempt at summary feels like a disservice; there’s too much contained within its pages, too many digressions, both large and small. It’s a challenge to encapsulate a novel that bursting at the seams with such daring imagination.

Reviewed by Olivia Heal

“I was raised in rural Yorkshire … I still have a deep feeling, which dates from my childhood, that you shouldn’t waste anything, especially words”—the matter-of-fact tone set by this phrase from Daisy Hildyard’s previous Fitzcarraldo-published book, The Second Body, glides, or say, steps into her latest, the novel Emergency. Words aren’t the subject here, but rather what they point at. Language is like glass, meant only for seeing through, for designating what is on the far side. The style recalls earlier modes of signifying: the tree is the tree. Simply that, without complication, complexity, or nuance. It’s an illusion, of course, that the world can be transcribed in words, but the mimetic writing here is convincing enough to persuade that this world is the world. As John Berger might have put it, each lion is Lion, each ox is Ox. Or indeed, in current terms it might be called phenomenological writing: descriptive, attentive, making an experience of engaging directly with the world available to its reader. And as with glass, the effect is of seeing more clearly than with the unframed and unfiltered point of view, than with the bare, the illiterate eye.

Reviewed by Jan Wilm

For my money, Solstad is the contemporary writer most capable of expressing the death of the soul in our time. He’s also hilarious. The strange events that pepper the continually monotonous lives of his characters rival the weirdest literary incidents in a surrealist and absurdist tradition that ranges from Nikolai Gogol to Daniil Charms to Leonora Carrington to César Aira. The way these incidents transpire, however, is so singular that it should be described with Ane Fårsethas’s term “Solstadian”—though I personally would prefer something a little more suitably odd, perhaps “Dagesque.” What Fårsethas sees as Solstadian in her Paris Review interview with the author is concerned mostly with Solstad’s style, his long sentences that weave and wander like those corkscrew clauses of the two famed Thomases: Mann and Bernhard. Apart from Solstad’s idiosyncratic style and language, what I see as peculiarly—let’s go with it—“Dagesque” is the way the author structures his novels. Solstad surrounds the weird events in his fictions with lives lived in such a thicket of mundanity and boredom that the intruding strangeness seems much more striking than in the previously mentioned writers’ invariably weird worlds.