Long after finishing it, I find myself still thinking about this—let’s not call it autofiction—digressive apologia pro vita sua and meditative, measured assessment of self, family, and culture. And, above all, this is not so much an account but a demonstration of how the artist resists the pull of the “neutral evil” of the world by harnessing the chaotic good to be found in it, in his or herself, and in other works of art.

Lee Klein’s subtle, serpentine prose was not quite what I was expecting (the acerbic wit and irony of his earlier book, Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox (?)) when I pulled this slim volume from the TBR-soon shelf not as soon after acquiring it as I would have liked—and now, definitely should have done, since if I had done so I would now also have (what I presume is) its sequel, Chaotic Good under my belt and be ready for the forthcoming Like it Matters, too, cos the writing is simply that compelling, I am happy to report.

And this is coming from someone who knew nothing of (and by my track record, likely to care little for) the book’s ostensible subject matter, a concert the monkish drone-metal band Sunn O))). For said concert is simply the scaffolding for the concert-goer’s inner artist to muse most cogently, productively, but unfetteredly (if that’s a word) and (mos def) peripatetically on topics only seemingly disconnected……

My favourite reads of 2022…

This is a book meant to be taken as a whole, as a unity.

But what is the nature of that unity?

And what or who is the Intimidator that still lives in our hearts?

These are not rhetorical questions. I am typing them out with my fingers even as I am asking them in my head, my lips trailing along behind in mute, dumb-show, whispered sympathy, asking for a friend.

In the hopefully mock-egotistical spirit of David Foster Wallace reminding us (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments), on more than one occasion, that he is “an exceptionally good ping-pong player,” let me just remind you, dear reader, that I have forgotten more books on postmodernism than you’re ever likely to read 1I won’t go into the reasons for making this sad claim, except to sing a few bars of the Van Morrison/John Lee Hooker tune “Wasted Years” —and then also remind you that, after making his own over-the-top assertion, DFW then……

While it is a truism that every artist constructs the aesthetic by which he or she wishes to be judged, I never tire of reading books like Cercas’s The Blind Spot, as these kinds of apologia pro [scribo] vitae sua (don’t ask me if I conjugated that correctly!) give what I would like to think of (however erroneously) as real insight into what practicing writers think of the phrase (one either abhorrent to or simply ignored by most scholars) literary value. For in books like this thoroughly amicable one we may not get quite at the truth about what drives a particular artist to create in the ways that he or she does, but we do get the artist’s public, conscious version of what drive’s him or her.

For Cercas (as for Milan Kundera, to whom the first part of this book is heavily indebted),  the novelist is an explorer of the human condition, and the sole moral absolute that all would-be serious authors must adhere to is to go exploring in new directions. Like Kundera, Cercas locates the Ur-novel in 17C Spain, with Don Quixote, which ushered in  a century-and-a-half of transgressive, digressive, genre-blending, formal literary freedom (in northern Europe at least, if, paradoxically, not in Spain), before this freedom was curtailed in the 19C by Realism’s quest for “constructive rigour” in the interest of bringing the novel its [allegedly] longed-for “purity, status and nobility”(27).

Cercas as a young writer wanted to tap back into what Kundera calls this largely……