An Obsession with Infinitesimals

O'Brien's literary genealogy: This book is what would happen if James Joyce and Albert Camus collaborated. The warm but subtly satirical descriptions of the everyday Irish life and the sharp-edged existential absurdity of post-WWI continental philosophy. The absurd humor mingled with warm characters reminds me of his countryman and fellow Joyce acolyte Samuel Beckett.

Connections to Lost: I recognized lots of themes from Lost. The hint that this is all a weird afterlife experience, the apparent materiality of dead characters, the obsession with fantastic mechanisms. When the narrator spends an evening conversing in conversation with a withered dead man in an empty, dark room I immediately saw Jacob's shack (don't worry Alvin; you'll get there).

Indelible images: I think the subterranean paradise where you can have anything you want, can grow no older, experience no hunger or weariness, that is brought about by a complex series of metal doors and tubes and corridors is the image I will remember longest. The hugely grotesque Sgt. Pluck and the aforementioned conversation with the ghost-who-is-not-a-ghost Mathers are other strong images.

Moral, or lack thereof: I didn't see there being any moral to this story. Mostly, I saw an author fascinated by the strangeness that infinitesimals foist upon us all. Like the boxes within boxes, the needle that is so sharp and narrow at its point that it can pass two-inches through your finger before it actually makes contact, the litany of things that aren't (e.g. Pluck trying to guess the narrator's name). All of these are variations on Zenos paradoxes (paradice?). Luckily, I'm a discretist and so appreciate the infinitesimal as a useful fiction without allowing it to lead me into logical paralysis.

Related to this theme is the obsession (carried out mostly in the de Selby footnotes, but also a bit in the question over the narrator's identity) with pseudonyms and the logic of who is pretending to be who. The author of the book uses actually a pseudonym, and published several other literary works under several other pseudonyms. The inability to distinguish what is the truth (is du Garbandier impersonating Kraus or is du Gabandier actually Kraus in disguise, or is it actually a third author pretending to be both) is another fascinating bit of logic.

In the end, I enjoyed it very much. Thanks for the good read.