rife with experiments with narrative, syntax and typography, of a part with the Dalkey Archive *within* the Dalkey Archive that corona\samizdat are doing such great work in putting together

like a lot of the novelists Clarke has clearly read most closely this is a work about people locating their (quote unquote) personhood in the failure to constitute themselves through closed systems. like the best of these writers, Clarke emphasises the distorting and constitutive nature of political economy and settler colonialism throughout

as the central characters seek to establish some form of connection or authenticity in their own lives only to find themselves railroaded into more intricate forms of isolation i mostly found myself thinking about david harvey’s various riffs on margaret thatcher’s line about economics as a method of changing the soul as their only options are over and over found to be ones available when the central societal dynamic is that of the accumulation of increasingly fictitious forms of capital; lifestyleism, branding, entrepreneur / nerd consciousness.