Subdivision, is a very good book that serves up what feels like a very bad dream. Imbued with dream-logic, the plot unfolds for the unnamed narrator along a path laden with mercurial transformations, uncertainty, and memories that are always just barely out of reach.
Subdivision presents a Kafkaesque tale with attention to minute detail worthy of the works of Nicholson Baker along with the embedded, frustrated teleology reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguru’s
The Unconsoled (1995), where the dream’s protagonist-with-a-goal finds, in the mode of Zeno’s Paradox, an infinite sequence of intervening goals each demanding attention first.
How can one summarize a complicated, extended dream? Recounting plot points would get you nowhere, just as the plot points themselves get the narrator nowhere, as they push against a dense dream headwind. In
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