One of the most unusual pieces of fiction published this year. Jason Schwartz, John the Posthumous (OR Books).Joshua Comaroff & Ong Ker-Shing, Horror in Architecture (Oro Editions).As previously stated, our tastes dictated the list and we make no claims to comprehensiveness, thoroughness, or even good taste. Although we missed that deadline by just a little (cough, cough), we have returned with an epic Fall Book Preview. A deeply metaphysical, formally radical one-of-a-kind book from a great Brazilian writer.When we posted our first half book preview in January, we promised to return in July with a second installment. Hilst, whose father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has created a lacerating, and yet oddly hopeful, portrayal of a descent into hell-Amos never makes sense of the new way he sees things, but he does find an avenue of escape, retreating to his mother's house and, farther, towards the animal world. Written in a fragmented style that echoes the character's increasingly fragile hold on reality, With My Dog-Eyes is intensely vivid, summoning up Amos's childhood and young adulthood-when, like Richard Feynman, he used to bring his math books to brothels to study-and his life at the university, with its "meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, meglomanias." He calls it "the clearcut unhoped-for," and it's a vision that will drive him to madness and, eventually, death. Most difficult of all are his struggles to express what has happened to him, for a man more accustomed to numbers than words. Something has changed in Amos Keres, a university mathematics professor-his sentences trail off in class, he is disgusted by the sight of his wife and son, and he longs to flee the comfortable bourgeois life he finds himself a part of. A short, stunning book by a Brazilian master of the avant-garde.
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