James Elkins' superbly strange novel is one that challenges readers to wonder, through a collision of literature and design, science and art, and psychology and humor, what it means for something to be true; and what meaning, ultimately, lies in truth.
Samuel Emmer, who monitors bacteria levels in drinking water for the small city of Guelph, has just been appointed to the city's Zoo Feasibility Committee. His big assignment: travel to zoos around the world and gather information on "problematic" animals (the more disturbed the better), so the future zoo in Guelph can avoid them.
But Samuel-with an unraveling marriage and an adult daughter who seems to have receded into his past-prefers the company of amoeba to fuzzy animals. Needless to say, he isn't thrilled about his new job. "I like microscopic animals because no one else does. No one cares if some kind of amoeba goes extinct, or even if they all do. No one even knows if any amoebas have ever become extinct," he tells his supervisor Catherine. "A little like employees of Water Management," an unsympathetic Catherine replies.
At a zoo in Tallinn, Estonia, the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way. In waking life, Samuel is emersed in the patterns of the obsessive, stereotypical behaviors of the animals he is observing: the heartbreaking pacing and self-plucking, the stomping and teeth-gnashing.
Meanwhile, back in Guelph, competitive interns Vipesh and Viperine send Samuel research packets, filled with articles with titles like "Box Elder Tree (Acer negundo) Intoxication and Poisoning in Fallow Deer (Dama dama)." The packets come with personal notes. Their cheerful but increasingly concerned voices accompany Samuel on his travels. In some ways, they are his only friends as the charts, graphs and photographs of animal "habitats" appear suddenly in the narrative, as Samuel finds himself confronting the well-intentioned zoo keepers who are also his hosts.
To a person they love their animals, and are doing their best. But something is happening to Samuel. As his travels continue from Helsinki to Knoxville, Salt Lake City to Basel, his behavior becomes more and more erratic; he begins lying to and provoking the zoo administrators about why he is there. As his grasp on reality weakens, Samuel's dreams become more intense. "Each new zoo," he observes, "had been putting me deeper to sleep."
Vipesh and Viperine grow more concerned for their boss. They send him esoteric warnings and advice as they compete for his approval. When things come to a head in Basel, and word of Samuel's misbehavior reaches his supervisor, Samuel has to confront the truth of his own suffering.
A second part of the novel meets Samuel in old age. He has found the book-the one we're reading, which he'd written decades before-and hardly remembers anything of the year recounted in the book. Instead, the stories and characters come through to him as music, on the piano he plays alone. His own stories remind him of the composers he has become obsessed with, and sheet music intersperses with text, forming a parallel narrative to the first part of the book. Ultimately, Samuel arrives at peace through melodies.
In this exceptional novel, an unaccountable and nearly inconceivable distance has opened within a single lifetime. Weak in Comparison to Dreams shows a way of thinking differently about the coherence of a life. Are unremembered dreams part of our lives? What if a single life continues so long that it becomes separate lives which no longer know one another? And what are the habits that we rely on to survive the enclosures and entrapments of our own life.
Industry Reviews
"Weak in Comparison to Dreams offers a profusion of visual and philosophical imagination... A deeply unconventional debut, it's an invitation into a teeming imagination. He has managed to suffuse this book with an unsettling essence..." -John Williams, Washington Post
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Weak in Comparison to Dreams is an experimental feast, an illuminated palimpsest, a labour of intellectual love. It will push and pull and ask you, just how do you think you read?"
-Maria Fusco, author of History of the Present"
Weak in Comparison to Dreams is a novel that will haunt its readers even as it enchants. An astonishing book; mesmerizing, dreamlike, phantastic, grimly real. James Elkins has written a book of shimmering depth. His remarkable, expansive, and materializing imagination at once produces a toppling sense of vertigo and a deep pleasure that so many connections, carelessly unseen, exist all around us. Never before have I felt such empathy for a diagram, nor could I have anticipated such fascination with the compelling descriptions (and depictions) of musical compositions about pain and suffering."
-Pippa Skotnes, author of Lamb of God and the Book of Iterations"Erudite and immensely entertaining,
Weak in Comparison to Dreams takes the novel where it has never gone before. James Elkins probes what it means to be human. He has written a powerful, sometimes angry, and, yes, wise book. I was hooked from the first page."
-Terry Pitts, Vertigo"Every now and again, a book presents a new type of narrative that alters the way we see literature. James Elkins's
Weak in Comparison to Dreams... surprises as much as it intrigues."
-Kimberly Brooks, artist and author of The New Oil Painting"Experimental in the best sense of the word..."
-Eva Schuermann, author of Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the Relation Between Sight and Insight"Reveries, dreams, reflections and memories drive this Sebald-inspired narrative through combinations of word and image... Elkins's novel offers a profoundly provocative exercise in visual thinking."
-Hanneke Grootenboer, author of The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking"Elegantly written and imaginatively intricate as well as subtle in its capacity to induce readers to become involved in the details of a solitary consciousness."
-Charles Altieri, author of Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience"
Weak in Comparison to Dreams is unlike any book I have ever read: a fascinating mixture of introspective realism and dreamlike surrealism, of text and image.... Elkins has created a highly original, unique literary work."
-Wojciech Drag, author of Collage Literature in the Twenty-First Century"An extraordinary arthroscopic view into a man whose life is liquefying, becoming a chrysalis. Deftly drawing on the sciences and the world of visual representation, it is a story full of wit, tragedy and surprise..."
-Kate Joyce, author of Metaphysics"A fascinating journey... an endless literary feast."
-Miguel Angel Hernandez, author of Escape Attempt and Anoxia"The long life of Samuel Emmer gives all-world art critic and first-time novelist James Elkins an epic canvas on which to entertainingly dramatize the ethics of zoos, the music of contemporary composers, and the lives of amoebas, all in twitchy, often hilarious prose. But all you need to know is that J.S. Bach rocks and James Elkins rolls." -James McManus, author of
Positively Fifth Street
