Scott Krieger

I think this is an important book. I've been calling _Illyrian Fugue_ an "alternative history" novel. It's not really a historical novel, although it's set in the years roughly 1805-1813 in Napoleonic Illyria (modern day Slovenia) and painstaking research through source material has preserved a 19th Century Pre-Darwinian innocence regarding the natural sciences, so in essence, the nature of things, even the nature of reality itself, was still up for grabs when this novel is set. The truth is, the events in this novel _could_ have happened, mostly. There's an element of the phantasmagoric and a touch of horror, but the core of this novel is how "long ago and far away" is a great playground for the psyche to wrestle through issues both personal and global, such as personal identity, trying to understand war, politics, the internet, heroism, hierarchies, and bureaucracies, all told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator tumbling through a fugue state brought on by a traumatic event. The author spent 15 years crafting this playground as a safe place to play out his own psychodramas
The book begins with the line "I leapt from the bridge of myself into the river of myself." The world is full of pirates, treasure, the guillotine, a strange salamander called the Olm, the bottomless pit, and a sleeping king ready to awaken a mountain. There's something interesting around every corner and in every vignette. There are 983 sections that make up this novel, no chapters. Each section can stand alone and gives a satisfying reading experience, though collectively the fragments tell the tale of an individual trying to make sense of the world in a traumatized state. Eventually, the novel is about healing from great loss and trauma, a difficult journey told between the lines in this modern day masterpiece.… (más)