Blake Butler In this rare and restless artifact, “Alice Knott”, it was nourished by two primary sources. The first, obvious, is based on the initiative of a certain American contemporary fiction, whose themes (paranoia as a transcript of guilt, the primary secrets of art, the abolition of spatial and temporary categories) organize the material of the novel, its tangible adventure. Echoes of capital works such as “a batch auction 49”, of Thomas Pynchon“The Leaf House”, from Mark Z. Danielewskiand “Wittgenstein’s lover”, from David MarksonThey resonate notoriously on each page “Alice Knott”. The second influence of Butler’s novel is softer but no less stronger and should be traced in the trilogy Samuel Beckett that form “Molloy”, “Malone dies” and “unnamed”, the Holy Trinity of Tears, texts that decide to demolish the existence of meaning and in the limit by extending any search for clarity on the surface of the world.
When reading from leather flow, “Alice Knott” appears to be a novel that explores the destruction of the unique uniqueness that is artistic works, but in its most intimate background, undoubtedly recognizable, what appears is the demolition of something more common. If the spaces we live, people around us and even our memories become suspects, if our name or our appearance enters into conflict with what has allowed us to inhabit the world, the coordinates of common sense are distributed and the center of the existence itself, that is, evidence that they represent an impatient identity.
Butler writes, on the stunning side of clarity that faces her protagonist to the disaster of his own self: “The only thing that kept all these lives together, as she understands, was a separate predict, any other, any other monument, and nothing to spend in her life. It is the same for a large part of the novel as a reader who is determined to clarify what is said, invites “Alice Knott” with high demand, at a time when it is popemoding literature, ashes, a popemodial crowd.
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Alice Knott
Blake Butler
Translation of Albert Moyano Muñoz
Zapa Skin, 300 pages, 20.90 EUR
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