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A debut novel, definitely. The kind that doesn't so much seem incomplete as wanting to do absolutely EVERYTHING at once. Am Weltenrand... takes us from the Paris commune to modern-day Tokyo, from the Big Bang to heat death, from struggle to nirvana, from the ascent of man to cyberpunk... and it does it by way of both Flaubert and Godzilla, quantum physics and Youtube comments, diaries and translations, etc etc etc. 1,000 pages, five separate texts, all masquerading as five very different kinds of autobiography, to be read in any order, supposedly influencing each other in different ways depending which order you pick...

And it almost pulls all of it off. And as bowled over as I am by the complete omnipedia of it, it's certainly not flawless. Comes with the territory, obviously.

German has a lot of words for "Why?". I love, as does Weiss apparently, the word "wozu?" - "Where to?". To what purpose? Wither all this high-precision blather? And that's arguably the entire point, I guess. It's the fourth (in my case) text, Cahiers, that seems to unlock it all, and still leaves me a bit frustrated with where it goes - you want that "wozu" to have a destination, you want fiction to set up difficult questions and if not outright answer them, then at least develop them to some sort of conclusion. But if life - or indeed existence, on a personal, species, or even molecular level - doesn't have a simply defined purpose, where to go with that? Weiss is an extraordinary stylist, creating five very different narrators to attack his big questions (what is an "I", anyway? Can you reproduce it using text? Can you truly know yourself or anyone else? Can you even trust reality itself? Can you order chaos? Is love something actual?) using every trick modern printing practices will allow him; yet as thrilling, funny, heartbreaking, pageturning, maddening, annoying (there's a fair bit of orientalism here which I'm pretty sure is about 90% deliberate), baffling it is, he still gets hung up on one particular then-current event a little too much, still a little too much in love with his own conceit, still struggling a bit to fuse his intimate personal drama with his big lofty questions.

But really, those are minor complaints. This is definitely the biggest read of the year for me, and I plowed through it like obsessed. I'll always love something that shoots for the moon and misses by a few degrees more than something that's happy to stay where it is, and Weiss' mad dissection of the world is both a ton of fun and one of those headaches I can't get rid of. Wozu? Second electron to the right and straight on til morning.

Suggested reading order:
1. Enzyklopädien eines Ichs
2. Terrain vague
3. Die Glückseligen Inseln
4. Cahiers
5. Akios Aufzeichnungen

"We have a duty to music, and that is to invent it."

I love to listen to (or in this case read) creative people trying to get at the root of what creativity actually is. Not everything in Stravinsky's lectures is something I agree with - his contempt for using music for anything beyond itself feels both admirable and a little naive today - but he's never less than interesting, and frequently very funny. I'd probably have loved it unreservedly if I knew more about classical music.

Yowza. There are those books on faith that not only get me interested as someone with very little room for it myself, but actually go on to transfix me throughout. Daniel Stein is one of them; sits right alongside Jerusalem and The Books of Jacob in my little pantheon of Judeo-Christian heresies. As in all great novels of ideas, I'm not sure I always agree with the author or that she always agrees with her hero, but it's a power drill of a novel, using its dozens and dozens of narrators to lay bare and then contrast just how easy it is to be right and how hard it is to act right.

Lösryckt, är ordet som dyker upp i huvudet hela tiden. Jag älskar tanken här, 44 kortnoveller som korsar gotik med folksägner, saker som kunde hända just i den tiden innan moderniteten fullt ut gjorde sitt intyg, innan de gamla sagorna bara blev trygga fyrfärgstryck hos Elsa Beskow och Astrid Lindgren.

Och här finns många små historier som är fascinerande, och jag gillar sättet han försöker måla upp dem allesammans som om de vore små målningar i ett mörkt kyrkhörn någonstans som någon sedan länge ställt en hylla med psalmböcker framför för att inte skrämma barnen. Men att Faxneld hela tiden använder exakt samma torra, helt objektiva, nästan journalistiska stil när jag hellre hade velat ha lite mer Det var en gång eller folkvisa över det, det suger livet lite grann ur dem. Han står där som en objektiv, allvetande berättare och återger att en sägen existerar i stället för att ge liv åt den.

Om något folkmetalband gör en temaplatta av det här kommer det att bli fantastiskt.

Påminner inte så lite om Ecos Baudolino - medeltid, mystiska kartor, odödliga profeter - men tar i slutändan en annan väg. Nilson förtjänar att läsas.

Feels very much like a warm-up for greater things, yet it is undoubtedly one of the funniest Dostoevsky... things (hard to call this a novel) I've read.

Also, his anti-European conservatism is a bit disturbing to read right now, but would be more so if he wasn't, again, funny.

Also also, Dostoevsky made fun of the old "I can't believe people still have these opinions in [year]!" idiocy 160 years ago.

Shaw really doth protest too much in both the foreword and the "sequel"; dude, you wrote a toxic romantic comedy, and if absolutely everyone reads it one way, maybe you're the problem. Pygmalion is a tad sharper than the 1938 film version and a lot sharper than the '64 singalong, and I'm still not sure if the whole white-man's-burden subtext is intended to be there or not, but I love how it manages to walk both sides of the street.

I'm tempted to go the full 5, partly because it's so good in its own right, partly because this is a side of PJH we've only glimpsed before, especially on albums like White Chalk and Dance Hall at Louse Point; the writer who draws a line from goth to actual old things, who can capture the inner life of a girl in a world where - thanks in no small part to the dialect which I'm told is broad - it's the 1970s and the 1600s and the 600s all at once, where time moves like the growth of an oak or ash tree; glacially slow, but ever-shifting. A PJ Harvey who owes as much to CS Lewis and Fairport Convention as to Howlin' Wolf and Pixies.

To some extent, I'm a little bothered by the bilinguality of the book; I understand the wish to write in pure dialect, but other authors have done that without having to spell it out in RP and footnotes and glossary, and it feels a tiny bit hand-holdy. At the same time, there's something to the way she occasionally needs to change the story just a tiny bit to say the same in English that Ira can think so easily in Dorzet - the rhymes need to change, the animals and plants need to lose some of their magic. It's part of the dying of childhood.

Once or twice I'm reminded of her old beau's And the Ass Saw the Angel; the heavy dialect, the brutality of adolescence, the ensouling of the world; but this is a far more mature, controlled work, without ever losing the perspective of the child telling it.

I'm really looking forward to new music from her now.