A review by matt_books
The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

4.0

Endless pages are dedicated to stories told to characters in another, longer story that is being relayed to our main character who later writes an account of the conversation that is being translated by the narrator at some point years later. Sachs spends a lot of time meditating on the unreliability of storytelling and of history at large, the endless game of telephone that refracts conversations/events/whole lives through a series of observers. Your firsthand account of a weird guy at the bar or whatever gets embellished and exaggerated the more you tell it, imagine the layers of unreality to writings about events that unfolded centuries ago.

There’s also a lot of stuff here about the relationship and unfair expectations between sons and fathers, but since I don’t have a dad (cheers to the anonymous sperm donors of the late 1980s) I cannot really speak to these themes.

I struggled at first to wrap my head around to the pages-long paragraphs and discursive, elliptical conversational style but ended up reading the last hundred pages in one sitting. Extremely satisfying ending, too!