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A review by screen_memory
The Dark by Sergio Chejfec
5.0
This is the first I've read of Chejfec, and with any luck I'll be reading more of him soon. This is an interesting novel - there is not a single line of dialogue and there is very little characterization between the few characters.
The prose casts a sweeping shadow over all things in the novel. All potential for action hesitates on the border of its realization. Thoughts often wander into the darkness of the mind into abstraction. The main character's reflections on his ex Delia betrays a vague pretense of a person - she is all abstraction, she is barely there, barely real. It is only industry that makes her real, her labor in the factory and the machines that vibrate with technical purpose that reveal any trace of humanity in Delia. Even the child she is pregnant with exists as nothing more than a vague promise, perhaps a threat, that will linger as well on the safer side of the border of possibility, never to be realized, never to be born.
I usually dislike novels that skimp on characterization or present a feeble pretense of purpose or resolution (see my post on Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread), but Chejfec presents the absence of these things in a way that is all too real and relatable; it is the reader's own melancholy and sadness that underscores what is left unsaid, what is left in the dark.
The sparseness and the delicacy of the prose perfectly illustrates in only the bleakest grayscale a portrait of two disparate subjects who seem infinitely distant, who, despite their earlier intimacy, remain isolated from one another, each unto their own lonely corner of the world (indeed, Delia is only watched through a window or a fence or seen in memories).
I only remember there being two mentions of light sources in the book, yet the light they provide is purposed only to cast a shadow. Neither is there any sense of movement afforded from the disaffecting prose. Rather, any movement implied seems to occur as one might imagine viewing a stock-motion video - each movement itself mirroring stillness in its portraitesque passage.
As a final point, the narrator often speaks of having read multiple novels relating to a particular thought or idea. There is no certainty in his knowledge, only the recollection of some varying number of novels that have addressed the same idea presented, a sort of x-number-of-authors-can't-be-wrong assurance in his secondhand wisdom.
The prose casts a sweeping shadow over all things in the novel. All potential for action hesitates on the border of its realization. Thoughts often wander into the darkness of the mind into abstraction. The main character's reflections on his ex Delia betrays a vague pretense of a person - she is all abstraction, she is barely there, barely real. It is only industry that makes her real, her labor in the factory and the machines that vibrate with technical purpose that reveal any trace of humanity in Delia. Even the child she is pregnant with exists as nothing more than a vague promise, perhaps a threat, that will linger as well on the safer side of the border of possibility, never to be realized, never to be born.
I usually dislike novels that skimp on characterization or present a feeble pretense of purpose or resolution (see my post on Dennis Cooper's My Loose Thread), but Chejfec presents the absence of these things in a way that is all too real and relatable; it is the reader's own melancholy and sadness that underscores what is left unsaid, what is left in the dark.
The sparseness and the delicacy of the prose perfectly illustrates in only the bleakest grayscale a portrait of two disparate subjects who seem infinitely distant, who, despite their earlier intimacy, remain isolated from one another, each unto their own lonely corner of the world (indeed, Delia is only watched through a window or a fence or seen in memories).
I only remember there being two mentions of light sources in the book, yet the light they provide is purposed only to cast a shadow. Neither is there any sense of movement afforded from the disaffecting prose. Rather, any movement implied seems to occur as one might imagine viewing a stock-motion video - each movement itself mirroring stillness in its portraitesque passage.
As a final point, the narrator often speaks of having read multiple novels relating to a particular thought or idea. There is no certainty in his knowledge, only the recollection of some varying number of novels that have addressed the same idea presented, a sort of x-number-of-authors-can't-be-wrong assurance in his secondhand wisdom.