DATE February 2010 selection

"There are no streetcars in Oblivion." reads the first line in Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss. Horace, an independently wealthy Luddite, chooses on a whim to relocate to the small Midwestern town of Oblivion because of its dearth of streetcars and quite possibly its name.

Horace is in search of “a state of complete detachment” and the Greek ideal of autarkeia (complete autonomy). He is deliberately anonymous.  As the novel unfolds he tries on and discards names and personas of various poets and philosophers: Chidiock Tichborne, William Blake, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Lucian of Samosata.

In Oblivion he accompanies his name change with a rebirth ritual of sorts; he walks out the back of his rented home and into the woods, disrobes, buries all of his clothing including shoes and returns home naked, reborn.

But for all of Horace’s avoidance behavior, life finds him. Before Horace Afoot ends, Horace is befriended by Mohr, the head librarian who is terminally ill; stalked and harassed by a young thug and reluctantly saves a bound and gagged naked woman he encounters as walks past a cornfield.

Frederick Reuss has said he is fascinated with characters whose lives are in a state of dislocation. He espouses the idea that identity is not a fixed thing--“a given”--but that which we construct on our own from memory. In effect, who we are is what we’ve read or what is found in the prevailing culture.  Reuss uses this central idea in Horace and also in his other novels, The Wasties and Henry of Atlantic City.

Philosophy and poetry wend their way throughout Horace. (Break out the dictionaries, history and philosophy books to better understand Horace.) Reuss, who holds a philosophy degree, uses it all to offer a way to examine society and self. Some readers may find Horace Afoot lacking in physicality and plot movement, but it more than compensates with wry and rigorous intellectual action.

Reuss, once a freelance researcher at the Smithsonian, is now a full-time novelist with four published novels: Horace Afoot (1998), Henry of Atlantic City (2001), The Wasties (2003) and Mohr: A Novel (2006).

Readers of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery would enjoy the philosophical bent of Horace Afoot.  If the Horace Afoot's odd sense of place and time engages, try The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.

BSI February selection

An Outline of the Republic by Siddhartha Deb  is a murky atmospheric tale of shifting politics and emotional ambivalence.  Amrit Singh, a nonpracticing Sikh and atheist, works half-heartedly as a journalist at a Delhi-based English language newspaper, The Sentinel.

In The Sentinel's news morgue, Singh stumbles across a photograph of two insurgents and their hostage, a young woman to be assassinated for being a porn actress. Singh journeys to the border region between India, Burma and Tibet in search of information about the alleged porn actress.

The physical and emotional terrain of Outline projects the reader into an existential no man’s land. Heroes and villains are conjured from rumors and rumors of rumors. What is real and true about the young woman, the saintly but shadowy Malik and even Singh himself is never exactly settled. The reader is left to make his or her own conclusions.

Siddhartha Deb  is the author of two novels, The Point of No Return (2002), which was a New York Times Notable Book, and An Outline of the Republic (2005), known as Surface in the UK and India. Aside from two novels, he is a regular book reviewer and journalist for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Guardian and others.

Deb won the 2007 Dublin IMPAC award for Outline. He is currently a Radcliffe Institute fellow at Harvard University and is working on Do You Know Who I Am? Stories of Wealth and Poverty from the New India, a nonfiction book dealing with contemporary Indian society.