Radiant Terminus took me somewhere I didn’t want to leave. Like Thomas De Quincey in the Confessions and Suspiria de Profundis, Volodine treats landscape as a state of consciousness, though stripped of De Quincey’s grandeur. In the endless taiga time dilates, nights last centuries, the dead walk among the living and among those who can’t tell the difference. Jeffrey Zuckerman’s prose is slightly fatigued, a flat register that sustains the wasteland.

The best things I’ve read this year: this and Suspiria de Profundis.

There are, fortunately, many more post-exotic works.

Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.

— T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton