It isn’t possible to read books like Marek Bieńczyk’s Transparency without seeing traces of Sebald, rather like the lost Da Vinci that might lie hidden behind the Vasari mural in Florence. Bieńczyk’s form of literary historiography weaves autobiography and literary text in a discursive fusion that mostly works, though it gets a touch soggy through the middle section.

Sebald asked “what is literature good for?” and answered his question: “Perhaps only to help us to remember, and teach us to understand that some strange connections cannot be explained by causal logic.” Bieńczyk and Bae Suah’s literary sensibilities appear sharpened on this whetstone, writers that roam outside the narrow margins of genre. Bae Suah’s Nowhere to Be Found and Bieńczyk’s Transparency, though different in technique, share this reflexive subtlety that evokes a dreamlike response long after you’ve replaced the book on the shelf.

These books that reject the grinding repetition of the conventional novel are what I seek out when I read, texts that offer greater freedom than the swindle offered by tired novels that insist on controlling their readers with outdated literary devices.