The Organs of Sense
by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2019)
Review by Nathan Knapp
Instead of beating around the bush and pretending to make some kind of objective judgment—and holding off making any kind of evaluative statement until the latter part of the review, as is sensible—I’ve decided instead to come right out and say of The Organs of Sense, the debut novel by Adam Ehrlich Sachs: it’s extremely—perhaps even deafeningly—good. Further still, I’d call it one of the best books published in 2019, or at least one of the best of the books published in 2019 that I read personally—I cannot speak for all of the books published in 2019, or even all of the books that made the many lists that proliferated back in December proclaiming this book or that book or that other book one of the best books of 2019. I can’t say such because I did not read all of them (either all the books published or the ones that made the lists), or really very many of them (books published in 2019) at all, in fact, as I went somewhat out of my way (in 2019) not to read much contemporary literature at all, instead choosing to spend most of the year reading the work of dead people. Generally, I’m much more inclined to read work by dead people than living people, as work by dead people, if it’s still around, is far more reliable than work by living people, in terms of being likely to be located at least somewhat near the neighborhood of literature. While most contemporary literature—and I suspect this has always been the case with contemporary literature—may be called contemporary, precious little of it attains to literature. This book, however, if I may continue to make immodest claims for it, these Organs of Sense, I think, could perhaps be called literature, or at least a collection of organs of literature, however vulgar that may sound, though then again it may not be particularly contemporary. (In fact, it goes out of its way, or seems to go out of its way, not to be contemporary.) These organs are still living and breathing organs, they aren’t dead organs, nor even organs that have been prepared for transplant. These organs, one senses, are untransplantable, unlike the organs which feature in most contemporary soi-disant literature, which are often perfectly ready for transplant, fitting in one book as well as another, in this book as well as that. The Organs of Sense is no mere mélange of literary appendages, distal extremities, subcutaneous growths, alimentary acids, cellular proteins, or emetic fluids. It is not sputum, saliva, nor plasma. Which is to say, it ain’t blood, though there is a lot in it about blood, both familial and otherwise. What it is, this novel, is sense, in all the senses and sanities of the word, all its applications and misapplications. And there are many applications and misapplications, senses and sanities, insanities and nonsenses in this book, in these organs that Adam Ehrlich Sachs has crafted into The Organs of Sense, a novel, featuring an unnamed narrator narrating the narration of the philosopher Leibniz’s journey to the observatory of an unnamed and eyeless astronomer, and—far more than Leibniz—the story of the aforementioned unnamed and eyeless astronomer, and the stories of the divers members of the royal family (the Hapsburgs, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire in the middle of the seventeenth century) for whom he (the astronomer, before becoming eyeless) serves for a time as Imperial Astronomer. Narration is nested within narration (occasionally within narration (within narration (within narration (within narration)))). Several reviewers have noted that this is the territory of W.G. Sebald (Andrew Martin’s back-of-book blurb says the book resembles what might’ve happened “if W.G. Sebald had gone insane”), but really Sachs is nothing like Sebald—whom Sachs has in an interview aptly termed Thomas Bernhard’s “gloomy disciple”—aside from his having also made use of this particular technique of nested narration, and aside from his book being one of people-talking-at-great-length instead of the traditional American form of people-doing-things-at-greater-or-lesser-length. Of course there is plenty of doing things in this book, more than in Sebald, and certainly more than in the work of Bernhard—from whom Sebald learned the trick to start with (hence Sachs calling him Bernhard’s “gloomy disciple”). And it’s Bernhard who is Sachs’s primary lodestar here, to much greater effect than some of the other Bernhard-influenced work that has finally (finally!) begun to appear, slinking in under the cover of darkness, talons bared, into the dead-fall-filled forest of the American novel. Which is not to say that The Organs of Sense is an imitation, though it does at times seem to imitate, mostly through its resolutely Bernhardian syntax, through its habit of stating that so-and-so-said, remarked so-and-so, reported so-and-so, a form that honestly ought to be named after the vituperative Austrian, who so adored syntactical collections of threes, as in vituperative, abusive, and malicious, or monstrous, atrocious, and egregious, which are all words one might apply to Bernhard’s technique of remorseless, pitiless, merciless, and occasionally even malignant prose, along with the serpentine sentences, tangled throughout both Bernhard’s corpus and Sachs’s Organs. Sachs, in interviews, has said he is sensitive on the subject of being influenced by Bernhard, while admitting same, and has even stated that he thinks Bernhard is the great unremarked influence on all contemporary fiction, an assertion I’m in total agreement with, providing one excepts most American fiction, which still runs in more or less the same channels of alternately dreary and ecstatic realism that it has since the salad days of Carver, Roth, Pynchon, and their various acolytes—and if one does anything wilder than those three in an American novel, the Donald Barthelme comparison (which I’ve seen misapplied to Sachs’s work by, again, Andrew Martin) can’t be long in coming—and I understand Sachs’s sensitivity, or anxiety, about being influenced by Bernhard, because Sachs quite obviously aspires to originality, to do more, and his absolute disregard of most of the forms, techniques, methods, evasions, and elusions of the typical drearinesses of most American fiction expresses this desire, this yearning to actually write an interesting novel that is interesting for what it is as a novel—which in no way means that Sachs does not entertain. Far from it! This novel is extremely funny, it is excessively funny, occasionally it is even a little too funny for its own good—by which I mean it occasionally presses the same joke a bit further than it needs to go—but this, the sin of surplus, is hardly the greatest iniquity for which we could indict a novelist, and in any case it’s a relatively rare sin in Sachs’s case—usually the result of following the Bernhardian syntax a little too closely. What is interesting about this syntax is that it is an at-least partly imported one. In his recent interview with The Paris Review, Michael Hofmann, critic and poet and German-to-English translator extraordinaire, has spoken of the separate Latinate and Anglo-Saxon strains of English, the different strengths of the different strains, and the fact that most American prose tends decisively, even militantly towards the latter, toward the hardness and simplicity of Anglo-Saxon, instead of the complexity, excess, and absurdity of English’s Latin and Greek department, which often tends to sound translated even in the work of native English speakers. Sachs himself decisively leans toward the Latinate and Grecian arms of English, as most translators of Bernhard—including Hofmann with Bernhard’s debut novel, Frost—into English have done. It’s tempting to wonder if the belated absorption of Bernhard into English, and the appearance and eventual influence of writers like Sachs, as well as others working in a similar vein, may be a decisive factor in American prose in the future, pushing us toward a more Latinate English, an English that leans away from Hemingwayan simplicity and brevity and instead swerves towards verbosity, prolixity, virtuosity, hilarity, profusion and surfeit, as in the early novels of Thomas McGuane (who in his later work has angled back toward simplicity, usually getting there on the back of that marvelous and simple animal, the horse), an English that veers away from our collective obsession with the illusion of sanity, and towards a more healthful insanity, perhaps most aptly described by Sachs’s unnamed astronomer, who’s been rendered suspect in the eyes of the of the world, and especially in the eyes of the chroniclers of the world,
who, in devoting their lives to carving from the infinitely extended, infinitely dense glob of absolute nonsense known as reality numerous little globules of nonsense, then compressing these globules of nonsense into beads of pure nonsense, and finally stringing together these nonsensical fact-beads into handsome glittering concatenations of seeming sense, i.e., their history books, practice sanity, promulgate sanity, and privilege, in selecting what and especially whom to preserve and parade about for posterity, a species of sanity. Now sanity has, no doubt, accomplished a great deal throughout European history, the astronomer told Leibniz. Sanity is important, too! But in all the hoopla over sanity, we ought not to neglect the contributions of madness.
Indeed, we ought not. This novel is a refreshing burst of madness, a flood of lunacy in a literary culture generally interested in its opposite: sanity, so-called. In the end—lest I overemphasize this one aspect of the book over all the others—it’s also a moving meditation on fatherhood, sonhood, and both what it means to be a family, and be a part of one. Despite its surface anachronisms, it’s here that the book leans toward the timeless, filled with startling wisdoms: “We begin to see the virtues of our birth fathers only after the fathers we thought would replace them have disappointed us in turn. By then of course it is too late.” And “it is because she loves [her father] so much . . . that as long as they live a friendly word will never pass between them.” And “at bottom there was between us a mutual substrate of mutual loathing that safeguarded for each of us the autonomy and actuality of the other.” I could go on quoting. In fact, it would likely be better if this review were relieved entirely of my words and simply filled with quotes from Sachs’s excellent book. The muscular delicacy of his achievement—with its subtle and complex treatment of familial love, familial hostility, familial pain, both shared and unknowingly-shared—cannot be overstated. I hope it will find the recognition it deserves.
Nathan Knapp’s criticism has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, 3:AM, The Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, and other places. Somewhat regrettably, and somewhat not-regrettably, he currently lives in that most middling of American cities, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, at present, he is finishing and refinishing a novel.
Banner credit: Anders Sandberg, shared under CC BY-NC 2.0