The Nothing-Something of Loren Ipsum
Gallix’s novel explores a nothing-something analogous to the one Ophelia’s utterings become, asking in its first chapter, “what is lost when nothing is lost? When it becomes something?” The question here, posed by the novelist Sostène Zanzibar, refers to a note that reads “NOTHING IS LOST” and is found on the corpse of the murdered, we learn later, “Solange de la Turlute, the controversial boss of one of France’s largest family-owned publishing houses,” the first in series of murders, mostly of authors. But the question resonates beyond this context and seems to serve as the grounding question of the entire novel, “the book you are currently reading, which . . . is not the book I wanted to write,” the author, Adam Wandle — whom Ipsum is in Paris researching for a book and whose works provide slogans for the group behind the murders — asserts, but in such a way as to make ”the porous borders” between character — here Wandle — and author —Gallix — “almost indistinguishable,” to appropriate phrases of a passage from Loren Ipsum that blurs, in a different manner, the distinction between fictional and nonfictional worlds.
Albert Rolls reviews Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix.