http://home.comcast.net/~tonydal/wise... ( )

Twentieth-century events, reordered and recontextualized into something that more closely resembles experimental fiction than a history book. With such a broad focus, it's unsurprising that the book chooses to work most commonly with collective masses such as 'scientists' or 'philosophers,' although a few individuals shimmer into focus on occasion. Ourednik is Eastern European, so it's perhaps unsurprising that fascism and communism factor in as the big baddies here, capitalism and neoliberalism getting more of a free pass than I'd be inclined to give. Intriguing nevertheless. (First read 2006-04-15) ( )

Village Voice
Europeana
Patrik Ourednik
Dalkey Archive, 122 pp., $12.50

Europeana is like Harper's Weekly Review extended across the 20th century: a bunch of neutral sentences that promise via sequentiality to make an endlessly dissolving narrative from "events." Here the facts are weighted: more sentences about WW I than jogging, though both appear, and ghostly power is vested in the magical word and. "And writers and poets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag . . ." History, or a knifing of the progressive humanist delusion that there's such a thing as history in the first place? Yes, exactly. A tragicomic prose poem to make poets weep with envy, to make everyone weep.