Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War. 

Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos.

Subscribe to Novel Dialogue on Apple or Spotify to listen and to be notified when new episodes are released.

View a transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist
• Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer
• Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
• OULIPO, Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau
• Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to W: or the Memory of Childhood)
• Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr. Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..)
• Marcel Proust: Was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola?
• Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence.
• Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: How different are they?
• Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene)
• The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat