Weak in Comparison to Dreams - (Five Strange Languages) by James Elkins (Hardcover)

About the Book

"For years, Samuel Emmer has monitored bacteria levels in drinking water for the small city of Guelph. He is content to focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his grasp on his own life recedes, and with it his with family and friends. No one is more surprised than Samuel when he is appointed to the city's Zoo Feasibility Committee. His assignment: travel to zoos around the world and gather information on the behavior of animals in their enclosures. The city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if naively, is trying to create cruelty-free habitats for its animals. It is in Tallinn, Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way... Weak in Comparison to Dreams, by historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no other novel you have ever read, even as its inspirations, from W.G. Sebald to Teju Cole, are clear to see. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites our love for the ambitious novel; with experimentation that never lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest aspects of our individual humanity"--

Book Synopsis

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams... is the most courageous and fascinating debut I have read since Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves." --Full Stop Magazine

For years, Samuel Emmer has monitored bacteria levels in drinking water for the small city of Guelph.

He is content to focus on dangerous life-threatening single-celled organisms as his grasp on his own life recedes--and with it, family and friends. To be sure, it is more than a little surprising when Samuel learns that he has been appointed to the city's Zoo Feasibility Committee. Even more so, that he is being tasked with interacting not just with animals, but human beings. His assignment: travel to zoos around the world and gather information on the stereotypical behavior of animals in their enclosures--the city of Guelph aspiring commendably, if naively, to a cruelty-free habitat for its animals. It is in Tallinn, Estonia, that the dreams start for Samuel. He is in a vast wooded landscape; there is a fire burning in the distance; and it is coming his way...

Weak in Comparison to Dreams, by the historian and art critic James Elkins, is like no other novel you have ever read, even as certain inspirations, from Sebald to Tokarczuk, are clear. With an astounding breadth of knowledge and playful courage, Weak in Comparison to Dreams reignites our love for the ambitious novel with experimentation that never lacks intention, and whose empathetic scope explores the deepest aspects of our individual humanity.

Review Quotes

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams offers a profusion of visual and philosophical imagination... A deeply unconventional debut, it's an invitation into a teeming imagination. He has managed to suffuse this book with an unsettling essence..." --John Williams, Washington Post

"The long life of Samuel Emmer gives all-world art critic and first-time novelist James Elkins an epic canvas on which to entertainingly dramatize the ethics of zoos, the music of contemporary composers, and the lives of amoebas, all in twitchy, often hilarious prose. But all you need to know is that J.S. Bach rocks and James Elkins rolls." --James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams is a novel that will haunt its readers even as it enchants. An astonishing book; mesmerizing, dreamlike, phantastic, grimly real. James Elkins has written a book of shimmering depth. His remarkable, expansive, and materializing imagination at once produces a toppling sense of vertigo and a deep pleasure that so many connections, carelessly unseen, exist all around us. Never before have I felt such empathy for a diagram, nor could I have anticipated such fascination with the compelling descriptions (and depictions) of musical compositions about pain and suffering." --Pippa Skotnes, author of Lamb of God and the Book of Iterations

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams is unlike any book I have ever read: a fascinating mixture of introspective realism and dreamlike surrealism, of text and image.... Elkins has created a highly original, unique literary work." --Wojciech Drag, author of Collage Literature in the Twenty-First Century

"A fascinating journey... an endless literary feast." --Miguel Ángel Hernández, author of Escape Attempt and Anoxia

"An extraordinary arthroscopic view into a man whose life is liquefying, becoming a chrysalis. Deftly drawing on the sciences and the world of visual representation, it is a story full of wit, tragedy and surprise..." --Kate Joyce, author of Metaphysics

"Elegantly written and imaginatively intricate as well as subtle in its capacity to induce readers to become involved in the details of a solitary consciousness." --Charles Altieri, author of Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience

"Erudite and immensely entertaining, Weak in Comparison to Dreams takes the novel where it has never gone before. James Elkins probes what it means to be human. He has written a powerful, sometimes angry, and, yes, wise book. I was hooked from the first page." --Terry Pitts, Vertigo

"Every now and again, a book presents a new type of narrative that alters the way we see literature. James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams... surprises as much as it intrigues." --Kimberly Brooks, artist and author of The New Oil Painting

"Experimental in the best sense of the word..." --Eva Schuermann, author of Seeing as Practice: Philosophical Investigations into the Relation Between Sight and Insight

"Reveries, dreams, reflections and memories drive this Sebald-inspired narrative through combinations of word and image... Elkins's novel offers a profoundly provocative exercise in visual thinking." --Hanneke Grootenboer, author of The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking

"Weak in Comparison to Dreams is an experimental feast, an illuminated palimpsest, a labour of intellectual love. It will push and pull and ask you, just how do you think you read?" --Maria Fusco, author of History of the Present