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Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is a 700 page novel about a man who wakes in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact but no memory of who he is or how he got there. On this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers chats with Jim to celebrate the 10th Anniversary Edition of his expansive novel, one of those rare, abundant books that rewards the most careful reading a person can give it.

00:00 A man who does not want his identity back
03:19 Waking in Guanajuato with no memory
03:56 Pessoa, Alvaro de Campos, and the poet of the absent self
11:07 Saramago and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
13:56 Gabriela, the ATM card, and memory in reverse
17:52 Douchebag, the VC who killed his inner self
25:59 Gomez, Raymond, and the money-laundering caper
35:24 Clocks, Proust, and every way to look at time
44:20 Blindness, the doctor's wife, and seeing the contagion
46:17 Seven years, 3:30 a.m., and writing to be surprised
51:41 Abundance, color, and the inner life
01:02:19 Too many books and the hunt for the real thing

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Effingers by Gabriele Tergit is an 800-page German Jewish family saga published by New York Review of Books Classics, and this week NYRB publicist Nick During joins me to talk about what makes it so special.

Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Berlin, across about seventy years of German history that ends with the catastrophic destruction of the family and German Jewish civilization in WWII.

We talk about Gabriele Tergit’s documentary style and her 151 short chapters, the way she gives us almost no interiority yet still makes these people feel vibrant and alive. We talk about Uncle Waldemar, the jurist who refuses to convert and decades later sees clearly what is coming. We talk about the remarkable women of the novel, and about the last hundred pages, where the dread finally lands. And we spend time with Tergit herself, a Berlin court reporter and author of Käsebier Takes Berlin (also published by NYRB), who fled in Germany in 1933 and finished this book in exile at a point in time when the world of Effingers and the type of characters that populate it, had vanished.

If you want to read Effingers in good company, follow The Big Book Project on Substack and subscribe wherever you listen. Come read the big books with me.

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus is a puzzling novel, and in this episode of The Big Book Project host Lori Feathers and guest Chad W. Post take on the first two hundred pages featuring an unreliable narrator, an unorthodox musical prodigy, and the transformation of art making into conformity to a systematized order.

The Big Book Project was created as a forum to share ideas about challenging novels, and today's conversation makes clear that questioning together is far more rewarding than puzzling alone.

Here's a few of the threads that we pull on in this episode: how much should we trust Zeitblom the biographer writing almost fifty years after the fact, insisting on his fabulous recall ability, and probably in love with his subject; Zeitblom's commentary on his own manner of writing Adrian's story; the coded use of Esmeralda's name; and, the twelve-tone system that Schoenberg made famous.
Throughout the discussion Lori and Chad keep returning to the tension underneath it all--humanism set against order, sentiment against system, during the decades in Germany when these arguments carried consequences far beyond music.
We hope that anyone who knows of Doctor Faustus only by reputation will find in this episode a reason to read and discuss it with us. Subscribe and follow along. Share your thoughts in the comments.

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