One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, and: A Detective’s Complaint, and: Take Up and Read by Shimon Adaf

Abstract

Reviewed by: One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, and: A Detective’s Complaint, and: Take Up and Read by Shimon Adaf Rachel S. Cordasco Shimon Adaf One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset A Detective’s Complaint Take Up and Read Trans. Deborah Bragan-Turner. New York. Harper. 2022. 288 pages. Click for larger view View full resolution SHIMON ADAF’S Lost Detective Trilogy embodies many worlds, attitudes, genres, and voices. Like Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, it contains multitudes. Philosophy, literary theory, immunology, temporal rifts, and religious texts mingle together in this trilogy to produce a work that attempts to mimic what Adaf believes is a deep truth: that people are not closed systems but nodes in a network of relationships. People are constantly exchanging bacteria and viruses with one another, their perceptions of time and space don’t line up, and one person’s individual trauma as a guinea pig in a concentration camp can be the portal to a major discovery about the nature of human consciousness. Like Adaf ’s previous novel in English, Sunburnt Faces, the Lost Detective Trilogy never loses sight of itself as a literary work. This might make the books sound pretentious, but they are actually the opposite: they are attempts to lodge a creative object, born of a human mind, squarely in the space between the intangible and tangible aspects of our lives. A book has weight and takes up space, but the weightless words within it are woven together by a mind that exists as part of a brain, which is attached to a brain stem, which receives blood and oxygen and impulses from the rest of the body. As one major character declares in the third book, Take Up and Read, “the true key” to understanding what a human is is the immune system, that “its entire function was to recognize what belonged in the body and what was foreign to it. It learned and it had a memory, and it was founded on the fact that the body is a microbiome.” Adaf has written a story that incorporates the latest scientific ideas about the importance of the immune system and age-old theories about the relationship between mind and body. Some have called this a meta detective trilogy, and indeed books (those already written, those in the process of being written, those being passed from hand to hand) appear on many pages. Adaf refers to the trilogy as “the chronicles of Elish Ben Zaken” (the protagonist), channeling the religious texts that figure strongly in Take Up and Read. Works by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Love-craft, S. Y. Agnon, Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and many works of children’s fantasy populate the trilogy, all but screaming to be noticed and incorporated into our understanding of Adaf ’s project. “Genre” as an idea is dissected and experimented upon. Central to the mystery at the heart of the trilogy is a Jewish poet from Morocco named Perotz who, after being captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald, becomes the subject of a typhus experiment. When infected with a certain kind of typhus bacteria, he doesn’t become ill because he’s naturally immune. Nonetheless, his immune system’s reaction to the invader causes a strange change in his consciousness. He starts seeing shadowy figures (which others around him can also sometimes see) and losing time. Later scientists studying this phenomenon believe that such a reaction as this “leaves an opening for study of the structure of reality.” I focus on this aspect of the trilogy because it anchors the entire story, and it is what I find most fascinating about the work as a whole. Yet it is but a small part explained at the end of the third book. According to Adaf, these are not books in a trilogy but “chronicles,” made up of “the detective novel One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset,” “the meta-detective A Detective’s Complaint,” [End Page 64] and “the anti-detective novel Take Up and Read.” Inextricably tied to the events of these books is the music of Dalia Shushan...