THE BOOK: Weak in Comparison to Dreams
PUBLISHED IN: 2023
THE AUTHOR: James Elkins
THE PUBLISHER: Unnamed Press
SUMMARY: Samuel is a civil servant in Guelph, Ontario. The city is planning to build a zoo, and he is sent to zoos in different countries to study animal welfare. He is besieged by the sufferings of zoo animals.
Each night he dreams of walking through an endless mountainous landscape. There are forest fires in the distance, and they get closer each night.
He knows that the fires mean something is happening to him in real life, but he can’t understand what. In the zoos he behaves more and more erratically, lying and provoking his hosts. His assistant, a person of indeterminate gender named Viperine, sees that he is suffering and tries to help, but word of Samuel’s misbehavior reaches his supervisor, and he is fired. In his dreams, the fires come up on all sides.
There are photographs of forest fires and zoos in the book—things Samuel sees and imagines.
The book has a shorter second part. It tells the story of Samuel in extreme old age. He has found the book—the one we’re reading, which he’d written as a middle-aged man—and he is reading it again for the first time in forty years. He hardly remembers anything of the year recounted in the book. Instead the stories and characters come through to him as music. The elderly Samuel lives alone, and plays the piano. The stories in the book, the ones we’ve read, remind him of composers he plays, and he writes about their music. This part of the book has actual sheet music. Samuel’s stories about the music form a parallel narrative, retelling the book as music. When the book ends Samuel is at peace, because all that is left of his memories are melodies.
THE BACK STORY: I’m an academic by profession, an art historian. About twenty years ago I started to feel unhappy about how writing is taught in the humanities. (Basically, all that counts is clarity and organization, and all the amazing and complex properties of writing are ignored or not encouraged.) It took me neary 20 years to write this book, which has nothing at all from my profession in it: no fine art, nothing academic.
WHY THIS TITLE: The main character, Samuel, is plagued by dreams. Every other chapter in the book is a dream, illustrated with photographs. Each night Samuel dreams of fires. Each night they get closer. Each day he forgets what he’s dreamed.
WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: For a picture of a life ruined by day and by night. For photographs, diagrams, and music in a novel. For the stories of animals in the zoos Samuel visits.
REVIEW COMMENTS: See this one in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/01/05/weak-comparison-dreams-james-elkins-review/ Or this one: https://sebald.wordpress.com/2023/12/06/james-elkins-ambitious-new-novel/
AUTHOR PROFILE: James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer.
He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the last twenty-five years he has lived in Chicago; he got an MFA in painting, and then switched to art history, got another graduate degree, and went on to do the PhD in Art History, which he finished in 1989. (All from the University of Chicago.) Since then he has been teaching in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He married Margaret MacNamidhe in 1994 at Eochaill on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, off the West coast of Ireland. Margaret is also an art historian, with specialties in Delacroix and Picasso.
Jim’s interests include microscopy (with a Zeiss Nomarski differential interference microscope and Anoptral phase contrast), stereo photography (with a Realist camera), playing piano (contemporary “classical” music), and (whenever possible) winter ocean diving.
His writing focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some of his books are exclusively on fine art (What Painting Is, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?). Others include scientific and non-art images, writing systems, and archaeology (The Domain of Images, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them), and some are about natural history (How to Use Your Eyes). Recent books include What Photography Is, written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; Artists with PhDs, second edition;and Art Critiques: A Guide, third edition.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: This book has lots of additional information—lists of characters, timelines, maps, notes and themes—online, here: https://jameselkins.com/writing-schedule/
SAMPLE CHAPTER: (Provide link). https://www.academia.edu/104862551/Weak_in_Comparison_to_Dreams_abstract_cover_sample_
LOCAL OUTLETS: Mad Street Books, Chicago.
WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: It’s on Amazon.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: jelkins@saic.edu
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 