ჯოანა კევენას შვიდი: აბსურდული მოგზაურობა რეალობის კატეგორიებში

Joanna Kavenna has spent two decades as a writer, navigating a remarkably unconventional path across a vast array of subjects and genres, from polar exploration to motherhood, economic inequality, travelogues, academic satire, and technological dystopias. "I like the genre," Kavenna remarked in an interview from 2020, "because there's a narrative, and you can work against it, test it." Nevertheless, her seventh published book, Seven, is a curiously uncategorized, protean thing: a slim, absurd novel but one brimming with ideas.In every genre Kavenna has worked – or, more precisely, tormented the boundaries of – Seven (or How to Play the Game Without Rules) is probably closest to academic satire. We first encounter the entirely anonymous first-person narrator in Oslo in the summer of 2007, where they are working as a research assistant for a renowned Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir is described as "distinguished, tall, strong, and terrible" and likes to host dinner parties for her hysterical institutional peers. The unfortunate narrator's job is to help her with her "box philosophy": "the study of categories, the ways in which we group and organize sets of reality [...] the ways in which we ultimately think inside the box, even when we try to think outside it."The action really gets going when Jónsdóttir sends the narrator to the Greek island of Hydra to meet Theodoros Apostolakis, a dentist/poet/mystic and a devoted follower of Seven, (a completely fictional) board game that was once "played throughout the ancient world from Greece to minor Asia", for which the narrator has a particular passion. Apostolakis is also the keeper of the Fanurpiton, or "Catalogue of Lost Things" – "like a steam-book book", in which the index of lost things is inscribed on "carefully illustrated" pages.Thereafter, there is a peripatetic journey across various scenic locations in Europe, under a paraboloic sky and silver seas, where our narrator encounters a diverse cast of mad thinkers, players, artists, and some extremely despicable "incoherent rich people", each in turn demonstrating our dearly human desire to define, categorize, and "box" reality even as it slips from our grasp. Along the way, we discuss the mythical King Minos and his labyrinth, Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot, the musician Steve Harley's tender lyricism, and the Nazi occupation of Crete. If this summary has made you feel a little overwhelmed, then this dense and abstract novel is not for you. Nevertheless, I – rather foolishly, rather earnestly – found much to like in this book.It helps that Kavenna's philosophical rigor is infused with a healthy sense of humor. Her characters are delightfully outrageous, and her jokes are consistently good as the circumstances in which our unfortunate narrator moves become increasingly absurd. (For this: "He comes to destroy art with a tie! It's too much!" Apostolakis cries as he attends an auction of paintings to foil the plan of some overprivileged upstart artist-icoclastic to paint a penis on a sketch of a horse by Goya. "It's reassuring when people maintain a high level of consistency over time," the narrator remarks at one point. "You don't want vampire or Dorian Gray levels," they acknowledge, "but other levels that are up to those levels are reassuring.")When the novel introduces the theories of the 20th-century Dutch cultural historian, Jan Huizinga, that our ability to play and our sense of "positive absurdity" demonstrate that human life inevitably transcends "the rational, logical order of things", this might be taken as an indication of Kavenna's artistic intent. Seven is not so much a novel about philosophy as a novel about the boundaries of philosophy – its structure is episodic, and throughout its length, there develops a recurring contrast between the discourse and our narrator that they are exposed to and the cosmic grandeur of the natural world they move through and experience. As a highly symbolic confrontation around an artificial platform unfolds in a professional game of Seven, the narrator wakes up on an idyllic island in the Turkish Marmara Sea, "with the scent of mimosa trees and the sound of waves, doves cooing on the veranda." "It was very quiet, as if the cybertrill wasn't real. If you close the laptop, it was incredible..." The knottiness of Seven, therefore, often feels like a red herring, or so much imposture.I'm sure there will be many readers who disagree with Kavenna's elliptical style and for whom the rewards of this quirky little book are not worth the weeds in the field. But for me, once I stopped trying to understand it all, Seven became a very enjoyable read: an invitation to enjoy pleasures without form in a world that "spins with itself", where galaxies spiral into themselves and everything – "games, boxes, words, symbols, stars even" – exists in a state of permanent flux.