Apostrophe/Parenthesis

Apostrophe/Parenthesis opens Frederick Mark Kramer's New York cycle. The book introduces Federigo, an imagined grandson of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, who spends some twenty years trying to synthesize plays, inner speech, dream notebooks, dialogues with an imaginary rat, and a philosophy of musical interludes into a usable account of his own life. The recursive, monologue-driven method here is the one the whole cycle runs on: dense interior voice, music-derived form, a present-tense Manhattan that the four later novels in the series will return to from different angles.