Analog Days

Searls, translator of Jon Fosse and author of The Philosophy of Translation, offers in these clear-eyed ruminations a Gen Xer’s impressions of the technology and violence that shape 21st-century life. Constructed for the most part as diary entries written in 2016 by an unnamed freelance coder in New York City, the book strings together everyday observations followed by grand pronouncements. For example, snippets of conversations overheard in a café about writers’ crass self-promotion and other regrettable topics lead the narrator to muse, “Someday they will say of us that we were living in a strange time, the kind that usually follows revolutions or the decline of great empires.” Elsewhere, the narrator dives into aesthetic subjects, like the 1995 film Dead Man, which he finds refreshingly elliptical compared to contemporary entertainment. Searls appears to gently poke fun at his narrator for taking up the antiquated practice of writing in a diary, as with an anecdote about a quixotic friend who’s “trying to get off the web” by marketing his blog in printed form and calling it a “plog.” Overall, though, a sense of dread pervades, as the narrator reports on atrocities such as a coordinated bomb attack in Baghdad or the killing of Alton Sterling by police in Baton Rouge. It’s a stimulating attempt at making sense of a gloomy world. (Oct.)