Apostrophe/Parenthesis Paperback - 2011

Fiction. The grandson of the Man Without Qualities living in New York City.

"In an attempt to comprehensively capture twenty years of his life, Federigo employs text from his plays, inner speech, day and dream notebooks, dialogues with an imaginary rat named Behemoth, and the philosophy of musical interludes. His goal: to figure out how it all comes together. Utopia, for Federigo, consists of getting down to the essence, bits that can be broken down and reconstructed without loss. Despite the fact that Federigo, a self- described New York City rootless cosmopolitan dreck, tries to bridge the space between thought, feeling, and speech, he recognizes that he is doomed to fail, and repeatedly laments his inability to translate thought or emotion into speech and action. We are prisoners of our own thoughts, he says, and can't break out of the cage that encompasses our words and all that is important now doesn't get spoken aloud or even in inner dialogue. Even if he could speak the right words, translation proves impossible. I stayed up all night writing down all that I felt but words couldn't express the feelings out there on the abyss and not being afraid. In the abyss, in the empty space between parentheses, lurks the indescribable..."--Robert Glick