Most 'experimental' literature fails, just as most scientific experiments fail to produce important data, and most experiments in the kitchen or even bedroom fail to spice up one's life. This doesn't keep anyone from trying again and again, just in case this time is the time.

Well, Europeana is the time. Ourednik avoids every possible literary characteristic--no characters, no plot, no personal investment, no meditating, an absolutely minimal narrator--while somehow providing, nonetheless, all the literary pleasures. The book is a very vaguely chronological history of Europe (with the odd side-trip to the U.S. or rest of the world), mainly between the first world war and the end of the twentieth century. It's told as you might tell history to a child: "After the First World War, Communism and Fascism spread though Europe because lots of people believed that the old world was rotten and it was necessary to seek new paths, and that democratic rule was not capable of preventing a world war and that capitalism has proved the economic crisis." I don't remember a single critical comment (there's no, e.g., 'communists said x, but really did y') and very few negatives. Sentences get longish, but never complicated.

Well, obviously it's grim reading at times, but you're never invited to wallow in the inhumanity-of-man-to-(wo)man silliness that much 'deep' contemporary literature prefers. The narrative voice is simply too neutral to create an overwhelming emotional response in that way.

Instead, Ourednik makes the reader uncomfortable in their complicity, as on page 97: "And the Jehovah's Witnesses said that smoking and alcohol soil the blood and they refused to eat black pudding and blood sausage and refused blood transfusions because the mixing of blood contradicted divine ordinances, just like the consumption of blood sausage or alcohol or extramarital sex." Presumably you, like I did, are laughing at the foolishness of the blood sausage bit, at the very least, and most likely at all of these hopelessly illiberal, out of date ideas. Ourednik goes on, "And they refused to enlist in the army and said that they belonged to the Kingdom of God and worldly matters were no concern of theirs," which you might think sounds vaguely sensible given the century we're dealing with, but also hopelessly naive and dangerously quietist. Then Ourednik throws in the kicker, as his sentence concludes, "and many of them died in the concentration camps in Germany and the Soviet Union because their attitude subverted the revolutionary ideal and propagated asocial and counterrevolutionary ideas in society."

Yes. Exactly how much better are we than than the Nazis and Stalinists?

There is a problem with the neutrality of the book's narrative: I'm not sure how much it could change anyone's ideas. I found many of my own concerns in the book, but then, almost anyone can find her concerns in a book this neutral and this distanced from judgment. But that's a minor complaint, and only those who refuse to think at all will find their entire world-view bolstered. There's also a danger in how much knowledge the book requires: if you don't know a bit of the history, you won't get too much out of it. And if you don't know much about the intellectual history, you'll miss the glorious destruction of the century's more obnoxious social sciences (particularly psychology) and philosophies.

On the other hand, nobody can read everything, and this is a much better way to spend an afternoon than trying to read Talcott Parsons or Martin Heidegger. ( )