When I Think of My Missing Head

This posthumous final work by Couve (1940–1998), a Chilean author and painter, is both perfectly readable and totally incomprehensible. Its subtitle is “The Second Comedy,” and it follows La comedia del arte (1995), which shares with this book the principal character of the painter Camondo. Camondo has lost his head—his literal, physical head, which has been turned into wax by the Olympian deities and removed from his shoulders by an angry former model. Few other facts can be ascertained from the narrative, which, while consistently using plain, simple language, jumps from time to time, place to place, and person to person with no obvious pattern. Several conflicting accounts are given of whether and how Camondo gets back his head, and no attempt is ever made to explain how he can live, see, and communicate without its presence. This isn’t magical realism, but an insistent anti-narrative: it takes effort and skill to maintain this sort of clarity at the sentence level without producing some kind of comprehensible overall schema. As a fiercely experimental piece of literature, this will interest fans of Kathy Acker or William S. Burroughs, but conventional enjoyment is almost entirely absent. (Sept.)