Attila

Coll (1948–1990) offers a literary riddle for the ages in this gorgeous 1991 novel, his English-language debut. Fragments of plot arise and dissipate over the course of the mysterious narrative, set mainly in the fifth century, as Coll tracks a love affair between Quixote Historia, son of Attila Historia, leader of the Huns, and Ipsibidimidiata, daughter of Rome’s ruler, who is also named Rome. Attila invites his son back to the mythical Hun capital of Etzelburg to divide the empire’s hostages. Instead, Quixote and Ipsibidimidiata go to Rome, where Quixote takes an administrative role in the imperial government. After receiving a vision urging him to travel to his father in the heart of the Asian steppe, Quixote takes Ipsibidimidiata on an epic journey across Eurasia. All the while, a spectral cast of characters drawn from religion and myth—King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, Specter of Absalom, Antigone, and Laocoön, among others—appears intermittently, offering gnomic pronouncements (“‘The lovers’ garden... bulges lethally”). More than its sequence of events, the novel is propelled by its unique prose, thrillingly translated by Whittemore: “Disturbing and anemophilous plasticity, how could one not understand this town’s mystic suicides, pierce yourself and reside in the rhythms.” This dazzles. (Apr.)