From Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels:
Across a half-kilometer of sand you enter a neighborhood where, for two dollars a year, the nouveaux-riches employ a woman to sweep out their rooms and wash their shirts. This woman, Rachel Carissimi, has killed several capitalists, but she didn’t eat them. Not far away begins an avenue full of potholes, lined with a string of vacant apartment buildings. In the third building on the odd-numbered side, there nevertheless resides a man who has memorized every one of Varvalia Lodenko’s speeches, and can recite them on demand. At the northern end of the avenue, you stand near another cluster of abandoned districts. When I say you, I’m thinking mainly of the Untermenschen, for instance Oulan Raff, which is to say me. Over thousands of hectares a blue-tinged blackish color predominates, and slag, and wind, and, just after that, to the southwest, an expanse of tundra opens up before you. If you follow an east-southeasterly course for some three thousand seven hundred kilometers, you will end up at the place known as Spotted Wheat, where a handful of veterinarians once corralled some old women who never died, who never changed, and who couldn’t be eaten. The nursing home was far from everything, even the camps. They say these immortals committed a grave error that they never stopped trying to repair. The story goes that they brought a man of rags up out of nothingness, and that he reestablished the circulation of dollars and mafias on the earth. If, instead of choosing that distant destination, you decide to come back toward the [bridge], you will first enter a courtyard where a windmill wheel squeaks mournfully day and night, connected to nothing. This is where Oulan Raff lives.
This novel, composed of "narracts" (Volodine's word, though also it is the novel's word), is not always narrated by Oulan Raff; he appears only here, in this one narract. Not all the narrators are so anti-capitalist as this one, though many of them grieve, in an ironic mode, for the failure of communism ("all those who built that ideal brick by brick in spite of the wars and the massacres and the privations and in spite of the camps and the guards in the camps, and went on building it heroically until it wouldn't stand anymore, and even until it would never stand again.")
How much is dropped, cast aside, in the narracts! Torrents of incident (narract/cataract); vast geographies of waste; grief at the demise of world revolution; and one narrator after another after another. (Waste: a chief narrator is named Scheidmann, calling to my mind Ausscheidung, elimination; Scheidmann is plagued by sloughing, scaling skin.) An extravagance, but not a showily cool, affectless extravagance. Waste on a prodigious scale, but in a somber key. Loss, perhaps, rather than waste.
