The Impossibly [Hardcover]

Laird Hunt (Author), Percival Everett (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001

"The first time we met, it was about a stapler, I think."

Deadpan delivery and a sly eye for detail characterize the anonymous secret agent in Laird Hunt's tense, funny spy noir. When the nameless narrator botches an assignment for the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life—including his new girlfriend—is revealed to be either true-blue, double operative, or both.

With the literary coyness of Paul Auster and the dark absurdity of Kafka, Hunt's debut is a daring, memory-driven narrative that is as fittingly spare as a bare ceiling light—and just as pendulous. On the surface, the narrator is a simple man, fixing his washer and dryer, strolling through city parks, falling in love at an office supply store. But in The Impossibly, the mundane gives way to outrageous misconduct, and with each unexpected visitor or cryptic note, the tension reaches tantalizing heights. As the narrator frugally doles out clues about his dangerous work in an unnamed European city, the reader inevitably becomes confidante and fellow gumshoe. The narrator's final assignment—to identify his own assassin—dismantles the reader's own analysis of the evidence.

Marketing Plans:

•National author tour includes: East Coast, West Coast, Minneapolis/St. Paul

• Co-op available

Laird Hunt is an editor for the Department of Public Information at the United Nations, and is New York correspondent for London's Mouth-to-Mouth Magazine. He has lived in Singapore, London, Paris, The Hague, Tokyo, and throughout the United States. The Impossibly has been showcased on the Fence literary magazine website. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A spy wanders through a strange series of interludes, attacks and interrogations as he struggles to decipher the identity of his potential assassin in Hunt's murky, obscure debut novel. It opens promisingly enough, with an unnamed narrator in several vaguely threatening encounters (including a romance with an unnamed woman) while staying in an unnamed city. He is reunited with an old friend named John, who in yet another nod to anonymity, gets involved with a woman named Deau. The four take a brief trip to the country in a series of scenes that make vague references to the spy's assignment and his status with his organization, concluding with a brief fight with John over the delivery of a package. The narrative drifts further from coherence as the book progresses, with the spy encountering a series of beautiful but often malevolent women who involve him in interrogations and continual random attacks while updating him on the "progress" of his assignment. The resolution is equally hazy and hallucinatory, describing the death of the spy's boss in a scene that seems quite disconnected from most of the earlier ones. Hunt's initial concept has promise he captures the tone of Paul Auster's City of Glass in the first few chapters, and he brings a decidedly Kafkaesque feel to the spy's early adventures. At times, his style evokes Beckett and Stein. But the rambling prose and the absence of plot make this a difficult, frustrating read, with Hunt writing the same scene with slight variations but no added illumination, story or character development. The result is an incomprehensible book that buries the talent of an intelligent and potentially intriguing writer.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Hunt is an intellect and a great spinner of claustrophobic noir plots, and his erudite gumshoe yarn owes as much to George Perec and Gertrude Stein as it does to Paul Auster.” —The Believer

“Every once in a long while, you discover a novel unlike anything else you’ve ever read. Laird Hunt’s debut is one of them. Innovative, comic, bizarre and beautiful.” —Time Out New York

“A fractured espionage story, John le Carré à la Borges.” —The Stranger

“For 200 pages, Hunt sustains an atmosphere of severe disorientation, packing his story with more curious and vaguely menacing strangers than a David Lynch movie. . . . The book’s many layers and difficult questions make it an ideal candidate for an adventurous book club.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The Impossibly is one of the most exciting debut novels I have ever read. . . . While most Kafka comparisons are specious and overstated, Hunt’s subtle humor, sophisticated intelligence and the graceful timbre of his prose place this novel firmly in the tradition of The Castle, as well as Nabokov’s The Eye and Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. This is high praise indeed, but The Impossibly is a marvelous, wonderful novel.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

"[Laird Hunt] captures the tone of Paul Auster’s City of Glass in the first few chapters, and he brings a decidedly Kafkaesque feel to the spy’s early adventures.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hunt debuts with a stylish, if opaque, noir tale about a hit man who falls in love, takes a break, and incurs the wrath of his organization. . . . The mystery runs at all levels here, and the style and situation have appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The Impossibly, Laird Hunt’s first novel, is a challenging and inventive work, alternately chilling and humorous, that breaks new ground in the world of speculative fiction. Diffuse with noir tropes stripped of their origins, it leaves the reader with a map of the complicit mind trying to deal with perversity and adversity in a violent world.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books

“From the title to the last, dreamlike passage, Hunt’s novel is a deliberate, sometimes striking conundrum, one with its origins deep in the heart of traditional genres (in particular, hardboiled detective fiction and international spy thrillers), but with ambitions that extend into knotty problems of narrative, language, and meaning.” —American Book Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 215 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; 1 edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566891175
• ISBN-13: 978-1566891172
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,157,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wit and heart, April 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Impossibly (Hardcover)

Hunt's narrator is a confused overweight dude who works for a criminal organization. He's always being given mysterious tasks by mysterious, violent people in mirrored sunglasses (the mirrors are a tip-off that these folks might at times be products of the narrator's mind -- perhaps, even, at some points, his mind after he's dead). Hunt's prose is smooth, witty, deadpan, but it's ruptured frequently by sudden flashbacks that are left purposefully unsignposted, so the texture of the writing remains even and glassy whle the timeframe it's describing wanders around wildly. I occasionally had to look back a few pages to remind myself where and how a particular tangent had begun, and I like having to do this when I read: it means I'm having to pay attention. Hunt may be using this device to describe the way we experience the world: our experience seems continuous, but it's made up of jarring swerves into memory and dream and, ultimately, death.

There's a love story amidst all this that I found quite moving. (In fact, I found the narrator's predicament moving throughout, despite its goofiness). The narrator's girlfriend is always wanting to acquire objects for which she does not know names. He provides the names, when he can: the objects she wants are usually oddly familiar things, like staplers. He finds all this charming, which makes sense, because he's trying to make sense out of the way his own perceptual reality is constructed. The girlfriend acquires what she learns names for, which is, again, a metaphor for the way we experience the world: we have access to that which we can name. In that way, in a familiar poststucturalist sense, our worlds are constructed out of language, and what we can "acquire" is limited by what we can talk about. Such a worldview does incite a kind of paranoia, though: what are we not seeing, what are we not getting at, if we can't describe it well enough to get hold of it and put it on a little shelf in our minds? And who controls what we see and know if we can get at reality only through language? In Hunt's novel, what the narrator sees and knows seems to be controlled by the criminal organization he works for, but there's a sense that escape is available and should be attempted even at great cost (Hunt's narrator, who does attempt to escape from the social controls he usually operates inside, is seriously punished for his temporary exit).

Hunt has found a new way to represent a strange aspect of human experience: that we don't know and can't know how much of what we perceive is reality, conspiracy, our invention, etc. -- it's an old phenomenological problem, even a Romantic problem (Shelley's " human mind...[that] passively renders and receives," and Wordsworth's concern with the world as "what we half create, and what perceive.") Hunt's book brings up all sorts of philosophical issues I haven't touched on and probably lots I know nothing about; it's also zany fun. I haven't read a new American novel I've liked as much in ages.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars demanding yet entertaining, December 3, 2003

By 

Unutterable (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Impossibly (Hardcover)

I picked up The Impossibly after a review in Time Out New York called it a combination of Robbe-Grillet and Beckett, two of my favorite authors. I can see where the comparison came from, but I don't think it's very accurate. If anything, the novel reads like Kafka as if written by Donald Barthelme - obscure and frustrating, yet written in a breezy ironic style. The review from Publishers Weekly complains that "the absence of plot make[s] this a difficult, frustrating read," but the same criticism could also be lobbed at any of the other authors above, and it misses the point - The Impossibly is not supposed to be a Bildungsroman, its difficulties are intentional. And it's worth the effort - the book is intelligent, funny, and beautifully written.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Impossibly Grand, November 25, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Impossibly (Hardcover)

The Impossibly is the best book that I have read this year: in fact, it is the best book that I've read since enjoying Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Melville, David Markson, Proust, Kafka, or Paul Auster.

What is wonderful about The Impossibly is that there are no other books like it: a rare claim in a world of increasingly formulaic and patronising novels. It is a book which is both extremely erudite and extremely simple: the mysterious plot, the author's witty asides, existential bewilderment, intellectual playfulness, and obvious mastery of the art of writing combine to make a work which is a joy from start to finish.

The Impossibly achieves the impossible: a completely thrilling fusion of accessible popular fiction and challenging, stimulating art.