Writing in the Age of Big Data

It is tempting for Anglophone readers to think of Kluge’s information epic as a species of that creative nonfiction genre that is sometimes classified as unclassifiable, experimental or hybrid, but Kluge does not do so. In Russia Container, first published in German in 2020 and now available in English translation by Alexander Booth, he writes: “As to the question of why I don’t write novels, I reply: what I write are novels. Novels are, in principle, collections. Classical novels belong to a layer of the public realm, which turns them into ‘material’ for the present.”