Absence

Issa Quincy appears to have read a lot of W. G. Sebald. Across the six chapters of his debut novel, Absence, an unnamed narrator pores over fading photographs, letters, and tortured family histories; he walks in curiously depopulated landscapes and contends with the limits of language to express himself. This narrator, we quickly discover, is a wanderer of body and mind. He gets a job “solitarily sifting through crumbling collections of letters, articles, reports and photographs” at a museum. He investigates the painful histories of various acquaintances and frequently digresses to consider some “rather striking concrete arches” or a painting by Hendrick Avercamp. He examines the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the Tunisian War of Independence; he describes bad dreams, foggy moorlands, a falcon on the hunt, and other Sebaldian artifacts. Like the narrators of The Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, our narrator is inquisitive, educated, sensitive, and slightly aimless. Throughout Absence, he wrestles thoughtfully with memory, exile, and “irrevocable melancholy.”