Sugar House, which can be called “Memory is a Scoundrel”, is a digital mosaic. It’s as if literature were a great social network and the reader could click on the profile they wanted to investigate and one photo led to another and one post led them to a video and then back to the same profile. In literature, which is understood as a database that comes to life, where time is fluid, where space disappears, what it means to exist in a world that turns us into simulacra and where we desperately seek to be original is discussed.
Another dystopian novel to warn us of the inhumane dangers of the internet? If anything makes this unique, it’s the ease with which 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan (Chicago, 1962) avoids the clichés of technophobic literature even though the script she’s a part of is the final cry. Addictive platforms, Possession of the Unconscious, a collective memory where people upload their memories to consult the memories of its users, are typical of Black Mirror. If he invokes some of the characters in his unforgettable Time is a Scoundrel—without going further than the platform’s creator, Bix Bouton—it is to show that hypertext is his belief, and that there are elementary particles that occur outside the novel. which is as important as the novel itself; The universe he proposes defies the physical finitude of a book and aims to depict the global consciousness we call the internet.
It’s no surprise that Egan is interested in exploring what will happen to language in this digital age, especially given that the novel projects some of its plots into the future. There’s a chapter written as an email or instant message chain, another written as a series of consecutive tweets, another involving the emotional hermeneutics of statistical data, and another featuring an expert in translating language into algebraic expressions to feed the algorithm that seems to control our opinion. There is a section that includes. The world is as vertical as a mobile screen. If he emerges triumphant from all these experiments, it is because his techno-literary turns never tarnish the greatness of his writing, which is so consistently based on that originality, on preserving the essence of what it means to tell a story. to watch. .
Perhaps if Sugar House is read as a collection of stories, it will be less disappointing for those expecting a traditional novel. The decentering of the plot, the disdain of hierarchies and dramatic flow, are nothing more than narrative resources that will give voice to a global hero, the contemporary world. Beauty is listening to what happens to the atoms that make up that world; If they give me the choice, I will stay with the members of the Hollander family who make us human, from addiction to unnecessary shouting, from military discipline to conspiracy theories. Authentic. Because if there is one place that technology cannot reach, it is fiction that raises its hand.