I'm here to tell you that the reason why it's hard to encapsulate The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec, translated by Heather Cleary, is because it has no plot ... I'll clarify that stuff happens in this book. But there's still not much of a plot. Instead, we get a web of ruminations on everything from the construction of a city to the writing of novels ... There are essentially only three characters ... Hardly a line of dialogue is spoken. These characters barely every cross paths. And yet, even though we might say there is no plot, something obviously happens on the page. A sort of dream-like state is woven ... I wouldn't say The Incompletes is Weird fiction, but I would say it shares that sense that what we are experiencing is akin to a dream. And aren't dreams sometimes illogical and silly? Haven't you ever woken up and wondered why you just spend the night dreaming about buying 25 cans of soup at the supermarket? That is the kind of feeling you get with The Incompletes... Just like you must accept dream logic when you're sleeping, you must accept The Incompletes for what it is, to allow the endless descriptions of rooms, city streets, broken televisions, the cold, peeling walls and dirty window panes, to take hold of you. In the end you'll stumble out of the book, a bit dazed, wondering what the hell you just read, but it's an enjoyable trek if you like beautiful sentences...
The most literary of [Chejfec's] novels ... Chejfec seems to be feeling his way, as intrigued by where these characters are going as his readers ... It is the enigmatic narrator, not without his charms, who ultimately connects the disparate elements and holds together the neural pathways of this cerebral novel ... Heather Cleary negotiates these switch-backs deftly, her familiarity with the author a real asset. Chejfec has professed a desire to write in 'simple language,' but in practice he is a stylist who loves a labyrinthine sentence. Cleary helps readers to navigate the maze. When he makes his appearances, we immediately understand that the narrator is no longer transmitting the thought patterns of Felix or Masha, but his own. And this is as much a book about being the person who stayed behind on the docks as it is about the one who left.
... ably translated into English by Heather Cleary, is both [Chejfec's] strangest and most directly political novel to make it into English so far ... Not all will find it compelling. For this reason, The Incompletes is probably not the place to begin with Chejfec. Yet the book is another reminder of how deeply Chejfec is thinking about the form of the novel, pushing its boundaries to let modern varieties of social malaise leak in, and thereby renewing the novel’s ability to reflect—and affect—our lives.
