The Autodidacts by Thomas Kendall (Whiskey Tit, 2022)

Review by S. D. Stewart

This ouroboros of a novel smolders in eternal anguish below the otherworldly glow of the aurora borealis. Its collection of doomed archetypes navigate their entwined lives in perpetual confrontation of the burgeoning awareness of the futility of future planning. They experience the excruciating digestion of the inevitability of the never-happening happening again—the never-escaping of one’s recycled fate. Futility is inhaled into reused lungs, pills are popped with nihilistic impunity. How to live with the constant slow-motion collision of identities in one’s consciousness. The sadness inherent in the pointlessness of employing deliberation. And isn’t this what all fiction represents if one were to examine it closely. Intended originality deployed as slightly askew replica, always righting itself by the end. A flashbulb moment shattered with the first few keyboard strokes into a familiar spent cube, jagged cracks opening with infinite speed across its weakened surface. We all write the same stories. We all live the same lives. But it is all ineffable.

He read the notebook nearly every day. It was a mystery. Whoever wrote it wanted to convey a feeling so exactly that all they could do was torturously describe what was recognisably indescribable, fluid, alterable from moment to moment, yet distinct from any moment in particular but still ultimately contingent and appealing to the very chance its existence was dependent upon and therefore what rendered it indescribable. […]

He imagined the writing as a huge lattice, a net…the sentences and paragraphs as wiring or string and in this system, this trap that hung loose in the world he thought, the indescribable buzzed about, testing the limitations inscribed around it until finally, exhausted or suffocated, it died weighting a few sentences here and there with the temporary outline of its meaning. The meaning was always the same and stood for something eternal that wasn’t. Something that stood.