Gog

<p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>This almost unclassifiable work of experimental fiction first published in 1931 tells of the worldwide wanderings of a rich and idle American Goggins (nicknamed Gog) who expends his fortune in an insatiable quest for...is it knowledge or novelties? Years later Gog-impoverished and confined to an insane asylum-one day entrusts a large sheef of notes to a frequent visitor whose company he had come to enjoy. These it turns out are the record of his travels and interviews. In about ninety entries we encounter a variety of geniuses with whom Gog gained audience including Freud Edison Einstein Henry Ford H. G. Wells George Bernard Shaw and Lenin as well as obscure idealists who eagerly display their several manias: modernist sculpture </span><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>avant-garde</em><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> poetry futuristic architecture academic sub-subdisciplines niche curio collections. Papini's anarchic humor brings into sharp relief the strangeness of human beings and the wilfully exacerbated strangeness of modernity.</span></p>