The Book

<p>The Book is not quite a novel although almost half of it takes the form of a narrative neither is it an essay although quite a lot of what is said in it adopts that style. It is actually closest to that rare type or "para-genre" of satirical prose embodied in the exemplary <em>In Praise of Folly</em> by the famous humanist from Rotterdam. Instead of the "Folly" of human manias and absurdities here in a similar kind of double-talk the books themselves “speak” those monuments to our intelligence ambitions and self-importance and they primarily "speak" by making an analogy between man's fate and that of books—to man's detriment of course.</p>