Deborah Eisenberg recommends Cards of Identity

This year's recipiant of the MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, Deborah Eisenberg  recommends Cards of Identitiy as an overlooked and underappreciated novel.

Cards of Identity
Nigel Dennis
1955

Here's a remarkable novel you might not have come across, possibly because it's so peculiar as to elude categorization. It neither instructs nor consoles nor deeply moves, but the sheer profusion of its surprises and its glittering sentences, along with the tenor of its loopy inquiries into profound matters of "the self," are inebriating, and can send you soaring over all kinds of narrative and intellectual confines. 

I was fortunate enough to have been given the book as a gift and to have known nothing at all about it when I opened it. That might be the best way to encounter it, so I'll provide only one more little clue about the content: the author was apparently a friend of the Viennese psychologist and theorist Alfred Adler, and he translated a certain amount of Adler's work.

It's a very, very funny book, but so witty, too, that instead of laughing, one might find oneself just gaping and pointing at the pages. It's not for everybody-or, goodness knows, for every mood-but perhaps you will join those of us who discovered that we were waiting forlornly to come upon it.

Deborah Eisenberg
Author