I inadvertently did myself a good turn by reading Volodine's Writers directly after reading Ben Lerner's 10:04. Ostensibly their subject is the same: writers and writing, so they can both be classed in a postmodern literary metafiction subgenre together, but they treat the matter so differently that it seems unfair to class them under the same umbrella. Besides the fact that both authors blend fact and fiction in their work, they have little else in common. Ben Lerner blends fact and fiction by drawing on his own life, making himself the point of interest, but Volodine eschews such personal attention. Volodine is not even the author's name, it is one of several pseudonyms employed. Volodine himself is a fiction, and he has created a "fictional-yet-real" literary movement called "post-exoticism" that he expands on throughout his stories.

Volodine is imminently more serious, both insofar as his worlds are darker and grittier (none of the writers who serve as main characters of the 7 stories are successful), but also insofar as he exercises his imagination and extends BEYOND himself as a writer. Ben Lerner is a showman, a poet turned novelist, flexing his muscles in front of the mirror that is the critic's circle. Volodine is a workhorse and he writes because he must GET IT OUT.

The writers of Volodine's slim book of short stories also must “get it out.” They are imprisoned, mad, exiled, unknown, unsung, ordinary, unintelligent, uneducated. They have been political assassins, factory workers. They sometimes write on scraps of paper, but they just as often ‘write’ aloud in their jail cells, or standing before the abyss. Every one of Volodine's characters is always speaking out over an unhearing void--they speak to no one and anyone and to themselves. They speak to you, if you are reading it I suppose, but they are unaware of your audience. This reader almost feels guilty witnessing them in their barest moments, but there is a sort of bravery in them that offers the slightest bit of consolation.

While Lerner is an aesthete in the Romantic style, circling in on himself, Volodine has an Aesthetic Theory that is grounded in suffering, and the raw emotion that compels us to speak out in the face of it. Unlike Lerner’s narrator, Volodine’s writers are not privileged, they are totalizingly disenfranchised. And yet still they create.

All of the stories are good, but they build strength as the little book progresses. I found "Acknowledgments" to be a needed delight after the dismal first stories in a madhouse/jail. Volodine has a seemingly endless supply of improbable unique character names, which he gets to make ample use of in this writer's overindulgent and increasingly absurdist "Acknowledgments." Readers interested in Volodine’s concept of “post-exotic literature" will find “The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev” and “The Theory of the Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen” of particular interest. The latter I found thoroughly haunting. The volume closes with a story about a man who discovers that the tale of his birth was a lie, and then becomes compelled to write it ‘correctly.’ All told, a lot of literary power is packed into a mere 108 pages. Volodine is officially on my radar. Long live post-exoticism! ( )

This book is in seven parts, each dealing in some way with a writer. These writers are utter failures--commercially, critically, and in terms of eventually acquiring even a minuscule sympathetic readership. This failure is treated bluntly and often humorously. However, the writings here revel in the power of words that reach no one, words for potential or future audiences, words merely written but discarded, words merely spoken but never written, words borne of "deaf voices," words with no owners. And the writers are as derelict as their words: former, future, or potential assassins, revolutionaries, and suicides, riddled with diseases, writing in spite of or because of their dysfunctions. It's clear that Volodine's vision and aesthetic are firmly in place, and I'm eager to read more of his writing, mainly to see other facets to his "post-exotic" approach, for it is clear that another audience for the writers in these stories is one another--other writers in the post-exotic universe, who appear to be for the most part imprisoned or otherwise institutionalized, and who pass their stories to one another. While Volodine's post-cataclysmic universe and its writers kept me busy enough, still other writers kept coming to mind. The dark, bitter and fatalistic resistance to totalitarianism of Danilo Kiš wasn't far from my thoughts. Nor was Cesár Aira, who also frequently includes veiled--and refreshingly non- or anti-academic--treatises on language and writing couched in his fictions. Also, in discussing failed writers, or writers who stopped writing, or writers who never even started writing, I was reminded of Enrique Vila-Matas' "Bartleby & Co.," except I found this work to be more compelling, more darkly enjoyable, and above all more evocative and imaginative in its hints and allusions to the various reasons why writing is, all at the same time, impossible, necessary, worthless, and transcendent. ( )