A Nanosecond Before Entropy
Review of >> Left hand by Paul Curran
Daniel Gianfranceschi
1/10/2025
Left Hand, Paul Curran, Schism 2, 2020.
While Samuel Beckett was continuously preoccupied with the extremes of language and it’s entropic swallowing of itself, he was also acutely aware that his every attempt at such frivolous activities was, indeed, a failure. Writing is, essentially, an additive process, meaning that even if your goal is to negate language, one must do so by writing, which means by producing text. A similar preoccupation with the extremes of language can be found in Paul Curran’s “Left Hand”, which presents itself more so as an experiment in writing as a process rather than traditional storytelling. The book is divided into 4 sections, two consisting of various aphorisms merging to form some kind of cacophony of a choreography and two short stories that are laid out as to mimic a multiple-choice questionnaire. For those that were hoping to dive into some “House Of Leaves” type of horror, you might be disappointed. Those that might be around enough to still come along for the ride will encounter one of the most thrilling excurses in writing of the twenty-first century.
Now, it is effectively impossible to either talk or write about this novel without mentioning how depraved most of its content is, but it could be arguable that its most visceral power lays not in the horrors portrayed but more so in how, even after having finished it, elusive all of it feels. In fact, even with someone like Beckett, constantly trying to “say less”, the reader is still, largely, able to manifest a certain/ general image of what it might be he’s talking about. With Curran, every sentence seems to be made from some amorphous liquid, slowly dripping out of each page and into the ether. Every time the “motel room inside a motel room” is mentioned, I virtually have no idea what that particular sentence might truly mean, but I am petrified to my core because of how eerie it feels. Indeed, Curran, like Beckett, is acutely aware of what he is trying to do, so much so that he will spell it out at various points in the book. He knows he is going for something completely off-the-wall, bat-shit crazy, yet he never falls into the trap of it being experimental for its own sake. Every word is meticulously crafted into a puzzle, a Borges-eske labyrinth of perversion and a reduction of the written word into a suggestion of itself. Any preconception of a linear storyline is quickly defenestrated, but its mission is certainly not to alienate the reader by causing a complete disorientation. In a way, Curran manages to craft a post-binary plot; a plot that is neither linear nor completely atonal. It challenges the boundaries and blurrings of the two, somehow becoming a third “other”; a story with no beginnings and even less endings; a writing without organs that, by some oxymoronic spectacle, captures every organ there is.
In fact, what Curran is doing here is not dissimilar to what Saussure was talking about regarding his ingenious “sound-pictures”, as in images that suggest a particular impression of sound. “Left Hand” does the inverse: it starts out from a sound—the sound of the written word, even if it might only be read by the demiurge’s voice up in our crevices and not out loud—and gives the impression of an image, albeit a very vague one. It is precisely that vagueness that embeds the writing with a perpetual feeling of dread and vertigo, leaving the reader in a haze of sentences and images that feel neither completely true nor completely made up. They exist in-between; in the inertia of language, they find their strength. Precisely because of this, the writing works best when the reader relinquishes all their control to it, almost as if one was caught in a meditational mantra, albeit one made from body-horror and continuous sex-changes; a ritualistic agglomeration of transgressions that feels equally vivid as intangible, without ever drifting into a tacky kind of surrealism that, often, bears very little fruits.
“Left Hand” feels poignantly real, so real that you start to think that maybe the narrator should be stopped from writing this novel, that the various strikes at blurring autofiction with what feels like automated writing are cries for help from within the writer, in order for this novel to never see the light of day. By some cataclysmic event, it survives and nests into the readers brain like modern novels rarely do. In fact, to call this only a “novel” is a disgrace to the medium itself; instead, it is a burial of the inherent meaning of language and a simultaneous resurrection of the word “picturesque”. This is not a book that, by the end, “resolves” anything it is presenting. It will leave you with more questions than answers, but perhaps that is exactly where it shines the most. Similarly to the very best of Tarkovsky’s attempts at visual transcendence, it is to be felt, to be experienced in a way that writing is only seldomly, if ever. Its content is equally relentless as it restless, spewing at its own seems in order to thrive in its own implosion. “Left Hand” is the nanosecond before entropy, a shadow before the inevitable eclipse.
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Daniel Gianfranceschi is a multidisciplinary artist working within the realms of painting, writing and sound. He lives and works between Munich and Bardolino. www.daniel-gianfranceschi.tumblr.com
[image: Corporeal Landscape, Daniel Gianfranceschi]

