The Wake and the Manuscript

2022 Anti-Oedipus Press.

‘Ratchet down all dreams of enlightenment, The Wake is coming for the last of them.’

Available via Blackwells, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and a range of other retailers. Also on Kindle.

OVERVIEW

In this brooding and obsessive novel, Ansgar Allen recounts the story of a nameless man who attends a funerary wake with no other distraction than papers that once belonged to the body on display. The deceased considered the papers to be his magnum opus, a text that unraveled everything he had been educated to accept, beginning with the spectre of religion—namely The Church of Christ, Scientist—and ending with the very fabric of educated, civilized thought.

Allen’s protagonist thinks he’s above the conclusions drawn in the titular manuscript, but the blurred lines between what he reads and what he sees in himself incite an apocalypse of introspection. The result is a dark, labyrinthine attempt to diminish (and eventually annihilate) the memory of the man who came to rest on the table before him.

Literary and existential, The Wake and the Manuscript explores the vagaries of death, identity, desire, and indoctrination as it (un)buries a history of delusion that speaks volumes about the human condition.

REVIEWS

Adnan Bayyat, Heavy Feather Review, 24 March 2023; Eugen Bacon, Aurelius #158, 2023; Phil Wood, aprocessview.com, 25 Jan 2023.

“a literary artifact pronouncing and protesting the inherent toxicity of education from cradle to grave.” – Adnan Bayyat, Heavy Feather Review

“The Wake and the Manuscript is an involving book, a textual persistence relentless in its chapter-less, paragraph-free form, start to finish. The story is a captivating oddity, a monolithic confession or lamentation, an existential interrogation inhabited with flashbacks, foibles, sickness, death, hallucination, mental aberration, religion and belief […] exquisitely weird.” —Eugen Bacon, AUREALIS MAGAZINE

COVER

What at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality”. — Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §58