Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

Day for Night

Frederick Reiken

Reiken explores the concept of 6 degrees of separation in this poignant and powerful portmanteau of interconnecting tales told in a first person narrative. The reader is manipulated like a puppet as they leapfrog from one troubling personal story to the next. At its heart is the traumatic legacy of the holocaust, the fragmented nature of the creative process and the shadow self that lies within all of us.

Extract
I recognise that we are all magicians in some way. We are complicit in all that we see and comprehend that what we see will never coincide with absolute reality.
As a result the human brain must make a narrative. This I can say with certainty, and yet each narrative we choose will reach a point at which it no longer suffices. One narrative must inevitably be abandoned for another. In this way, any narrative sequence defers meaning, even beyond the point at which it appears to end. Borges is at home in a universe of philosophy, speculation, and Big Ideas, and the sheer density of his thought cannot be measured by the length of his stories. Borges says more in five pages than most writers could put forth in a trilogy, dazzling the imagination with explorations of time, space, language, identity; and even the very nature of reading and writing itself.
Parallels
  • Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
  • Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
  • Libra by Don De Lillo