In 2013 I read some pretty weird books… but this slender, sinister work from the late Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser is so out-there that it makes even Tan Lin’s mashup seem like chick lit. Flusser’s book is so deeply bizarre that saying it “resists categorization” or “defies summary” qualifies as a ridiculous understatement; but here goes. Flusser takes the discovery of vampyroteuthis infernalis, a rare form of deep-sea squid, as the jumping-off place for an extended quasi-scientific dialectic where “every attempt to transform Vampyroteuthis into a human complement is a betrayal… a dangerous romanticism,” and where, therefore, “the Vampyroteuthis is our Hell.” Mixing the language of biology, philosophy, and poetry, Flusser invests the deep-sea creature with a kind of dark Miltonic majesty, endowing it with mystical sexual powers, making it into a symbol of everything alien and terrifying and other. “The Devil in the depths is our brother,” Flusser exclaims, in one of the letters appended to the text; “our logic is his deep psychology, our sex his geometry.” The whole thing is so improbable that – more than once – it sent me scurrying to the computer to verify that it wasn’t all some elaborate literary hoax. Oddly – or perhaps not so oddly, who knows – the book reminded me more than anything else of the fanciful pseudoscientific footnotes of “De Selby” in Flann O'Brien’s The Third Policeman, featuring the same kind of high seriousness melded to loopy metaphysical flights of mind. The result is a dense, knotty, and fanciful: postmodernism at its most adventurous and enthralling. The translation is by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes.

