What a wonderful book. (But you won't like it if you insist upon straightforwardness, character development, and storyline.) Bayer uses rather experimental methods--montage, including bits from other books; repetition, with the repeated passages sometimes negated and sometimes distorted; garbling of syntax; and apparently a mathematical constraint. And golly does he use them well. Snippets about Bering and his surroundings at home and at sea, discussion of cannibalism and preservation of corpses, wordplay connecting kings and games, notes on selection and initiation of shamans: these don't simply tie together, they allude to each other and best of all to things beyond them lurking unseen outside the book. And so at once the reader's given an intellectual connect-the-dots and a rather dream-like, seemingly limitless host of evocative allusions.

Yet the book isn't difficult. The prose, scenes, and references are readily intelligble; the two or three times syntax goes out the window the intent is clear, and only a word or two had me reaching for a dictionary. The real world isn't abandoned in the narration, either; we see scenes of Petersburg in its early years and ice forming in the Arctic.

I'd strongly advise anyone who gets the book to read it at one go after having read the afterword and to expect to spend far longer reading it than suggested by its 55 pages. Though I'm normally a fast reader, the latter wasn't difficult for me: it wasn't simply that I didn't want to miss any of the connections but that I wanted to absorb every last bit of the novel. It was a powerful work as well; for a while after finishing Vitus Bering I read only non-fiction because it had made the conventions of traditional fiction seem irksome and off-putting. ( )