Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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This is a crime/science fiction novel by one of the principal authors of Disco Elysium and set in the same world as the game. Disco Elysium is a detective story of sorts and it might just be my favorite ever game. If nothing else, it easily has the best writing I've ever seen in a video game. So I was very excited to hear about this book.

There was just one little problem: it was written in Estonian and never officially translated into English. Thankfully, in the intervening years there have been a few fan translations, so I picked up the "Group Ibex" fan version and read it. Overall the translation is solid, but I can't help but feel that a professional translation would have better captured the idiosyncratic prose style.

Setting aside the translation, the book itself was interesting, weird, and deeply depressing. The overall plot follows a group of men whose high school sweethearts mysteriously disappeared twenty years before, as they search for them and follow leads. Setting aside the setting in a strange alter-earth with different geographies and polities, the front half of the book could be a conventional, if a little peculiar, crime novel. But as the book goes on the pale¹ begins to take on a larger and larger role.

As a result the back half of the book is deeply weird and is a Borgesian meditation on the persistence of memory (or the lack thereof) that is both poignant and very bleak. Without spoiling too much, both the world and the protagonists come unravelled and the overall effect is haunting.

It's not the most elegant or literary novel I've read (or even that I've read this year), but if you played and enjoyed the game it's absolutely worth your time and I recommend it. If you haven't played the game, I might downgrade the rating to three stars, and suggest you play the game first. Even if you're not normally a video game enjoyer, most of the game is just reading anyway.