Analog Days, the plotless first novella by Damion Searls (translator of Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse), is a challenging read, a dismal catalogue of inescapable crises. Brisk prose encapsulates a generation's irrefutable struggle with an oblique and unforgivingly dark destiny.
Shaped by brief diary entries, spanning from June 22 to July 20, 2026, by an unnamed narrator, the novella's digressive reflections of disturbing diurnal slices of life are grounded in the political history and social climate of 12 Gen X friends in New York City. The friends mourn for the time before the web and YouTube, replaced by living in an "age in which despair and material comfort, technological wizardry and political malaise... were mixed together... [with] weariness of the present, and pessimism for the future." Quotidian demands overwhelm them. Arizona wildfires, Baghdad bombings, Louisiana and Minnesota police brutality, the murder of a member of the U.K. Parliament dominate global tragedies. The group anxiously anticipates frightening consequences of fall's presidential election if the candidate with the "gravitational narcissistic pull" wins. Searls softens the onslaught of gloom with a few uplifting moments of digression: a child on the subway sneaking a snapshot of the narrator's feet, the pleasure of "summer bees."
A compelling core of the novella is Searls's creative analysis of Jim Jarmusch's eerie 1995 black-and-white cinematic allegory, Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp as William Blake, a Cleveland accountant journeying to the frontier West, where he encounters a Native American. Blake's Stygian odyssey seems to parallel the narrator's life. Despite its overall bleak tone and subject matter, Searls's somewhat surreal cinema counterpoints add a metaphysical grasp to his attention-grabbing theme and voice. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic