The Incompletes

The Incompletes is a rambling and unfocused account of the narrator’s wanderings from Porto Allegre (Brazil) to Buenos Aires, and later Barcelona and Moscow. Nonetheless, its best moments have the enchanting philosophical flavor of W.G. Sebald or Fernando Pessoa:

A hotel in a foreign land. Felix could imagine himself living a borrowed life there as he could almost nowhere else; a life that was decidedly his, but whose details . . . could easily have been assigned to another; all it would have taken was the smallest difference, being just a few minutes too early or too late, to dispel the sequence of actions that had delivered him to where he was.

[…]

He remembered other walks, also endless. In Buenos Aires, when he used to roam the suburbs at dawn and everything seemed to belong to a dying world, or along the old canals of Manchester, which traced the melancholy web of a forgotten plain fallen out of circulation, populated by chimneys in disuse that had come to resemble taciturn geological formations. There were few places he’d gotten this feeling of having a territory expand as he crossed it. Many associate this experience with nature, or rather wide open spaces (the sea, flatlands, even interconnected valleys); for Felix, however, it was a condition specific to cities.

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