With My Dog-Eyes

With My Dog-Eyes is a strange and unsettling little novel about a 48-year-old mathematics professor (Amos Keres) who uses a forced vacation — he has found himself unable to speak to his class, apparently blanking out for 15 minute stretches — to reminisce about his past. Some of his recollections are intriguing:

Poetry and mathematics. The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top of that small hill. But he didn’t see shapes or lines, didn’t see contours or lights, he was invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning. He could say only that. Invaded by incommensurable meaning.

[...]

The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of saying everything’s okay, we’re here and that’s enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths.

But others are less comprehensible (though nonetheless engaging, since it is clear we are witnessing a mind unraveling):

The green fruit was plucked? Is that what he said? The wall on the other side of the street. There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old: moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated, sounds that should never be heard, pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down to the heart, words that should never be pronounced, hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom.

Recommended.