Every sentence of Solip is a brazen little puzzle of heavy mystery, which when welded together as an object form the most compact and mask-faced take on the encyclopedic novel I can think of. In the ballroom with Sukenick and Lispector, it's one that continues to unfold, query, conflate, revealing slick black floors where you thought walls were.
-Blake Butler
Confession time: Ken Baumann's debut Solip isn't a novel. Think of how it feels to watch an engrossing film; now imagine becoming that film, your vision little more than a flickering image, your body just a burst of white vinyl. Baumann's non-novel, a vast detonation of language, not only captures that feeling, but also challenges you not to be held in its thrall. Indebted to Samuel Beckett and Gaspar Noé, Solip asks the reader to give up all human prejudice and surrender to life's new texture, the flesh become word: a code all Baumann's own, which bludgeons language as much as it opens prose fiction up to the highest horizon. Solip is a world for those who already dwell in the sentence, an anarchic hell that sounds something like heaven, by one of America's most promising young writers.
