On Aliocha Coll's Attila

An ambient response to one of my favorite novels of the past however many years

Any sentence I can write here will be ineffectual. That isn’t a reason not to write; if anything, it might be the only reason one is able.

All great authors are disabled. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have the time to face what lies beneath the horseshit we call language. By authors I don’t mean writers, by and large. I mean people who don’t have the choice to see the world the same as others who would never use their time on being free.

In America 2025, freedom is a luxury we can’t afford. Everyone is only worth what they bring to the table for everybody but them to choose to consume. The book as an object is no longer objective, and neither is the printer that supplied the ink. Our most visible creators are insane by nature, not by choice. The only eventual endgame is disappear or become pulp.

Things haven’t changed as much as we thought; only the technology used to divide the difference is. In due course, it has been fiction that carries the bulk of our damage, being as within it may be buried unwanted notions and inexplicable events that in being transposed into nonfiction are served up solely to be misused by those who live through different lives.

The world of a novel is everything that isn’t the case. No one likes to sit with this, which is why it is called fiction in the first place. At its most basic, the world wants to destroy only exactly what it is—all the rest being a stand-in for batting practice, so we can feel the piss run down our legs one last grand time.

Attila is the kind of book that writes itself. I mean this in an opposite way than it might seem: that it exists solely because its author did, and because that person—Aliosha Coll, which is a pseudonym—took the time to exchange himself for the right to transfer it from nonessence into obscurity.

Everything is its opposite opposite. Without exactly the traits and experience any exclusively figuratively sane author has been granted in order to sit in the same room for years and lose himself between the words, we might as well have had just another butcher standing behind a glass case full of loose meat waiting to get paid in exchange for blood money.

That “Coll” took his own life not long after having written the novel’s last sentence—‘We laugh the outsides of allusion.’ (quotations marks his)—reveals nothing more than what the first sentence instigated by being scrawled, likely as casually as wiping your ass after taking a shit—And so the misogenesis aborted.

Whatever you don’t think you understand, you understand. The problem is, you don’t actually want to. Most contemporary American writing works as a venom, not an antidote, intended to besiege the reader with all its glory yet to come.

This isn’t the problem of the willing author, per say, or even the publishers of tasty trash, but more so an indication that we’ve reached an impasse in creative production itself. Here at the brink on which we rest, commercial American literature, and the very possibility of contributing to its brain rot’s wrath, is like the twigs and branches over the precipice we know better than to cross, but not to fill in.

Instead, we fuck. Leave it to winning gamete to chop up its father’s endless nausea by making more of the same horror that creates the next hole.

Attila is perhaps the most coherent book written in the last 50 years. It is not, however, a Finnegans Wake, despite the author’s assertion of that tome as “the 'starting point’ for literature” as his bio at the back of its original translation into English verily points out. Nor is it an animal shriek, or a finger trap, or sandpaper, as all of those would be like butter on a wound; comparatively, to break the metaphor entirely, Attila is skin.

All people hate skin because it hurts. Skin, forced onto language, must be insoluble; otherwise it’s already basically blood, which lubes the void. By beginning and ending in one bound span, borrowing the form of the novel, Javier Coll Mata, as an author in a chair, provides the idea of Aliocha Coll with an impregnability that insures its validity, no matter who arrives in arrears to try to squeeze orange juice out of rum.

I hate the world where this book exists. I am grateful for the author of this book for its existence. I feel closer to him than I have felt to the vast majority of the living.

There’s so much more I want to say that I don’t have anything to say, like I already know my death, but not how I get there. In reading Attila, I felt close to a mode of being insane inside myself I originated in my memaw’s basement before I knew the world that the books my mother read me asked me to allow in. Somewhere in that basement, I’m with him.

It doesn’t matter who Coll was or why he suffered; it matters that there was nowhere else for him to be.

Any other words used to try to describe the situation of Attila are less than ineffectual, in that they are affect intended to disguise the system from inside it, like a zeitgeist without people. The opposite of freedom.

For some reason I’m thinking of Jesus knocking over the lenders’ tables, but on all the tables are all the books published since the last sentence of Attila earned its period. I suppose the reason is obvious, but in my idea, Jesus is naked.

Being naked is the opposite of reading an author posthumously, like my name is the opposite of myself.

For, for another reason entirely, I’m thinking of Mark David Chapman killing John Lennon but instead of being caught carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, carrying a copy of Attila. What a different world this would be!

I can hardly smell it: the decay of their corpses, both Lennon and Coll. One the front of a boy band, the other not a closer, despite having been the one of the two to off himself, because he could.

The anger that funds me finds some relief in the delay of the various forms of revelation available to the able-bodied consumer, if never served solely for one’s particular self, but for all of those who choose to sit in the pit and stroke the silt that lines its bottom.

I can’t go on, I’ll go on is old hat. Coll has Mark David Chapmanned it, simply by writing each sentence that he wrote in the order he wrote them. All of us are witnesses whether we read it or not.

The second we see what it all means, we’re a sentence ourselves. In the meantime, no freedom suffices for he who asks first.

It’s a great day to go outside. Whoever you are, I love you like I love all the empty space in the all the remaining libraries on the day before they close for good.

After it is written, every sentence can be revised by anyone who reads it, and it still will remain the same. The sane mind of the figuratively sane author is yet another opposite, waiting only to be cured.

All writing is writing.