Awake by Harald Voetmann

Nature begets monsters, fire-breathing bulls with lion's teeth who imitate human speech and call our names to lure us from our tents and cabins. She created man solely so he could suffer, the only animal who cries, the only animal who knows death and understands the scope of its suffering. The only animal who understands that it is made to suffer for nature's amusement. He who believes himself meant for better things is the unknowing victim of nature's game, hardly better than an animal. My suggestion: We must learn to enjoy the cruel game, and so be it that it is at our own expense.

There are four voices in Danish classicist and novelist Harald Voetmann's Awake: First, the voice of Pliny the Elder, as recorded in his Historia Naturalis, a first century AD attempt at taxonomizing the natural world. Then, a second voice of Pliny, elaborating inwardly on his Historia, embellishing it with details from his childhood on the hard margins of the Roman Empire, which are perhaps meant to represent the final dictations to his slave Diocletes, whose is the third voice. The fourth voice is Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, commenting on his uncle's final works after his death at the hands of Mt. Vesuvius.

Pliny, as he writes his final additions to the Historia, is an aging and miserable wreck, mostly unable to rise from his bed and covered in various excretions: first piss, then blood--he's prone to nosebleeds--then vomit. (There's a grim irony in our knowledge that it's a volcano, not these ailments, that do old Pliny in.) The elder Pliny, it seems, seeks to finish his categorization of nature because he fears and disdains it; as he sees it, death and misery are the ultimate ends of the natural world, and to know nature better is to have a map of the enemy's forces. In this attempt he makes suppositions of a grand and imaginative nature, which the Younger Pliny--more of a poet, but more of a skeptic, too--punctuates dismissively. When the elder Pliny, for example, records that he has seen stars descend on a ship and "hop like birds from place to place," his nephew notes: "He is confusing stars with fireflies or something."

I'm just a sucker for these fictionalized versions of real historical figures. Awake couldn't be less like The Organs of Sense in tone, style, and method, but it, too, is about the ambitious quest for scientific knowledge. Pliny worked with fewer tools than Liebniz or the astronomer of that book, and, relying only on the pieces of the Historia Naturalis replicated here, wrong about every single thing, but for him, too, the desire to know the universe bordered on a kind of madness. Unlike The Organs of Sense, Awake is deeply unsatisfying, even intentionally unsettling: Pliny the Elder claims to have paid a man to have sex with his daughter, who was born without any orifices whatsoever. Later, he sentences his own slave and scribe Diocletes to a horrible death by crucifixion, as if intent on participating in the very cruelty of nature he's set out to document. Awake is, like the life of Pliny (and us all) short, difficult, beset with lust and misery, and full of gross physical ailments.