At the heart of In a Broken Star, we find the themes of diaspora and quest romance, prophecy and gnosis, which have long suffused Norman Finkelstein's poetry. The central poem of the book, "The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust," is a long narrative featuring an uncanny protagonist of indeterminate gender, age, and cultural identity, a bookish, wandering mage with mysterious links to the Immanent Foundation, the equally uncanny institution from Finkelstein's previous book, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation, a work which Nathaniel Mackey read "wishing it would never end." There are also intimate lyric sequences suffused with historical loss and cosmological vision. Poignant and darkly ironic, veering weirdly between Kafkaesque comedy and Lovecraftian creepiness, In a Broken Star may be Finkelstein's most compelling and sheerly entertaining work.
Norman Finkelstein's In a Broken Star is a Wunderkammer of shining and enigmatic song-lyrics, memos and dispatches from an extra-dimensional dead letter office, and gnomic fragments of ancient wisdom texts. At its center is the astonishing narrative The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust, in which Finkelstein has reinvented the quest narrative for our own moment-whether postmodern, post-political, post-gender, or post-truth. A knight-errant (or vagrant) in "flowered Docs," Pascal wanders in quest of-well, they're not quite sure: origins? genealogies? foundations (immanent or architectural)? answers? Pascal traverses waste lands recalling those of Eliot, Browning, and Lovecraft, swims and flies through libraries of Alexandria and Babel, and receives tantalizing hints of destinations in colloquies with specters from beneath the sea, from eldritch dimensions and "faery lands forlorn." Where will Pascal find the key to all mythologies: in the Zohar? the Necronomicon? the Standard Edition of Freud? And are they all finally the same book, its pages reshaping themselves beneath the (three-lobed) reading eye? Engaging, nightmarish, intensely erudite in the arcana of canonical literature, philosophy, outsider art, and pop culture, Pascal Wanderlust is one of the most electrifying adventures in contemporary poetry.
