For 80 pages or so, it’s a parade of grotesques, then doctor and son arrive at the local castle, Hochgobernitz, where they encounter the suicidal insomniac Prince Saurau, whose unhinged philosophical monologue dominates the next 80 pages. This second novel from Austria’s pre-eminent rant- meister is narrated by a doctor’s son following his father on his rounds through the gloomy and treacherous countryside, calling on one patient after another, all of whom suffer from various horrible ailments. Rulfo claimed that the novel’s structure was “made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time,” which while likely confounding the casual reader, yields sublime rewards for the dedicated one. A straightforward opening belies the narrative complexity that follows, as the book shifts from Juan’s narration to another “I” (Pedro Páramo himself, in the past, which is not immediately obvious), and then into a third-person omniscient that lets everyone in the village, past (inhabitants) and present (ghosts) have their say. Juan Preciado, the narrator-initially, at least-of this surreal masterpiece, comes to the town of Comala in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, having promised his mother that he’d make the journey after she died. Nested narrators have been around since the dawn of storytelling, one storyteller passing on a story they heard from another, mixing direct and indirect dialogue as they repurpose it second-hand, but the following books take the technique to a whole other level, whether to splinter the idea of a central voice, question the nature of storytelling, rupture the forms we’ve become accustomed to, or, as it were, to make the novel novel again.

And so, in Mouth to Mouth, the successful art dealer Jeff Cook unspools the story of his rise to our unnamed narrator, a former college classmate he hasn’t seen in almost two decades, thereby transforming a first-class lounge at JFK into an impromptu confessional. The way forward, I realized, was to embed the act of storytelling into the story itself. Then I reread one of the books on this list and it cracked the whole thing open for me. I’d been wrestling for a long time with the idea of a relationship between a drowning man and his rescuer, but I kept hitting dead ends, unable to settle on the right point of view.

Years ago, I was on the verge of abandoning the draft of what would become my novel Mouth to Mouth. (On the off chance Wallace Shawn is down for it, I’m available.) Would it be a celebration of the ways in which stories are transmitted through our culture, or would it be an unhinged mess, hovering on the edge of madness? We’ll probably never know.

Outline transit kudos