THE ORIGIN OF AWARENESS

Yunghanns investigates concepts involving physics and human awareness in this philosophical epistolary novel.

A young American with the unlikely name of Derrida Eramus, fresh from his freshman year at an unnamed Ivy League school, is in London on a peculiar mission of philosophical development. His goal is to learn enough to earn a slot in professor Rousseau’s doctoral program in philosophy, which is based purely on the professor’s discretion. As Derrida contemplates the nature of existence, he reviews emails from the professor that feature minilectures on the atom and related subjects. He reads about the history of man’s understanding of the most basic particle while breakfasting at a cafe in Hyde Park. While doing so, he meets an elderly woman from an unnamed African country whose personal story is so intriguing that he asks if he may record it on his phone. Eventually Derrida composes his own account of the woman’s story, which he sends to another professor named Confucius: “She gave me her name as the letter Y. She was ninety-nine years old. At three years old, she had been given the title Sofos Anthropos, the village sage, or the Witan of Utopiae and personal advisor to the Supreme Leader, His Supreme Holy Highest.” Overall, the plot of this novel is thin, with characters that essentially serve as mouthpieces for various physics and philosophy concepts. The prose is rather dense despite Yunghanns’ attempts to dress it up in more conversational language: “My dear boy, consider entanglement as one of the events that occur at the subatomic level with which you are not familiar in everyday life in respect to physical entities.” The connection between atomic theory and Y’s more political account of “Africa’s Utopiae” aren’t immediately made clear to readers, although they share an odd, antiquated framing—particularly the latter, which comes across as thorough exoticization. The author’s goal appears to have been to make complex ideas more palatable through fiction, but she doesn’t adequately develop the story’s characters, plot, or emotion to achieve it.

An idiosyncratic but ultimately unsuccessful work.