Healing Brian Esseintes

Book excerpt: At the centre of this unusual novel of chapter-long sentences lies an unusual protagonist. The survivor of a near-catastrophic fall, he finds himself possessed by peculiar, residual behaviours, the most peculiar of which is a compulsion to expel every drop of pleasure from his life by filling it with repetitive tasks and activities. When an abnormally large, abnormally cruel red butterfly enters his apartment and torments him to the point of delusion and insomnia, he realizes the only way to free himself from its grip is to leave home for an extended period of time and do what is most abhorrent to him: be among people. Wandering the streets, mistaken for the perpetrator of a violent assault by a compassionate university student who takes him in and seeks to rehabilitate him, he remains entirely and infuriatingly resistant to change. Throughout, like a hurricane of events around a static eye, what an intoxicating ride - what a grand experiment – his story is.