Amy Imogene Reads's Reviews > Saint Sebastian's Abyss

Now this was neat. Circular threads overlapping themselves all winding their way to the endless void of meaning/un-meaning in the art world… all with a satirist edge.

Saint Sebastian's Abyss is a very slim novel, barely there—144 pages of long-winded brevity, if you will—just like our protagonist's "terse nine-page email" from his ex-best friend and colleague's deathbed confessional email.

At the risk of sounding condescending in this review, that kind of satiric nonsense is what this novella is all about. (How is a NINE-PAGE email regarded as "barely a jotting", etc.)

This is a novel about two tediously dull art critics who used to be best friends and colleagues. Now they're mortal enemies because one of them said that horrible thing decades ago, and ever since then they write books as barbs against each others' latest works.

Their entire careers, spanning decades and several novels a piece, are centered on the one painting that is their mutual obsession: an early Renaissance work titled Saint Sebastian's Abyss.

But now Schmidt, our unnamed protagonist's nemesis and closest colleague, is dying in Berlin. And our protagonist must see him one last time.

This entire novella takes place in our protagonist's memories as he takes his journey to Berlin. While on this relatively short trip, we unpack the history of his deep bond with Schmidt, their mutual obsession with The Painting, and the facts surrounding the painter himself—who had a similarly bizarre existence mired with madness and obsession.

Part of the fun of this novella is the sheer tedium and satiric hypocrisy of our narrator. He's tedious, Schmidt is tedious, and the two of them together as vignettes over time are... tedious. They're pretentious art critics bemoaning the trite hypocrisy of other art critics and schools of thought while simultaneously being that themselves, fulfilling their own prophecy by spending their lives in endless discussion over one relatively insignificant painting.

The novella handles this wryly hilarious fact by being as tedious and circular as possible. The narrator cycles through similar thoughts, fragments of sentences, and arguments over and over again. We, as the reader, find ourselves lulled into this bizarre thinkspeak of being and are both bored and gripped at the same time like a trainwreck you can't stop looking at.

A hypnotic novella. A tedious novella. Something to read and snicker over if you have any kind of opinions about the art world—pro or con, it doesn't matter, it's still amusing.

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