The Strange Case of X will especially appeal to readers who enjoy tales in which the author includes a fictional version of himself or herself as part of the unfolding story. We might recall August 25, 1983, where Jorge Luis Borges has his younger self enter a hotel room and encounter another, much older Borges on his deathbed. In The Other, Borges reverses the roles: in 1969, an old Borges takes a seat on a bench beside the Charles River, north of Boston, next to his much younger self. And there's Italo Calvino, who appears as a fictionalized character named Silas Flannery—a novelist suffering from writer’s block—in his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
Then we have The Seventh Voyage by Stanisław Lem, in which Ijon Tichy faces a dilemma: the exterior of his mini rocket ship is damaged and must be repaired. Unfortunately, this is a two-man job, and Ijon is flying solo. But the impossible happens: that night, while asleep, a slightly familiar-looking man shakes Ijon awake and demands he get out of bed to help repair the rocket. Ijon, knowing he’s alone, insists the intruder is nothing more than a dream. The next morning, Ijon calculates that his damaged rocket has veered off course into a mysterious gravitational vortex with incalculable relativistic effects—with the result that Ijon is now face-to-face with the Ijon from yesterday.
Like these metafictional explorations of self and identity, Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Case of X blurs the boundaries between author and creation, reality and imagination. Following in the tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Lem, VanderMeer turns the mirror inward and explores authorship and selfhood—but with his own darkly surreal twists and loop de loops.
VanderMeer frames his tale as follows: an unnamed man enters a building and walks along a number of long hallways, then down several flights of stairs—mushrooms sprouting from cracks in the walls and floors—until he eventually reaches a black spiral staircase descending to Room 54. In this room, he will question an unnamed writer (referred to as X). For what purpose? As he informs X, “I am here to decide your final disposition. Should we lock you away for five or ten years, or should we find some other solution?”
Once his eyes adjust to the light, he can make out a desk, typewriter, bed, canned goods, and a small adjoining room with a toilet. As for the writer, he has broad shoulders, a barrel chest, a new beard on his chin, and blue eyes behind gold-framed glasses—a writer the interrogator soon verifies as having been born in Belfont, Pennsylvania, in 1968, and having grown up with parents who were in the Peace Corps (details that align with the biography of author Jeff VanderMeer).
“I am now firmly of the belief that Ambergris, and all that is associated with Ambergris, is a figment of my imagination. I no longer believe it exists.” So states X. But as becomes increasingly clear to both the interrogator and the reader, at certain points in the past X most certainly did believe Ambergris existed—and for good reason. Once, while walking in downtown Tallahassee a year after the U.S. publication of City of Saints and Madmen, X saw “the Borges Bookstore, the Aqueduct, and, in the distance, the masts of ships at the docks.” He recounts similar experiences that suggest Ambergris is, in fact, every bit as real as New York or Chicago.
However, there’s a serious problem. X says, “I am in a Chicago psychiatric ward because I have been hallucinating that a world of my creation is actually real.” Looking for a clear demarcation between our world and Ambergris? X (and Jeff VanderMeer) will not be pinned down so easily.
The Strange Case of X is a fifty-five-page tale in which our American author works his literary magic, prompting readers to ask: What is the relationship between a writer and the imaginative fictions they create? How tight a hold does an invented world have on its creator, even when that writer tries to move on to other fictions? Can an imagined world become a stronger force—and more central—than everyday so-called reality? And as X himself conveys: “It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet to rely on his senses to describe it.”
To add further convolution to an already complex pie, midway through the tale X hands the interrogator a manuscript entitled The Strange Case of X! Russian dolls, anyone? Additionally, City of Saints and Madmen—the actual 2002 Picador publication I hold in my hands—contains a three-page About the Author describing Jeff VanderMeer as a writer with a background both in our real world and (gulp!) the city of Ambergris.
Down the mushroom-covered rabbit hole we go. Read City of Saints and Madmen cover to cover to set your imagination on fever-dream fire.
American author Jeff VanderMeer, born 1968
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