A meditation on ecological grief, violence, finitude, art as resistance, and the possibility of hope.
What can literature do in a world fractured by the ecological crisis, the breakdown of democracy, and the loss of meaning?
In a dark New York, still shaken by the pandemic and under the shadow of Trump’s new authoritarianism, a writer is commissioned to undertake the biography of Benjamin Fondane, a French poet and filmmaker of Romanian origin, witness to Parisian surrealism, author of a cursed film in Buenos Aires, and murdered in Auschwitz. But the project is interrupted. An illness, a mourning, and a devastating event open a crack through which family history, the disappearance of a landscape, the ruins of the century, and the memory of a fox whose gaze revealed an extraordinary gift to his immigrant grandfather in Argentina slip through.
In Everything There Is a Crack and Through It the Light Enters is a shape-shifting novel, halfway between essay, autobiography, apocryphal biography, and philosophical treatise; a text interspersed with notes that expand it, a text that asks how to live today, and how to write, amid collapse. It is also an elegy for a world falling apart—the physical world, but also the symbolic and moral. And it is an ambitious, desperate, necessary attempt to restore meaning through imagination, artistic creation, and the attention advocated by Simone Weil.
A meditation on finitude, ecological grief, visible and invisible violence, art as resistance, and the possibility of hope. With echoes of W. G. Sebald, Sigrid Nunez, Zadie Smith, Annie Dillard, and Rachel Cusk, this book confirms Patricio Pron as one of the most singular and daring narrators of his generation: radical, elegant, fierce, and melancholic. A writer who transforms desolation into living thought and storytelling into a luminously memorable emotion.
