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The Haunting Images of War, An Exploration of the Ravages of Time: A Review of Jakub Arbes’s Newton's Brain

Updated: Oct 11


Jakub Arbes (June 12, 1840 - April 8, 1914) was a Czech writer. A disciple of Jan Neruda, Arbes would carve out his own niche in the rapidly changing world of European letters, creating the form he called the romanetto, brief, proto-detective novels often with Gothic elements, influenced strongly by Edgar Allan Poe. An opponent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and publisher of political magazines, Arbes would spend 15 months in prison, leaving Prague shortly thereafter to join other ex-pats in France.

 

Thanks to independent presses like Jantar Publishing, the world of Eastern European literature translated into English is growing at an impressive rate. Jantar Publishing has brought the literary world many impressive novels, including Andriy Lyubka’s Carbide and Krisztina Toth’s Barcode. Moreover, the editors and translators have a knack for identifying historical literature—like Jakub Arbes’s unforgettable romanetto Newton’s Brain (translated from Czech by David Short)— that the world needs translated at this critical time when global wars dominate headlines and the true human cost of it outweighs the price any government places on the aid packages it sends to those countries defending their people and sovereignty.

Nonetheless, most readers—whether they read historical science or detective fiction—will probably never have heard of Arbes’s Newton’s Brain. First published 18 years before H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Arbes’s book bears a literary depiction of a time machine and explores literary and scientific concepts of time and time travel that are truly groundbreaking. The romanetto’s depiction of when the inventor “suddenly lifts off part of his skull ‘like a cap,’ displays his bared brain, and calmly announces that his head in fact contains the looted brain of Isaac Newton” is, as Peter Zusi explains, “perverse” but also anticipatory of “the casual yet disturbing absurdities of twentieth-century Surrealism.” Thus, Newton’s Brain not only defies early conventions of science fiction, but it also defies genre definition, since it blends elements of horror, stands as a monolith for “proto-modernist irrationalism,” and serves as an exploration of the places where evil, science, and human manipulation of both exist.

The plot of Newton’s Brain is, at first, deceptively simple. During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, a seemingly mad genius dies at the Battle of Koniggratz. As the mad genius’s dearest friend narrates the storyline, the story shifts from being a recollection of the mad genius’s all-consuming studies and pursuit of the dark sciences to the narrator’s moral navigation of a world torn apart by war. Meanwhile, the narrator learns that his friend did, in fact, not die; instead, the friend has procured Sir Isaac Newton’s brain and replaced his own with it and, in turn, has created a device that allows him to explore Newton’s laws and create a strange device through which he can observe the past.

The past revealed to the narrator and his friend thanks to the strange device and Newton’s brains is quite horrifying. The narrator and his friend hurdle at the speed of light, and readers are inundated—quite impressively—with numbers and calculations that make one wonder how Arbes, during his time, could have managed such calculations. These moments in the book are true works of physics studies, and as the numbers and calculations blur, so does the narrator and mad genius’s journey. This blur is a structural and conceptual technique that quickly plunges readers deeper into the book and leads them to its final chapters, where the book’s moral lessons also unfold at a rapid pace.

Also helping to facilitate the mimicked speed at which the narrator and his friend travel is the poetic writing. Science, nature, and humankind’s violent follies collide in beautiful paragraphs that wax and wane in lengths ranging from single, minimal lines to longer, more detailed paragraphs:


  The image slowly grew clearer.

  I observed some odd shadows streaming in wild disarray not only along the roads,

  but also across fields and meadows…

  Before long I could tell that these shadows were alive and consisted of countless

  atoms…, for I made them out to be cavalry and wagons and even infantry…


The utilization of ellipses fuses with the poetic descriptions and reinforces the writing’s surreal, dreamlike tone, which—once readers reach the final page—abruptly shatters. However, it is the book’s incorporation of war’s sheer numbers—presented as the number of lives taken—that acts as its most jarring point. The narrator’s friend reveals the numbers as he and the narrator fly through time: “‘Wars in South America,’ my friend said, ‘cost five hundred and nineteen thousand lives, and the war in North America saw three hundred and eighty-one thousand victims.’” Accompanying the numbers are brief categorizations of some of the battles and wars which continue to define and shape Europe today:


  Next the Hungarian defeats at Belgrade and Trnava and the occupation of Raab

  by Windisch-Gratz, then scenes from the uprising in Lemberg, the defeat

  of the Hungarians at Schwechat, the storming and bombardment of Vienna,

  scenes from the October revolution in Vienna, from the troubles in Frankfurt

  and elsewhere, scenes from the June uprising in Prague and the bombardment

  of Prague by Windisch-Gratz, the battles of Vincenze, Curtaton and Santa Lucia,

  revolts in Dresden, Baden, Prussia, and elsewhere, scenes from the February

  uprising in Paris and the early turbulence brought about by the revolutionary

  movement in Italy.


Again, form follows function, and the utilization of simple punctuation—in this case the commas—to separate these major events creates a blur, a swirl, the sense of being swept into history’s annals and of being unable to escape the consequences of humanity’s neverending violence.

Newton’s Brain, in many ways, defies definition. Some will read it as a work of pure science fiction. Others will perceive it as a warning about the scientific powers humans have discovered and how humans use those discoveries for either good or evil. Other readers may focus purely on its brevity and how its poetic translation and form compress to create the embodiment of lyrical mastery. Nonetheless, no matter what readers take from Jantar Publishing’s latest masterpiece, one definitely cannot die that Newton’s Brain is timeless and necessary, and Jantar’s publication of it could not come at a more poignant time in humanity.


Newton's Brain by Jakub Arbes can be purchased here:

 

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University,  teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.

 


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