BOOK OF NUMBERS - JOSHUA COHEN

The massive and challenging 'Book of numbers' by Joshua cohen, deploys the obvious torah reference of the jewish exodus from slavery in egypt to mount sinai and the covenant- to examine questions of a search engine tetration, questions of surveillance and the impingement of the internet on human consciousness. Deemed by critics as 'the ulysses'' of the digital age the formal challenge of the novel is very much surmountable. It isn't so much meandering as associative. Cohen delights in puns and neologisms ,and has also two compressed sections of a molly bloom like stream of consciousness in techno savvy slang. ''Book of numbers' is a meta fictional novel, at 580 pages about a writer Joshua cohen ghostwriting a book about billionaire Joshua cohen, founder and CEO of the tech company tetration. The first and third sections of the novel pertain to the writer Joshua cohen , dealing with his estrangement with/from his wife Rach , the diminuendo of his first novel whose launch party calamitously coincided with sept 11 2001 and foundered . Joshua cohen , after the unsuccessful venture into his first novel's supercession by political events, a novel based on his mother's history as a jewish woman in poland during nazism, flits from reviewing jobs to fictional projects that never fructify. Joshua cohen is also a sardonic , self reflexive intertextual nod to the jewish male characters of saul bellow and philip roth - he quips, observes mordantly aspects of multiculturalism and feminism, ruefully regards his own anonymity , surfs the net to watch copious pornography and gets snarled in the ghostwriting project , involving traversing dubai, abu dhabi, berlin, frankfurt, vienna, paris , london . In the final stages of the completion of his project , which is imperilled and undermined by nefarious larger political corporate forces his interim of obsession with a muslim woman Izdihar is restituted by self forgiveness. But while the pyrotechnic prose , the inexhaustible punning and asperities and hapless sincerity overlain by self referential irony of these sections are deft they become wearisome to read.

By contrast the section concerned with the billionaire joshua cohen, called principal are immensely fascinating. Principal's childhood , with his engineer father, jewish ancestry abutting kiev and odessa (with biblical names like joseph, yehoshuah etc) his mathematical prowess, his private language encoded in the word W in all its rearrangements and permutations signifying states of resposefulness, satiation, restiveness , etc establish a foundation for his work in conceptualizing tetration, deepened by the indian Moe , a maverick whose reversibility of entropy in perpetual self renewing in a heterogeneous polysemous realm of reality, however unfeasible, becomes the metaphysic of the search engine. Cohen delineates both the history of the internet and the tedious process of algorithms, search engines , urls that are not outcroppings of genius but exhaustive, painstaking work that is unrewarding . Principal, after his own obsessive, health impairing obsession accrues a sedate mash up of eastern mysticism and buddhism, equanimous and ineffaceably alone . In this he is a doppelganger of the writer joshua cohen- both solitary, inalienably and keenly aware of loneliness, with a history of second generation jewish survival after the horrors of the holocaust. But principal is the more persuasive character arc - in him the multifarious variations of metaphysical reassembling of technology and the search engine commingled with an internalized private provisional mysticism are demonstrated in wide ranging ideas, references - and his section of the novel has crossed out lines, interview sections , narration alternately stream of consciousness and linear while the latter writer Joshua cohen sections are interspersed by emails .

The epistemology of the search engine and web is magicked by a romantic conception of freedom, free floating seeking, a compendium of possibilities that can be sought and the promised vision realized for Moe and Principal and soon reveals the hedge funds, shares, the reliance of bigger players for start ups, the intercession of the state to extract information and exercise surveillance . Compounding the problem, discernible from the very genesis of the search engine which is to contain the overabundant, proliferating, crisscrossing that is both its cause and consequence . The more diverse, disparate, multitudinous the information to be compassed and corralled and organized the more the slippages of the uncontainable and unmanageable. The search engine emblematizes a seeking that only finds what is predetermined or accessible - a circuitous loop whose numerous permutations and combinations and plurality of motifs function with a seething, teeming, polymorphously perverse enticing closed circle whose dimensionlessness exists in a void of meaning and being- precisely the opposite of the buddhist void or the shedding of attachments hinduism adumbrates. Instead principal, despite forays into foreign countries with requisite terminological techno contraptions of tetration like tetrate, tetset etc becomes cognizant of the way his project never materialized in a manner consonant with its potentialities . Edward snowden and julian assange are the obvious examples fictionalized here in the figure of the dissident whistleblower Thor Ang Balk who alerts Principal, as does Moe, sidelined in a project to advance a technology module that would be put to covert surveillance uses beneath its more resilient data saving/storage capacities , as to what is afoot with the conglomeration of corporations and politics. Each of the myriad associative , paranomasiac variegation of 'Book of numbers '' - with its reference to hinduism, mathematics, culture, jewishness , the literary establishment, the koran and sculptures are intertwined and form a dense textual whole . The transposition of the book of numbers to the 40 years of age of both author /anamnuensis, subject is further complicated by the genealogy of the internet . Principal refers to himself as we- in him depersonalization and impersonality are indistinguishable whereas Joshua cohen the writer leads a raddled vortex like existence with dysfunctionality at various levels, mitigated by a tentative peace with himself that is undetermined and indeterminate.

''Book of numbers '' is paradoxically a novel that is unable to surmount the sum of its own multifaceted parts . As a meta fictional novel it presents the contemporaneity it explores in both joshua cohen's as fragmented , adrift and unmoored on a plane of unstoppable semiotic prodigality that has no anchoring premise, that generates its own hyper self conscious sophisticated rationales that tail off into ever more nimble and circumlocutory divagations , where there is no core self but a plurality of disaggregated selves. The author biographer joshua cohen is dispersed and refracted , coalesced to the perpetuum mobile of the medium of technology and postmodernity whose array of guises and calibrations capsize that which is inessential and inviolate. This is not the word turned into flesh or establishing divinity but a veritable cornucopious disgorging of an uncontrollable depthlessness that disorients and inundates. Principal , dying of cancer, chooses self extinction even as posterity problematizes his scheme of offering a subjective truth to Joshua cohen who, besieged by his own refractory obsessions and his past relationships and misspent , squandered opportunities caving in on him , is also beset by shenanigans without, involving kori dienerowitz , who climbs the ranks of tetration and accrues massive power and control as intermediary and functionary of state and financial interests overstepping the bounds of his role . Numbers in this novel are as slippery as symbols - numbers can systematize , collate , codify (as words can define, explicate as also foreclose ) but cannot cohere, cannot straddle varied realms of meaning or tread with any first principles the inchoate landscape of wishes, desires, yearnings that constitute a phalanx of multiverses within human reckonings that are inarticulable and indecipherable .The technology is outstripped by its own ambition .

'Book of numbers' is a casualty of its own clever conceits - as a novel it is a mirror that instead of reflecting a fractured reality of unthought through, irreconcilable vastness becomes instead a chinese box, with endless regression . It is a novel that is a trapeze act, performatively brilliant , with dazzling turns of phrase and a blend of the scabrous , the highfalutin , the scatological, the irreverent and the deeply serious - but it all roils in the heightened , acutely self reflexive anvil of its own meta conceit . The internet has become a far more unknown quantity and what it reflects of human reality in its own microcosm is a far more tangled affair that the novel's misgivings could envisage. The writer Joshua cohen as also his doppelganger principal might have their time off from the web, or interims of quiescence and the novel might suggest a tremulous reprieve, momentary and incompensatory as it is, of this lull but in actuality there is never any time off , both in reality and hyperreality, within or without. If the ''book of numbers'' diagnoses or anatomizes or plays with the malaise postmodernity and technology present us with then it is a diagnostic legerdemain that sees in symptomatology a plethora of unconscious polyvalence whose varieties of illusoriness dazzle and enervate in equal measure-but in a larger vacuum ,whose aetiology predates technology , perhaps even globalized culture as we know it. ''Book of numbers'' has a salutary sense of the gravity of the problem and eschews any simplistic moral humanist schema as a ballast . But that elastic openness of it as also its reversion to the very postmodern indefiniteness whose incommensurable pixels can only float, sever, combine , reassume newer forms, diffract and attenuate in an unceasing reweaving of prearranged conceptual categories, becomes its overarching limitation .