EXCELLENT BOOK...BUT hard to describe.
Let's say you took the first two novels in Proust's sequence À la recherche du temps perdu and then turned it into an erasure poem, lowering the word count by 90-95%, leaving some whole sentences, some phrases, sometimes a single word. Divide it into short chapters, somewhat on the lines of Lyn Hejinian's My Life. Then you might have similar to Annotations.
The Proust comparison came to mind because those first two volumes cover Proust's life from earliest memories up through the end of adolescence, which is about what Keene covers here. But Proust's novels also include a lot of local circumstance, a lot about his interests and education, and something of the context of the times, and so does Keene.
The thing is, though, that in Keene it is all radically compressed--the whole thing is about 80 pages. Even so, reading it, you get something of the complexity, density, and range of a full-on, door-stopper autobiographical novel.
Not to mention that Keene seems to be observing some kind of protocol or compositional restraint, like Hejinian. I couldn't figure out what it was, but there was a kind of procedural regularity to the book that I felt but could not detect.
Anyway, outstanding book. Keene has been getting some kudos lately (National Book Award, no less) but even so he deserves too be more widely known than he is.
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