It's not even that this narrator might be a liar to the reader and to himself. Rather, he refuses to sign the contract between reader and writer, where the writer promises to make things clear and flashes back appropriately, and delivers the epiphany at the end, all the snow swirling around and such. Sleep works on a different logic. It gives the reader a headache. Like a Hal Hartley movie, the characters deliver their lines unconvincingly, but in a somehow compelling way.
Sleep dreams up bank robbers, old men and streakers, dead bodies, cheap knives, broken elevators.
All say something and then take it back. The stories in Fetish Lives concern such historical figures as Eleanor Marx, Mata Hari, and Walt Whitman. The stories do not so much bring these figures to life as mortify them, rendering them as uncanny and insubstantial as photographs. In turn, the inhuman or scarcely human fetishes of the book's title, the wax dummies and other images, grow strangely animate. As I write this, I am surrounded by books on Julia Margaret Cameron, the current object of my research.