We follow Pliny the Elder in the final stretch of his life, as illness begins to distort both his body and his certainty about the world.

Pliny, who once believed everything could be named and contained, finds himself slipping into a state where knowledge no longer stabilises anything, and the act of looking becomes unreliable. The novel moves through fragments of observation, memory, and philosophical inquiry, circling the tension between classification and collapse.

Harald Voetmann is part of a loose Scandinavian lineage of writers interested in antiquity as a psychological space, exploring this by drawing prose from classical texts, here with Pliny’s Natural History. The idea is then to repurpose it into something closer to a bodily and mental disintegration. The prose is controlled but unsettled, interested in decay, obsession, and the limits of rational thought, where the desire to understand the world becomes indistinguishable from a kind of madness. If you love Anne Carson, this you shouldn't miss.

Lolli Editions paperback, 2022 (first English edition, translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen). Clean, sharp copy with minimal shelfwear—very good condition.