In The Major Refutation, Pierre Senges imagines a sixteenth-century scholar undertaking the formidable task of proving that America does not exist.
The lands supposedly discovered across the Atlantic are, he argues, a magnificent fabrication, assembled from the ambitions of explorers, the interests of monarchs, the inventions of cartographers and the willingness of an entire civilisation to believe in something it has never seen.
Written as a sprawling, fantastically digressive argument, the novel takes the form of a historical document in which every piece of evidence produces further doubt. Senges moves through geography, theology, navigation, politics and the peculiar machinery of European knowledge-making, constructing an increasingly intricate case against the existence of an entire continent.
Both an intellectual comedy and a study of how accepted truths come into being, it really captures the extraordinary human capacity to make the world conform to an idea. A strange, playful and deliberately excessive work of literary invention, particularly suited to readers of Borges, Calvino and the more elaborate traditions of philosophical fiction.
Edition/Condition: Contra Mundum Press, 2016. First English-language edition, paperback. Translated from the French by Jacob Siefring. Good to very good condition, with light cover wear and minor handling marks. Interior appears clean and unmarked.
