Nonetheless, his immune system’s reaction to the invader causes a strange change in his consciousness. When infected with a certain kind of typhus bacteria, he doesn’t become ill because he’s naturally immune. Central to the mystery at the heart of the trilogy is a Jewish poet from Morocco named Perotz who, after being captured by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald, becomes the subject of a typhus experiment. “Genre” as an idea is dissected and experimented upon. Dick, and many works of children’s fantasy populate the trilogy, all but screaming to be noticed and incorporated into our understanding of Adaf’s project. Agnon, Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K.
Adaf refers to the trilogy as “the chronicles of Elish Ben Zaken” (the protagonist), channeling the religious texts that figure strongly in Take Up and Read. Some have called this a meta detective trilogy, and indeed books (those already written, those in the process of being written, those being passed from hand to hand) appear on many pages. It learned and it had a memory, and it was founded on the fact that the body is a microbiome.” Adaf has written a story that incorporates the latest scientific ideas about the importance of the immune system and age-old theories about the relationship between mind and body. As one major character declares in the third book, Take Up and Read, “the true key” to understanding what a human is is the immune system, that “its entire function was to recognize what belonged in the body and what was foreign to it. A book has weight and takes up space, but the weightless words within it are woven together by a mind that exists as part of a brain, which is attached to a brain stem, which receives blood and oxygen and impulses from the rest of the body. This might make the books sound pretentious, but they are actually the opposite: they are attempts to lodge a creative object, born of a human mind, squarely in the space between the intangible and tangible aspects of our lives. Like Adaf’s previous novel in English, Sunburnt Faces, the Lost Detective Trilogy never loses sight of itself as a literary work.
People are constantly exchanging bacteria and viruses with one another, their perceptions of time and space don’t line up, and one person’s individual trauma as a guinea pig in a concentration camp can be the portal to a major discovery about the nature of human consciousness. Philosophy, literary theory, immunology, temporal rifts, and religious texts mingle together in this trilogy to produce a work that attempts to mimic what Adaf believes is a deep truth: that people are not closed systems but nodes in a network of relationships.
Like Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan, it contains multitudes. SHIMON ADAF’S Lost Detective Trilogy embodies many worlds, attitudes, genres, and voices.
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