The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Letters from Hanusse by Joshua Haigh. Ed. Douglas Messerli
Jason Picone

Joshua Haigh. Letters from Hanusse. Ed. Douglas Messerli. Green Integer, 2000. 291 pp. Paper: $12.95.

A nightmarish vision of malevolence and depravity, Letters from Hanusse is the third volume in the Structure of Destruction series, Douglas Messerli’s examination of evil in the twentieth century. The novel is composed of a series of letters purportedly written by Joshua Haigh, an anonymous figure who became dangerously obsessed with Messerli’s fiction. While Haigh is clearly a construction of Messerli’s, the mere suggestion that Haigh’s account could be real only adds to the book’s exquisite sense of terror. Letters from Hanusse is Haigh’s first-person account of his involvement with Leon, a charismatic figure he and his wife, Hannah, run afoul of in Queens during the 1960s. Under Leon’s tutelage, the couple succumbs to the nonconformist spirit of the era and enjoys an open sexual relationship with Leon and his wife, Elizabeth. After each woman has a child, the couples’ arrangement deteriorates drastically, though Haigh’s recollection of what transpires is disturbingly murky. Haigh alleges that Leon is guilty of murder and attempting to sell the children into slavery, but no clear distinction is made between fact and suspicion. Interwoven throughout the narrative are excerpts from biographies of Proust, Wilde, Stendahl, and other writers; the quoted passages all focus on the death of the artist in question and are accompanied by a photograph of the writer’s tombstone. These grisly selections (the details of Wilde’s postmortem are particularly gruesome) reveal Joshua’s morbid curiosity and parallel his descent into madness. As he reconstructs the novel’s atrocities and attempts to vilify Leon, Haigh’s own actions and reliability become more dubious. Ultimately, his inquiry into the nature of evil is too successful; Haigh unknowingly indicts himself as evil’s practitioner and disciple. [Jason Picone]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Letters from Hanusse by Joshua Haigh. Ed. Douglas Messerli Jason Picone Joshua Haigh. Letters from Hanusse. Ed. Douglas Messerli. Green Integer, 2000. 291 pp. Paper: $12.95. A nightmarish vision of malevolence and depravity, Letters from Hanusse is the third volume in the Structure of Destruction series, Douglas Messerli’s examination of evil in the twentieth century. The novel is composed of a series of letters purportedly written by Joshua Haigh, an anonymous figure who became dangerously obsessed with Messerli’s fiction. While Haigh is clearly a construction of Messerli’s, the mere suggestion that Haigh’s account could be real only adds to the book’s exquisite sense of terror. Letters from Hanusse is Haigh’s first-person account of his involvement with Leon, a charismatic figure he and his wife, Hannah, run afoul of in Queens during the 1960s. Under Leon’s tutelage, the couple succumbs to the nonconformist spirit of the era and enjoys an open sexual relationship with Leon and his wife, Elizabeth. After each woman has a child, the couples’ arrangement deteriorates drastically, though Haigh’s recollection of what transpires is disturbingly murky. Haigh alleges that Leon is guilty of murder and attempting to sell the children into slavery, but no clear distinction is made between fact and suspicion. Interwoven throughout the narrative are excerpts from biographies of Proust, Wilde, Stendahl, and other writers; the quoted passages all focus on the death of the artist in question and are accompanied by a photograph of the writer’s tombstone. These grisly selections (the details of Wilde’s postmortem are particularly gruesome) reveal Joshua’s morbid curiosity and parallel his descent into madness. As he reconstructs the novel’s atrocities and attempts to vilify Leon, Haigh’s own actions and reliability become more dubious. Ultimately, his inquiry into the nature of evil is too successful; Haigh unknowingly indicts himself as evil’s practitioner and disciple. [Jason Picone]

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