Zeev Smilansky's second book of prose is called "Money", but more precisely, more than money, it deals with data, in fact with big data - that is, the way in which the unimaginable abundance of information robs man of the ability to understand things with his mind, forcing him to make way for all Various algorithms, codes, robots and together with them, simply, to chaos.
The hero of "Cashif", a kind of greedy guy named Elisha, does not chase money at all.
He is a lover of plants and stars, and "money, to his taste, was nothing more than an excrement that people excrete as part of their existence process."
But after he failed to get tenure in the academy in his field, astrophysics, he leaves Seattle University and integrates, thanks to his mathematical abilities, into the world of fintech (financial technology).
He gets a job at a New York hedge fund called "Harmony", which, in ironic contrast to its name, derives huge profits precisely from periods of global crisis and economic collapses.
The secret of the success of the "Harmony" fund is not a deep understanding of the global markets, but a statistical model - machine code - that has been successfully operated for many years, so that no one, not even the managers of the fund, know what it is actually investing in at any given moment.
One of them tells Elisha: "This system trades itself in these bonds, and pours out money, lots of money, hundreds of millions of dollars every year, maybe a billion, without anyone touching it, or even without anyone knowing what's going on in there - running, pumping money from the world and squeezes it, like that, into the harmonic."
Because the code is written in ancient languages, no one has access to it, except for its developer, a reclusive genius who lives on the other side of the continent, in California, in a shabby cabin perched on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and Elisha is sent there to learn the secrets of the code and develop a similar code - perhaps even more effective - in current languages.
But while Elisha sits in his house, the key reveals to him not only Harmoni's secret code, but also the secret of the world as he understands it.
"There is no order," he tells Elisha, and adds: "But! But! But, but, but within the disorder there is order," and then in a whisper: "There is order in the disorder."
This insight, regarding the order hidden somewhere in the depths of the disorder, is not only the key to the fintech world, as "Money" understands it, but also the fundamental formal key of the book, which is read as if it does not apply to the organizing hierarchies of main and main or accepted conventions of Writing a story: it is a text full of frantic jumps and capricious and inexplicable characters, it does not have a distinct narrator's voice, and most of all - it has a sea of details, inventory lists and blocks of information that, if not for the reasoned conceptual basis, would create an insurmountable obstacle.
For example, when Elisha plays, during a flight, a computerized card game, the moves of the game are described, in detail, over about two pages ("He put a diamond six on a seven and after that we discovered a five and then a four, so that now he had a tower of five arranged diamonds... ").
As he prepares tea, his actions unfold across my face like a column ("He filled the kettle with water and returned and placed it on its base and pressed the button. An orange light came on at the bottom of the kettle and a hiss came from it...").
When he arrives at a convenience store at a gas station, the contents of the shelves are spread over a page and a half ("The first shelf is dedicated to beer. There were Deweser, Bud Light, Heineken, Heineken Light, Bosch, Kors, Kors Light, Miller, Miller Light, Corona, Becks , Pabst, Sam Adams, Red Rock, Archies, Brank, Shakuma, Tyree Stone, Zolfi Burst, Middle Giant, Cookie's, small and large bottles, small and large cans..."), as well as an order at a roadside restaurant , scanning radio stations, travel routes, the content of a statistics book and a mathematical lecture loaded with professional terms and more.
Congestion without realistic fullness.
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This informational congestion does not produce a realistic fullness, for example in the style of Emile Zola's naturalistic novels, but brings to mind the consciousness of a data analyst, human or robotic, that sinks into the data and makes its way through it with statistical tools.
It also obliges the readers, if they want to survive the book, to participate in this activity - to sift and filter large parts of it.
In this sense, the book not only represents the age of big data, but also produces the readers who will suit it, it obliges us to take an active part in the human practices necessary in the age of big data, and first and foremost in the massive elimination of unnecessary blocks of information.
At the end of the novella "Money" appears a short story called "Exit", which continues some of the conceptual lines developed earlier but also deviates from them greatly.
Like other characters throughout the book, who sit in remote holes and take control of databases through their personal computers, the protagonist of "Exit" remotely activates, from a seat in the south, a robotic system that knows how to pick up a fork or spoon on command or mix coffee in a cup.
But in this story a detail is revealed that changes the point of view on the character and "closes the story" from a structural point of view, and precisely this tightening makes it weaker than the novella that preceded it.
Although the problems the book deals with - the chaos, the loss of values and the excess of data - are completely contemporary, some of the reality it describes has not happened (yet): at one point in the novella it becomes clear that in the US there are "protesters or rebels" who are bombing government buildings (the details are vague, the fact This is mentioned almost in passing), while at the same time in Israel, the "special forces" are abducting civilians at night.
The chaotic and restless world described here does belong in part to the future, but it is a contemporary lament for the order, the values and the meaning that have been lost from reality, and it is doubtful whether they are still relevant to the literary world as well.
"Money", precisely because of its flaws, raises this question: Should the world of literature continue to present an organized and disciplined reality and characters with volume and consistency, even when it is clear that the world we live in has long since moved far away from this fiction?
Silver, Zeev Smilansky, Patel Publishing, 187 p.
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