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Taking examples of a handful of authors from between the 1850s and 1950s, Said considers the span of individual careers as the text they each produce. It makes sense as the novel was starting to come into its prominence with the rise of an educated middle class in most Western countries and the mechanical process of text through typewriters. But neither of these, nor the economics of publishing, are where they begin.

The soon-to-be loneliest man in the British Empire-centred world is the one who starts of thinking he has it all when the next male Dombey comes along; but Paul Senior sacrifices too much in this future investment, first by neglecting his wife and then continuing this stubborn practice with his daughter. This tale is strikingly postmodern, in particular a technologically-challenged old seasalt Sol and new age nephew.

Inside Stephen’s head for the protean part of his odyssey, where the many thoughts on time, space, imagination and the projected stereoscope lead from his Aristotelian musings to who knows where. The editor cites several actual locations in 1904 Dublin, but the inner monologue skips over centuries of acquired knowledge while losing Stephen’s narrative role, making way for Leopold and Molly, the main protagonists?

Taking more than a page or two from the Inception screenplay, Verity and Wilf jump from one reality to another, making it hard to tell to whose subjective point of view each chapter belongs. The nefarious yet-to-be-seen antagonist Cursion operates through a system of projections with a spying app called Followr that can also be accessed by Lowbeer in her timeline, making Wilf, Rainey, Conner and Ash futurrs.

How about that: my choice to read this book with a somewhat random order of chapters instead of consecutive or chronological arrangement reflects the method Auerbach selected his examples, randomly from the books that were available at the libraries of Istanbul. Important how he wrote this all-encompassing book on reality in western literature at a point in history when Europe was tearing itself apart in unreal ways.

Not even attempting to connect the stories together, Rubens makes a wild claim about an impressive first person shooter that reinvents the role of the player, and somehow Williams’ interview probably had the author interrupting him several times with seemingly profound interjections on Missile Command that the game designer would only brush off with a half-hearted “yeah sure, that game” without a care.

Passing the halfway point in the novel, Verity gets to visit the future and starts learning what her mission will be, eventually after many formalities of drone-sharing. Wilf and Rainey are doing their best to assist with the process, but I can’t recall what motivates them; with all their time devoted to multidimensional stubs, it feels like little Thomas will be next seen as a teen. All part of a PR agent’s job?

Writing from the Roman Empire often reminds me of Christmas pageants in a variety of media, where Roman are cruel simpletons only concerned with taxes and grand showy gestures of punishment. Christian authors critical of Rome would present their heroes and saints as of the people, similiar enough to a receptive audience through a device Auerbach describes as figura yet hides all of the same Christian excess.

For all the hyperbole of Theurer and Adam’s creative vision, perhaps the game’s lasting influence is quite the opposite of what Rubens claims it is: tv shows, movies and celebrities like Interview creator and star Seth Rogen, how it looks cool and all hail humanity’s apocalyptic end. Funny now as Rubens opines against an expectation to “come together to sing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’” (p. 224).

More French novelists and a few steps closer to a modern sense of reality before things get all surreal in the twentieth century. The de Goncourt brothers and Zola have a knack for bringing up the fourth estate, to scandalous acclaim, much like the popular plays by Ibsen. But at long last does Auerbach stretch beyond the familiar to mention, all too briefly, the impact Russian authors had on their western neighbours.

Poets, psychopaths, aesthetes and pragmatists are in turn examined for their bifurcated views of personality, often limited in scope while Jung determines what works for each theory. The works of the German poet Schiller or American philosopher James get extended attention, breaking down their two-types into their multiple aspects; it still feels like Jung is holding back for his own discovery until the dust settles.

The multidimensional conversation begins, with Wilf assisted by Ash, meanwhile Verity seems surprisingly calm about the whole situation, still probably recovering from the motorcycle ride with her uppity barista, hired on by the laminae filling the gap that Eunice left in Verity’s life. She will be less shocked to learn she is in a stub than a dawning realization how much of her world is determined by these agents.

The study settles on the novel as a space of authority and molestation bringing the beginnings of Great Expectations and Nostromo under observation. There are a host of other novels to critique, briefly, but Said’s interests seem to be with unpacking non-fiction such as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Interpretation of Dreams to examine what each author claimed to have begun.

The study settles on the novel as a space of authority and molestation bringing the beginnings of Great Expectations and Nostromo under observation. There are a host of other novels to critique, briefly, but Said’s interests seem to be with unpacking non-fiction such as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Interpretation of Dreams to examine what each author claimed to have begun.

In presenting the French romantic historism found in authors Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, we get something like those classic three monkeys See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, only for the evil substitute modern realism, as one author pays no heed to everyday life, the other seeks no in-depth truth and the last goes off on artistic, even mystical, flights of fancy rather than a straightforward world as it is.

Theurer can rest a bit easier now that Missile Command is done and he has less nightmares about nuclear annihilation, allowing him to focus on nightmares of monsters from his childhood to create the game Tempest. His legacy for the former game is a waking nightmare of overly obsessed high score chasers who have taken mild amusement to creepy and combative heights. These monsters are on social media.

Writing a play to show everyday choices and compromises of average citizens during war, while that war was happening, is a daring project. Having Simone conjure up the dream life of France’s protectress, Joan of Arc, while also playing the role of The Dark Knight’s Joker has past, present and future converging in one production, designed for stage but showing many touches of Hollywood-style storytelling.

Schiller and Goethe are two names I have read a great deal about without having read much of their works (just both parts of Faust decades ago) and it may be that I should remain curious but not committed to reading either: Schiller specialized in melodrama, not reality, and Goethe got bothered by the revolutions in neighbouring nations to exclude them from his genetico-realistic-sensory style of literature.

Closer to where storylines will converge, Netherton suits up in an anthropomorphic drone to reach Verity’s stub, crossing the temporal threshold. Just before Eunice executes her escape and eventual Gandalf-like return, she and Verity share a moment staring at a mural that depicts Hillary’s victory over a grabby menace, a mere shadow of what might have been for them but a serious systems error for us in this stub.

There’s that famous dream sequence in the Simpsons episode ‘Homer vs. Patti and Selma’ where Homer needs to come up with an invention that restores his squandered family fortune. In the dream a marketing team are praising his genius yet preventing a curious Homer from seeing the “product in question.” Classic bit that gets replayed on almost every page of the last four chapters, but less amusingly.

A short chapter involving an exchange between two poets and infernal phantoms may not seem like much in the grand scheme of literature, but the emphasis Auerbach places upon literary inventiveness on display makes it seems like the only thing worth reading. Dante's Comedy does the amazing figural feat of telling all Christian history, past and future, filtered through an everyday reality of the poet himself.

There is a standard high school English lesson where students read the first four acts of a Shakespeare play, and then creatively write what they think happens in the fifth act: usually boys have a sudden eruption of violence, especially in the comedies. Gregory's writing is as clumsy and brutal, and yet for all its faults, says more about history than "the majority of the most polished humanists" (p. 93) - a lesson?

The present timeline is starting to coalesce into the experience most readers have with this kind of sci-fi, where an intelligent system rattles off vaguely understandable possibilities while the human operator (or reader) does what one can to keep up. In the distant future, I am doing what I can to recall the many Peripheral characters that Wilf interacts with, and I only had read that book three years ago.

Meditations are for dwelling in the moment, in this case, beginning at the beginning. Of course, someone like Nietzsche or Husserl or Auerbach has already said something related to what is about to be said, yet still takes that moment of pause to take it all in - and you start gasping for breath! And yet following the meditative practices, perhaps it is as simple as finding a mantra that works for individual readers.

Enter Theurer and his mission simply to create a game that would be popular enough to keep Atari's coin-op division rolling in quarters, but the mythologizing of his command of pixels and players' minds. Rubens repetitively makes him out to be the mastermind behind the minus-sum game while the strategic partner manager at Google gets to play armchair psychologist with his hero and yet denies readers a hero's journey.

A stopgap for western theatre that connects the Greek tragedies and Roman drama to Italian commedia dell'arte and English Renaissance plays was the liturgical pageant. The one selected for this chapter is a scene from the Garden of Eden, showing the whole scope of Christian beliefs set up as everyday reality. Was nobody in the audience skeptical of human innocence, not knowing good and evil before the apple?

Ping-ponging again between different timelines: a chapter here for Verity, next one catches up with Wilf, and repeat. The future has moved on little from The Peripheral but it is the exploration of the recent past in an alternate Russian hacker-less political landscape that is really appealing as an escape from our scary non-novel reality. Eunice is a piece of work with future foreshadowing spinning her web.

Petronius and Tacitus receive praise for their view from above of Roman society, depicting their speakers' worldview in each particular way that shapes the reality of the moment, suggesting the way each person present that world is more relevant than the world as it was and most likely continues to be. As an antidote, one of the Gospel stories presents a similar scene, yet overloaded with moral dictums for all times.

The preamble leading up to the creation of an iconic early video game has a lot to do with the Soviet Union and the United States, from the end of one war to the mutually assured destruction of the entire world. In the non-disco 70s, a couple of geeky guys made a fortune and invented a new medium form with the right amount of American can-do attitude, yet starting something as addictive as Atari’s often-used drugs.

It feels strange to read such a thick and well-regarded book on types without any familiar reference to alchemy as in his later books, but the seeds of this understanding are deeply planted with the opening discussion on religious disputes and philosophical stances. Each section reveals the bifurcation of types into a more complex understanding of the psyche; some amazingly succinct, intuitive description of reality.