How do you find meaning in a novel that rejects it so thoroughly? The publisher’s blurb for The Theory of Everything, Yumna Kassab’s new work, describes it as many things, among them “a rant, a manifesto … a dramatisation of actual events, a horror-scape … five mini-novels or else five post-novels … an agreement, a wink”. In perhaps her most ambitious work to date, all of these things could be true.
While Kassab, the inaugural Parramatta laureate in literature, has become known for her fragmented, polyphonic style, here she breaks the mould even further, removing the narrative supports of her earlier works Politica and The Lovers and taking us out of the familiar forms of the novel, novella, short story, even vignette, into something – indescribably – else.
