A Novel Without a Head

Kaya Genç on “Headless by K.D.”

Not long ago I received an email from Goldin+Senneby, the Stockholm based artistic duo known for their explorations of withdrawal and invisibility in the field of international finance. The message appeared in the form of a banner on the screen of my iPad where I was reading Headless by K.D., a novel with a large cast of characters that, as it happens, includes Goldin+Senneby. It felt a bit like receiving a letter from Baron de Charlus while reading “In Search of Lost Time”. There was no way I could keep on reading the fictional text, when one of the characters had just sent me an email now waiting in my inbox.

In the email, Goldin+Senneby had clarified details about the Istanbul launch event of Headless by K.D. where I was invited to participate in alongside curator Maria Lind, cultural economist İsmail Ertürk, and Turkish curator-cum-art-writer Övül Durmuşoğlu. The project’s machinations had been meticulously planned by Goldin+Senneby for more than ten years. Their email made clear that they would not be attending the event. It seemed as if they wanted to pull the strings from afar, probably from their lodgings at Stockholm.

I learned that the reason I was picked for the book launch was a piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books a few months ago on the shape of modern detective fiction. In that essay I had discussed Roland Barthes’s concept of the death of the author and pointed to how it applied to contemporary crime novels that seemingly have nothing to do with the lofty concepts of French philosophers. You don’t have to be a post-structuralist theorist to see that Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders, David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web, and John Banville’s The Black-Eyed Blonde have a common feature: they all feature famous detective characters produced by dead authors. Those characters lead Lazarus-like lives, having raised from the dead by their authors who all enjoy a good health.

The ideas I’d discussed fit well with the Goldin+Senneby project where the novel’s author (“K.D.” according to the title) continually eludes the reader. The cover of Headless by K.D. features a blurb by Joseph O’Neill who calls it “mysterious and brilliant.” The O’Neill blurb provides the text a literary license with which booksellers can safely shelve Headless by K.D. in the literary fiction sections of their shelves.

What’s brilliant about the novel is that it uses the theoretical problem of authorship as its source of mystery; otherwise it is an ordinary detective novel composed in a stale prose style....