Of all human illusions, the hardest to give up is the belief that consciousness exists after death.
Sorrentino, who died in 2006 at the age of 77, was a cleareyed observer of human illusion and the frailties and follies of the species.
"There is no cure for ugly," she says in her flat Rochester accent, "but you can make yourself into a human optical illusion".
It is as simple as this: dailiness is central to the deep-rooted human illusion of control.
These elements were present throughout his work, and all inform "The Abyss of Human Illusion," his final take on life's absurdity.
The title of Gilbert Sorrentino's last novel comes from Henry James's story "The Middle Years": "It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep".
Accordingly, "The Abyss of Human Illusion," with its 50 set pieces labeled by Roman numerals — the first a mere 130 words long, the last approximately 10 times that — is not so much a novel as a random collection of mini-narratives, some of them variations on previous Sorrentino themes, one a homage to Rimbaud, another a nod to Saul Bellow.
Even those of us who think that romantic love contains more than the usual share of human illusion are willingly floored by it now and then, in literature as in life.
What characterized that book characterizes this one -- an urge to integrate multiple bodies of information, a skepticism that is turned as much against scientific certitude as it is against human illusions, a dark awareness of the tragic past wedded to what seems an unkillable optimism.
Above all, Freud never ceased challenging human illusions.
