Kosinski slips in and out of their fragmented narratives, a presence at once signally important and maddeningly elusive.
To tell his stories, Banerjee, who has been based in Berlin since 2011, draws upon the visual and textual vocabulary of Western modernism: fragmented narratives, alternative endings and beginnings, repetitions, elisions, mixed-up chronology.
It is this sort of experience that most obviously marks out fragmented narratives as difficult texts, whether the book in question is JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest or David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress.
The appearance of the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar as a character in the Nocilla novel is Mallo's way of paying tribute to one of the most celebrated fragmented narratives of all: Hopscotch.
Both address Italy's fascist past through fragmented narratives and striking visual styles, and are based on literary texts: "Spider" on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Conformist" on the Alberto Moravia novel.
The last time Michael Ondaatje visited Sri Lanka in a novel was in 2000 with Anil's Ghost where, through a series of fragmented narratives, he presented a story of waste in a time of war.
