Kenneth Bernard

In this haunting narration from a postmillennial urban zero zone, the central character gains hope, strength, and renewed energy from conducting a nearly invisible campaign of microsabotage against a surrounding but amorphous bureaucratic terror. A skeptical new conscript to the burial clubs of the aged, the protagonist performs small but cunning acts of resistance. He recreates whimsical conversations with his son, now co-opted by the same forces that have lately grown aware of him. He inserts mistakes in the club’s reports to the district, thereby defiantly remaking history in small ways. By slow degrees his acts put him in contact with what appears to be an organization of resistance. Then the forces of closure and constriction, quick to snuff out the merest hint of individuality, surround him with violence and images of death. His only recourse, other than capitulation, dissimulation, or death, is flight-but only to a wasteland on the edge of civilization. Living in an abandoned but mysteriously furnished garbage truck, he finds solace in the mongrels that roam the area, broods like a fisher king upon the rubble as winter impends, and plots the “burial” of his narration deep within the district file. From the District File is a finely tuned dramatic novel that re-invents the underground man for the nineties and in so doing gives us a story that is muted but powerful and oddly transcendent.