If you were into that feeling when, as a child (or adult), you discovered something nobody else knew about — something like the spot on your back where the scratch travels right into your brain, or a new band, or a good bathroom on your college campus that now, since you told everybody about it, is constantly occupied and reeking of your colleagues’ poop — Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is the perfect book for you. In fact, it calls out to you. It screams in your direction. It yearns to pull you into its vortex and spit you back out with information about the painter (and subject of the novella) Count Hugo Beckenbauer, a person who is not historically real yet is nevertheless more alive than most ‘real’ people. You, whoever you are, reading these words now, must also know of this feeling: a shaking of self which surfaces when a work of art brushes your soul.

I should warn you about one thing: this book is full of quibbling academics that surround the body of work of Count Hugo Beckenbauer, known almost exclusively (to them) for his painting Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. They fight and generally disagree on the subject of Beckenbauer’s work, not to mention matters of apocalypse and one sacred, holy donkey that may (or may not) be looking at the burning of the city of Jerusalem. 

And that’s it. That’s the whole book. 

I spent a really long time trying to find the painting online before I realized it didn’t exist. The image on the cover is a different painting entirely. A part of me still believes, however, that it is out there, waiting to be found. And if I cannot believe that, then I cannot believe anything at all.

I believe Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is the only spiritual book I have ever read. The proof is in the dedication of the quibbling academics, in the way they connect body and soul to Beckenbauer’s work. They live like monks. Their bodies become the conduits of art. What relationships they have with their families, with their wives, disintegrate, and the painting is all that remains. They tremble, they feel those sensations which seem to come from beyond when shaken so greatly by a work of art. I too have been there, standing in museums, confused and terrified, alive in the presence of a painting ignored by many others yet infinitely meaningful to me. 

Never in my life have I believed more in the conviction of two characters in their quest for art. They spend their whole lives devoted to one of only three surviving works by a sixteenth-century painter who lived an even more monastic life than them, living his final days blind in a barn, devoted entirely to his art and yet accomplishing nothing, not even a presence among his peers in his lifetime. (And who hasn’t been there? i.e., trying to work the name of a crush into the body of a text, spending hours revising and revising because the added name makes no sense and requires a total and complete overhaul to make work, and then reading it at a university-wide event, only to find yourself crying in the bathroom alone at the end of the day?) There is something alive and vibrating in the connection between all of these bodies — those in the world of art criticism and that of the artist nearly half a millennia ago.

If I had to sum up this book in only a few words, it would be these: who gets to decide what something means? I feel the same way thinking about how many books there are to read, and that I can never read most of them, let alone understand any of them. I hardly understood this one—Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is one of those small books, in the words of Alejandro Zambra, that “fascinate and wound.” I cannot think of a moment when I did not feel the pleasure which comes with reading a tightly wound, magic box book, a sort of perfect, miniature world, with too sharp pangs of sadness that left me unsure of myself by the final page. 

Please, read this book. And then when you do — you, who also look into the vacuum of art and feels that sort of jolt which travels so quickly down the spine — we can argue about it, you and me, together, all of us can, because, really, what’s art there to do if not to make us quibble over those things which hover in our minds but never quite resolve?