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As society has been obsessing over computers impersonating humans, Hamid Ismailov — a writer forever tinkering with different modes of storytelling — has been swimming against the current. In other words, he has been impersonating a computer.

Originally written in Uzbek and published serially on Telegram, We Computers is narrated by a large language model-style AI, and is a genre-blending, time-bending, head-spinning novel about poetry, authorship, love, knowledge, censorship, truth, divinity and other similarly capacious human concerns.

Unruly and uncontainable, the book is in fact structured around a very contained form: the ghazal, an ancient poetic love song that remains a popular storytelling device in Central and South Asia. This is not the first time Ismailov has taken poetics as his subject. His previous novel Manaschi revolves around the Manas, an oral folk epic from Kyrgyzstan, while several of his other novels — A Poet and Bin-Laden and The Devils’ Dance (which won the EBRD Literature Prize in 2019) — deal with the lives and legacies of poets.

It is a book of odds and ends, revisions and corrections, false starts and digressions, as if delighting in its own difficulty

Born in Soviet Kyrgyzstan, raised in Uzbekistan, and a UK-based writer-in-exile since 1992, Ismailov is at home in many places at once. In his fiction he splices together ideas and stories from distant authors and eras, unearthing hidden connections and uncanny echoes that cross time, space and dimensions. We Computers is his most expansive and imaginative creation yet.

At its centre is Jon-Perse, a French psychologist turned poet turned computer geek who in the early 1980s dreams of creating computerised literature. Roland Barthes has already proclaimed the death of the author, but Jon-Perse wants to go one step further with authorless, personalised literature for all. If Stendhal posits that the novel was a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul, Jon-Perse wants to do away with the violinist altogether.

A trippy, literary hall of mirrors then serves as the book’s plot as we follow Jon-Perse on his quest. Beyond the immediate concerns of the author’s disastrous love life we encounter Uzbek folk tales, Sufi poetry, a biography of the Persian poet Hafez, a compendium of French philosophy, appearances from Rumi, Mandelstam and Rimbaud, all narrated through a series of inputs and outputs by this disembodied, but rather personable, “We”.

All this shape-shifting makes for a riveting, if unstraightforward, read; it is a book of odds and ends, revisions and corrections, false starts and digressions, as if delighting in its own difficulty and mimicking something like the process of writing itself. At one point, the narrator likens poetry to “bits and pieces that explained the entire world”, a good definition for the book in our hands.

Stylistically, We Computers possesses a Calvino-esque energy as the narrator frequently interrupts itself with interjections such as “Before We continue Our story”, “If you’re wondering why” and “You also must have noticed”. Particular admiration must go to Shelley Fairweather-Vega, who has taken on this Sisyphean multilingual translation task and produced the most fluent of reading experiences.

If Jon-Perse’s utopian vision of computerised literature is seductive, while reading We Computers I couldn’t help but feel its literary shadow hiding in plain sight: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, written in the early days of the Soviet Union, the empire on whose fringes Ismailov grew up. The We of Zamyatin’s creation have not been liberated; rather, they have been condemned into unthinking.

Ismailov is too subtle a writer to turn We Computers into some polemic on the virtues or vices of AI — and anyway, aren’t we all already exhausted by that circular debate? But one quote from Michel Foucault that Jon-Perse feeds his computer has stayed with me and feels all too relevant for our moment: “There are invisible forms of oppression and domination,” he writes, “and we call them the new normal.”

We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega Yale University Press £15.99/$20, 296 pages

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