Music, in a Foreign Language - Andrew Crumey

Self-consciously intellectual novel about the construction of a (literary, historical, personal) narrative. The "author" presents several attempts at writing about two people who meet on a train, but each time veers off into a story about death and betrayal centred on the father of one of the characters, and complains that

the tree of possibilities branches so quickly, that it soon becomes impossible to follow with any degree of completeness, all the many middles and ends which can spring from a single beginning.

The whole thing is set in an alternative present, the inverse of the situation the "author" describes when he observes that

the alternatives seem impossible only because they didn't happen. It's left to writers now to dream of all the other equally probable outcomes which history could have chosen - like that genre of novel now appearing, based on the premise that the German occupation never occurred, and that the Communists were not elected in 1947.

Despite all the complexity, the central story is presented as a straight narrative and was engaging and satisfying.