This work is a compilation of the first and last facsimile pages of a hundred books. It's a profile of chaos and indirectly a self-portrait set in adolescence. I had read most of Hermann Hesse's writing while still at school but I'd never looked at this nonfiction work called "In Sight of Chaos." I was really more interested in his novels. I remember Hesse now as a very sentimental writer interested in expressive subjectivities and routes towards self-discovery. Perfect for adolescence. Insofar as it focuses on expression and transformation, "In Sight of Chaos" has a similar outlook to the novels, but it turns out to have been the more prescient of the books. In the extreme economic and political disorder of post-war Germany, Hesse predicts an even more traumatic future. He advises those who want to know about the imminent maelstrom and its perpetrators to read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Hesse uses terms from Nietzsche to describe the brothers' extreme involvement in life: "He reaches forth beyond prohibitions, beyond natural instincts, beyond morality." The change will be devastating but, he says, it will also renew Europe.

I had read Karamazov when I was young and I wondered if I had had a proclivity for narratives of violence. If Hesse thought Dostoevsky presaged disaster then what about all the other material I'd been reading? I began assembling all the books I could remember that might be concerned with chaos, choosing the first and last pages of each for a compilation of a hundred. The title In Sight of Chaos by Mark Harris simply acknowledges the appropriatation of the Hesse and makes it clear that this is a subjective selection. The collection remains idiosyncratic since it isn't the result of objective research into the most appropriate books. It's only what I was able to remember or root out during its production. Although it was always meant to be about the recent past, at some point I decided to include earlier texts which had helped form my ideas about the twentieth century. The first of these are by Voltaire and de Sade, which are then followed by nearly thirty nineteenth-century books. I also included about twenty-five publications that postdate the Second World War which I've found memorable.

Besides the novels, the book includes poetry (Cavafy, Mandlestam), philosophy (Hegel, Nietzsche), drama (Brecht, Beckett) autobiography (Shklovsky, Cleaver) and political writing (Kraus, Gramsci). One of the few texts about an historical event is The Wreck of the Medusa by Corréard and Savigny, two of the survivors on the raft. Their account of official incompetence, class rivalry, abandonment and violence provides the most pessimistic appraisal of the plight of the following two-hundred years. The compilation ends in 1969 with Lessing's The Four Gated City, the last in her Children of Violence series.

The paper and typeface used for the cover and spine of the book reproduce the appearance of the Hesse original. As an A4 book it is an adequate size for the largest of the facsimile pages.