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While his influences included everything from “Huckleberry Finn” to the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of images of grotesque reality, little of this erudition called attention to itself in his fiction.

Elsewhere Alsadir engages with notables of decidedly more intellectual bent, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin.

On a busy street during the middle of the day, I was witnessing a grotesque and carnivalesque spectacle like something Mikhail Bakhtin would have written about in "Rabelais and His World."

Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian cultural critic and literary theorist, popularised the notion of the carnivalesque – a concept that became well-known in his country in the 1960s and much later in the West.

It was in the early months of my separation that I started to become acutely aware of this gratitude for the peculiar anonymous company that urban living offers — for the cafe just downstairs from my new apartment, where many of the same regular customers gathered each morning: the amiable elderly man chain-smoking and mansplaining trans-Atlantic politics; the mom-friends with their parked bassinets; the 20-something boys reading Bakhtin and Heidegger who never offered to help me carry my stroller up the stoop stairs.