cmpolitano interview[s]

“[M]y novels…might sit slightly on the outside of things”: An Interview with Adrian Duncan — Cristina Politano

Adrian Duncan is a Berlin-based writer whose novels are often influenced by his upbringing in Ireland, as well as his formal education and decade of experience as an engineer. His most recent novel, A Thought Without Collision, draws heavily from both influences, narrating the life of a young Irish maths prodigy named Catherine who discovers her gift as a young girl early in the twentieth century and winds up the confidante of Dr. Joseph Alois, Duncan’s fictionalized version of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the course of narrating their unlikely bond, Duncan develops a unique approach to cognition and interiority, one that affords us insight into the mind of a young prodigy as it develops new ideas and engages with new concepts in real time. I sat down with Adrian Duncan to discuss these themes among others. The following is a transcription of our conversation.

What is the importance of geography to the novel?

The novel is structured through two notes, ‘1’ and ‘2’. The “ones” progress through the novel in the Midlands, in 1920s Ireland. And then the “twos” are up in the northeast coast of Scotland, not far from Aberdeen. So the ones, essentially that’s my home. I’m from the Midlands of Ireland, and my parents are from towns called Ballymahon and Lanesborough in county Longford. There’s a small road that runs between them, and that seems to be an energy line for me. I keep going back to that landscape. It is bog land, and even though I’m from there and have spent a lot of time on that land, I don’t really understand where things are. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how to get somewhere properly. So it’s quite mysterious to me still, the landscape around that piece of road. I find myself often going back and placing my novels in that landscape, as if to try and eke some meaning from that land. I don’t really understand why I’m doing it, but I find myself doing it. It seems to be full of energy, let’s say.

And then the other landscape, the twos, is the northeast of Scotland in the early 1950s. This came about for two reasons. First of all, I studied engineering in Aberdeen up in the northeast of Scotland. In the ’90s there was still a very strong oil industry up there. So the engineering course there was a good one to do from that point of view. I got to know Aberdeen quite well. Second, in this story, the character Dr. Joseph Alois is loosely based on Wittgenstein, and there was a moment in Wittgenstein’s life when he was in Norway and he built his own house on the cliff side of a fjord. That house has actually been rebuilt. It was knocked down years ago and then rebuilt recently by fans of Wittgenstein’s work. I didn’t want to put Alois’s house in Norway, because that’d be too on the nose, so I decided to put it up north near Aberdeen. Then I found myself writing about Aberdeen City a little bit later in the novel. As a novelist, you follow the energy and you follow experiences as well, particularly formative experiences.

Can you expand on your background in engineering and how you came to writing?

When I was 17, I left Ireland and I studied engineering in Scotland. I got an undergraduate degree, and then I came back out into the industry and I worked as an engineer until 2008. I was a structural engineer, so I used to design the structures for large buildings. During the boom years in Dublin, it was extremely stressful. You would have these large structures in your mind – maybe four or five different buildings at a time. You’d know them very intimately because you designed the structure. Things like where and how certain columns meet certain beams would be spatially clear in your  mind. I remember I finished one particularly large project that I’d spent about three years on, and when I was walking around the building near the end, I saw the structural solutions I’d come up with all being covered over. I knew this would be the case, but seeing it happening was quite dispiriting to me – that all this creative and mental work was just disappearing behind gleaming office walls and its facade. I had the thought then that any competent engineer could have done this, and I realized that this wasn’t going to be enough for me in my life. So, I decided to go to art college out in Dun Laoghaire, which is in the south side of Dublin City. This was summer 2008.

I started doing creative writing evening courses up in the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin at that time, too. So during the day I’d be out in Dun Laoghaire doing visual art, and then in the evening, once a week, I’d be doing creative writing. It soon occurred to me that when you’re an engineer, when there’s a problem, you need to think deductively until that problem is removed. Whereas in the visual arts and in creative writing, you don’t need to get rid of problems. They can be there for the duration of a whole project, and they don’t need to be gotten rid of. So I decided to take a leap of faith. I was 30 at the time, in 2008, and I decided that I wasn’t, in a creative sense, going to plan anything. That was a drastic thing for me to do, to kind of go, “I’m not going to plan my short stories, art projects, video works, anything – just see what happens, and try to trust how I improvise with the material as it appears and as I go.” This is very different to what an engineer would do. But by now I’m working in this way about maybe 20 years, and I couldn’t think of doing it any other way.

I should say that nothing really came together for a couple years because it was such an open-ended and new way of working. I was barely even able to pull a short story together. And then after a year or so more, I started getting short stories published in the Dublin Review, which is this really wonderful journal that’s edited by Brendan Barrington. I worked with him quite a bit on these short stories. He is a brilliant editor. And then the Stinging Fly took one of my short stories. Sally Rooney was the guest editor at the time, and she took one I’d written about football (soccer) called Prosineċki. I think that was 2017 or 2018. She was very nice to deal with. In think she was working on Normal People, her second novel, then, which has some football in it. So we had a nice interaction about how football and writing are similar in ways

Then, I published my first novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site. I’d spent four years struggling with that. And then my second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, came very quickly afterwards. I wrote that in about four weeks, and then edited it and worked on it for months, but it was published a year later. And then the short-story collection Midfield Dynamo, which contained a lot of these stories that had appeared in the Dublin Review … and then after that novels three, four and now five came. So that’s basically how the journey happened.

All of the entries in On Certainty are dated. And as I read it, I realized there was a moment near the end of Wittgenstein’s life, when he made an entry into this book and this date coincided with my mother’s sixth birthday. Then suddenly two figures popped into view – a six-year-old girl, and a dying man with curly hair.

You mentioned the Alois-Wittgenstein parallel. Are there any historical parallels for Catherine?

The book originated from two characters. I’m not a scholar by any stretch, but I do read some scholars’ writings about Wittgenstein. And I just enjoy sitting down and reading his work, particularly Philosophical Investigations. You come across a number of questions and queries that you won’t find anywhere else in the world. He has such an interesting way of framing the world, framing problems, framing questions. It’s a very addictive thing to do, to sit with him for half an hour once or twice a week. I was reading On Certainty, which was one of his several books that were published posthumously. On Certainty was basically a sheaf of papers at first that one of his executors, Elizabeth Anscombe brought together on his behalf. She was an Irish philosopher of ethics and logic and she wrote about religion, too. She studied in Oxford and then under Wittgenstein in Cambridge. If there was any person that Catherine might be at first based on in an historic sense, it would be her. But at the same time I don’t yet know that much about Anscombe’s life.

All of the entries in On Certainty are dated. And as I read it, I realized there was a moment near the end of Wittgenstein’s life, when he made an entry into this book and this date coincided with my mother’s sixth birthday. Then suddenly two figures popped into view – a six-year-old girl, and a dying man with curly hair. And then I just started writing these fictional characters into being. Then the idea that they would meet somehow by her being older, brought these other mechanisms into being. But the originating aspect was that particular day in 1951, when Wittgenstein was nearing the end and wrote an entry into this book-in-progress, on the same date as my mother’s birthday.

We get a lot of passages that deal rather intimately with Catherine’s interiority and her cognition.

I wanted to show the cognitive activities: those really intimate moments when you first start learning something. I’m very interested in this moment when you’re just picking up patterns of something being shown to you, and then it starts bending into actual knowledge, and you think: “I don’t need to return to this pattern again. I’ve stepped beyond the pattern, and I understand.” Whether it’s a piece of grammar or a piece of mathematics. “I understand how that function works now because I’ve been shown what it does over and over again. I can lift it out of these particular cases and use it generally.” I’ve had that more recently when I moved to Germany and learned German. You return to a very infantile state when you’re learning a language freshly. And because you’re an adult you’ve got so many rational habits in place, and you’re able to see and detect the problems of learning because you’re sort of aware of what’s happening while you learn. You’re not this malleable person who just takes in information, or at least not as malleable as you were when you were a young child. If you notice the way young children pick up languages compared to adults, it’s extremely entertaining to see how easily they do it.

Then there’s the numerics, the mathematics, and the philosophy. This is something I’ve been interested in for years. When I was in art college, there was this wonderful BBC program that had been put up on YouTube. They were discussions made during the late ’70s and mid-‘80s, all chaired by a writer called Bryan Magee. The show was called Men of Ideas. I taught myself the outline of the history of Western philosophy through looking at these discussions and then afterwards going deeper into whatever thinkers I found interesting. I did this for about 20 years, and then I would look at more of these free online lectures from different universities. I started becoming interested in Wittgenstein and then interested in Frege, the nineteenth-century German logician. What I found very interesting about his projects was in the late 1870s, he started trying to reimagine mathematics from a logical basis – that it was a branch of logic. He would often reduce or rethink something that most people would take for granted, like, say, a number, and ask: “What is it? How does it work? How do you show it logically?” Extremely ‘simple’ questions. I think this is why Wittgenstein admired him so much, because he got to such elementary questions about mathematics and language.

Anyway, I was very interested in this stuff, and it started finding its way into the book because of my enthusiasm for it. I felt that a young child who is learning numbers afresh could have these very imaginative views of what they are, without it necessarily being difficult for readers to grab a hold of.

It wasn’t so much the Civil War in Ireland or necessarily the World Wars, although the interwar period to me is a very interesting time. But it was the monetarism and the economic shifts that drew me to it most.

We get some snippets of European history: the Irish Civil War and the World Wars.

One of the main reasons for those particular dates in the early-to-mid-1920s was not just that it was after World War I, but that there was also a moment then when the world economy snipped itself away from gold. Instead of valuing the dollar or the pound against gold, they entered into a period of monetarism, which is basically where the value of currency is relative to other currencies as opposed to tethered to something in the ground on the earth that’s precious. This to me was an extremely interesting moment in Western economics, and I thought it would be in that moment that Catherine’s father, who was an extraordinary gambler, would be seduced by this seemingly easy way to make vast sums of money. This of course is one of the fallouts in the book, his mis-judgment of the probabilities of the future value of the currency he buys. Then of course the Wall Street crash of 1929 came, which destroyed speculators all over the world. So these were the moments in history that were important to the story. And not just because of the impact they had on people’s lives but also because of the mathematical models that underpins them: Probability – the way in which the future is measured using numerical models. So those things just came together. It wasn’t so much the Civil War in Ireland or necessarily the World Wars, although the interwar period to me is a very interesting time. But it was the monetarism and the economic shifts that drew me to it most.

How does Austin figure into the broader plot? He seems like a sort of hapless character who we’re introduced to and then is kind of summarily taken away.

The importance of Austin is that he’s the photographer, so he’s documenting people’s lives. He’s not from the locale either. He’s been excommunicated by his family because he sold out his brother who was on the other side of the Civil War in Ireland. He is an aspirational figure in that he aspires to greater things. His interest in not just photography but also in golf. When I was young, from the age of about 11 to 16, I was obsessed by the game of golf. It wasn’t very expensive to be a junior member in Longford – 25-quid-a-year, something like that, and because I am from a family with many siblings, it was a good way for my parents to get rid of me for the day. I was studying technical drawing in school as well at that time, and I started conflating these two worlds. So the idea of designing a golf course then started becoming operative in my mind as I wrote Austin. In fact, I’ve since designed a golf course myself. Not that it’s been built, but I’ve designed one (and its clubhouse), just to try to better understand what the character Austin was doing. This idea that numbers would have characteristics and names, like the ninth hole in the golf course would have a particular length, difficulty, and orientation to the sun. This is why he became all the more interesting to me in the book because of how numerics are used in the sport he is so interested in. And then when he leaves these sets of drawings behind, it in turn introduces Catherine by chance to this idea that numbers can have other strange and solipsistic characteristics outside of just being things that are named, or used just for counting things.

So the idea of designing a golf course then started becoming operative in my mind as I wrote Austin. In fact, I’ve since designed a golf course myself. Not that it’s been built, but I’ve designed one (and its clubhouse), just to try to better understand what the character Austin was doing.

The relationship between Catherine and Alois is sort of ambiguous. Why?

My sense is—and of course this is obviously very open to interpretation—that the relationship between them is unrequited love. This is an old story. People have told the story countless times. And I think that the reasons for why it’s unrequited aren’t necessarily perfectly or wholly elucidated. But I do think that if there was a direction of love that it certainly is from Catherine towards Alois. He finds her fascinating. But I also think he is envious of her mental capacities. So it’s one of those relationships where they’re not necessarily very good at expressing their desires for each other. But there is still something that’s tying them together. There is an attraction of a kind. And the attraction might not be necessarily one of physical desire, but he’s very attracted to the way in which she might think or talk or act. So I suppose this attraction at different registers is what’s happening as opposed to necessarily a sort of “will they, won’t they” love story where there is an understood physical attraction and desire between them. So that’s what’s interesting to me in their relationship – how he would disagree with her, how he would look into her notebook sometimes when she isn’t there because he is curious about what she’s getting up to intellectually and she is curious about what he’s getting up to intellectually. The attraction happens through different registers for them, which is just as well because I don’t know if I’d be very good at writing a straight-up love story.

I felt it was kind of getting there with Francis and Claire or Austin and Claire.

That’s a much more traditional love triangle there. One is attracted to the other. The other doesn’t really have much interest. And then there emerges this sense of regret in it all. Those are the things that everyone’s probably experienced at some stage in their life. It was nice to revisit those as well and write them particularly in that more straightforward way where I’m not having to overthink it.

Can you expand on the meaning of the title, A Though Without Collision?

I didn’t start with the title in mind. I realized near the end of the book when Catherine utters the words “a thought without collision” that it was a very interesting thing for her to say. My sense is that when someone reads the book they’ll get an understanding of what it means to themselves. I don’t want to be over-prescriptive in terms of what I mean by it. But I do think that it sort of sits along the lines of the kind of thought that appears in one kind of activity that can’t be elucidated in words … something like that.

Is this book an installment in a cycle? How do you relate it to your previous novel?

Apart from the connection with the landscape near my home, my first three books were about technicians. My debut was about an engineer on a building site. The second book is about a retired bridge engineer who’s a very, very obsessive thinker. He thinks about bridges and talks about bridges and thinks through a very narrow set of other objects. Mathematics is obviously a central concern of his as well. The third book was The Geometer Lobachevsky, which is about surveying land, essentially. So those three, I suppose, are related because there are technicians at the centre of them and the work of technicians.

The fourth novel I wrote – The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth – was about a sculptor. So the writing changed. There was a different style. The writing reflected the way in which the narrator thinks. So Love Notes from a German Building Site, that first book, it occurred to me after a couple of years of writing it: Why should this take the form of a novel? This guy isn’t a novelist. He’s an engineer. So the book should probably take the form of a little machine of some kind. And then the book started making more sense to me. I would say the same with The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth. It took me a while to realise that this sculptor wouldn’t necessarily write a novel in the style of a traditional novel. He would think in a very fragmented, hesitant, unsure, doubtful way. And then at times he’d make a very decisive movement, a sort of sculpted stroke, in how he thinks. A Thought Without Collision feels like a return to the technical thinking, but not of an applied kind.

And then when he leaves these sets of drawings behind, it in turn introduces Catherine by chance to this idea that numbers can have other strange and solipsistic characteristics outside of just being things that are named, or used just for counting things.

Do you consider yourself an Irish writer?

I don’t really think of it too much in those terms. One thing I can say is, there is an ‘Irishness’ to it. There’s lots of turns of phrase that are quite ‘Longfordian’. The narrators, I don’t know if they sound particularly ‘Irish’, but because I’ve been in Germany for thirteen years and all my novels and my short-story collection have been published while I’ve lived in Germany—the German language and my struggles with it have been an important part of where my novels have come from. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as saying that I’m a German-Irish writer or anything like that, but my daily struggles with the language and the culture have definitely fed into the books. I think it probably has produced an outsider-ness in the characters, partly because I feel very much like an outsider here.

Who do you consider your influences?

I was hugely influenced by Russian short-story writers when I started writing. I was drawn to that absurdity and that tone. I’ve read a lot of Marguerite Yourcenar over the years, too – Memoirs of Hadrian, and particularly her two non-fiction books about her family histories – Too Many Years and Dear Departed. I would say my interests are ‘Eastern European’ also. Recently I’ve been re-reading Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech writer. I really enjoy that stuff.

I don’t read much contemporary writing at all. The reason is because when I was studying art, I realized that when you’re a student, you look at a lot of contemporary art, and you find yourself aping what is successful without thinking about it … without really knowing it. And when I was starting to write novels, I thought to myself, “Don’t make that mistake with writing. Turn away from what’s happening in the industry,” – because I think that a lot of what is considered ‘good’ in the industry or ‘good’ in the literary world is just something that the industry has deemed valuable. And really what you’re looking at is a successful trope or something that fits an industry norm, and when I wrote my novels I didn’t really want to partake in that. One of the upshots of this is that my novels I think might sit slightly on the outside of things.

A Thought without Collision is now available from Serpent’s Tail.

Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer. He has published five novels, a collection of short stories and a book of non-fiction titled Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss. His novels and his short-story collection have been shortlisted for several book prizes. His fiction is published by Tuskar Rock Press (Profile Books) and his latest novel A Thought without Collision was published in August 2026. His third novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, will be published in French in September 2026. Duncan’s film works have screened in competition and in official selections at CPH:DOX, IFFR, Karlovy Vary, HotDocs, Biografilm, IDFA, RiDM, Dokufest, among others. His most recent film, the award-winning, Latina, Latina (84mins, 2025) was funded by the Arts Council’s Reel Art Award and will show this winter at the Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History at Columbia University.

Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.