When people are asked about their influences they tend to answer aspirationally: these are the authors I like, would like to write like, wouldn’t mind being compared to or read alongside of. But influence is usually real only insofar as it operates in ways the author isn’t entirely aware of at the time of writing (…). Which is why it’s usually better to ask a third party, like a critic, who an author’s influences are, rather than the writer.

Regarding Joyce, there’s very little of him in this book, so far as I can tell. The first draft ended with a long Molly Bloomish monologue—which is to say it used stream-of-consciousness techniques pioneered by Joyce in that chapter of Ulysses, but it eventually got rewritten in a more Bernhardian style as a result of other changes that had been made in the meantime. 

Ryan Ruby: Interview mit Ben Libman, in: The Unnamable, 20. April 2022.