Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives message of the book is the importance of exploring new ideas beyond the ones that have been traditionally passed down. The title word "Sum" refers to the Latin for "I am," as in "Cogito ergo sum". Like Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", "Sum" does not fit entirely into the traditional category of a novel. "Sum" has been called "philosofiction", an "experimental novel", and "a collection of thought experiments". Most of the stories are understood to "posit the afterlife as mirroring life on Earth" The New York Times Book Review called Sum a "delightful, thought-provoking little collection [which] belongs to that category
Mr. Cogito which unequivocally identifies the character with the poet for the very first time in the oeuvre. It mentions his return to his homeland, and the other poems in the collection treat about various aspects of Mr. Cogito's being – imagination ("Mr. Cogito and the Imagination"), longevity ("Mr. Cogito and Longevity"), virtue ("Mr. Cogito on Virtue"), eschatological concepts ("Mr. Cogito's Eschatological Premonitions"), bloodshed ("Mr. Cogito Thinks about Blood"), a contact with Maria Rasputin ("Mr. Cogito and Maria Rasputin – an Attempt at Contact"), the need for precision ("Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision), the notes from a house of the