Fantastic Metropolis

The Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano

(W.W. Norton & Company, 1989)

I’m not really sure what the right word is for this beautiful mosaic text. When in doubt, let’s call it a novel, or, better, a “novel.” In fact, though, it’s a compilation of surreal images and very short narriticules (most only a few lines long, none more than two pages of prose) that are sometimes political in nature, sometimes surreal, sometimes philosophical, sometimes fictional, sometimes factual, and almost always highly metaphorical, meditative, and elusive. None contributes to an overarching plot. Some characters reappear here and there, but one doesn’t read to discover what happens to them. Galeano was born in Uruguay, and his work inhabits the same narratological space as such magical realists as Borges, García Márquez, and, particularly, Cortázar, but his concern with form and his visual awareness set him apart from these writers in a deeply stimulating way.

VAS: An Opera in Flatland, Steve Tomasula, Stephen Farrell (Art & Design)

(Barrytown, 2003)

This gorgeous book is a must-read for anyone interested in notions of textual collage and exploration of the technological reality of the page. The comic narrative concerns a guy living in a (literally) two-dimensional suburban world who is struggling over whether or not to get a vasectomy, but it’s the form of the narrative—i.e., the body of the text about the text of the body—that makes this novel an unforgettably unique pleasure.

P, Andrew Lewis Conn

(Soft Skull Press, 2003)

If Andrew Lewis Conn’s impressive debut novel were a DVD, you would find it in the cult section of the video-rental store alongside those risky narrative oddities you’re genetically wired either to love or loathe—or, often, a little of both at once. P follows the peregrinations of pudgy thirty-three-year-old ex-porn-star and failed pornographer Benji and super smart doobee-smoking Nietzsche-reading nine-year-old runaway Finn as their paths sporadically intersect on the streets of New York one day in 1996. Benji is haunted by memories of his dead lover, Penelope, and how they were seduced, worn down, and ultimately burned out by the universe of blue movies. Finn, the daughter of a divorced showbiz lawyer-mom, feels like a prisoner in her claustrophobic world of the Upper East Side. Both search for something that feels like a real home and real human contact. The innovative form their tale takes is in good part an appropriation and manipulation of Joyce’s Ulysses with a Nabokovian-Pynchonian backbeat. P begins, for instance, on 16 June (i.e., Bloomsday), flirts with stream-of-consciousness, and embraces linguistic sportiness. One chapter is governed by headlines, another shaped around a catechismic series of questions and answers, and a third mimics a screenplay set in a psychedelic nighttown. Unhappily, sometimes such self-conscious pyrotechnics carry the whiff of the undergraduate classroom with them. Sometimes they seem forced and inflated, more willing to imitate than transform the source material in imaginatively liberating ways. And, like most small-press books, P is peppered with gaffs in layout and proofreading. But somehow all that doesn’t matter much in the end. Conn’s technical talent, handle on smut arcana and insight, and strong sense of character and place make P a sharp, funny, punny, moving avant-pop love song whose heart understands “that every human relationship is, finally, a story of loss.”