Oh metafiction...sometimes you unerringly fail to create something worth reading. Other times, you pop up in books like "The People of Paper" and create a whirlwind of hallucinatory imagery, magical realism-esque elements of the fantastic, and discuss loves lost and won through the battle of man versus the gods. And it is so, so good.
Until I opened this book and looked at the formatting, I couldn't ever remember hearing about it until recently. But I realized that my first workshop professor at USF, Stephen Beachy (author of "boneyard" and who blogs at Living Jelly) presented some excerpts of this book in one of our classes. I remember enjoying what I read, but couldn't really grasp the concept or the formatting at the time. This was well before I began playing with the fracturing of text and format in service of the story.
But I haven't been able to put this book down since it arrived in the mail a few days ago.
On earth, origami surgeons create paper organs for people in need of transplants; a bed-wetting father watches his wife leave him before moving to California with his daughter; that same father gathers support from the local gang and wages war on Saturn, believing him to be the reason his wife left; a whore made completely of paper who leaves scars on the tongues of her lovers; a baby Nostradamus predicts the future and speaks to children in blacked out messages; lovers come and lovers go, all dancing around each other through the haze of war-time.
In the heavens, Saturn's identity is revealed; the book itself, considered "the war," is funded by a rich, older couple; the author writes because of his own lost love while loving another; Saturn's lover is addicted to the sting of bees.
"When in the house of Saturn there are things an EMF member must do, instructions were given to us, drawn up under roofs of lead. Things to be done if one is ever lucky enough to be in proximity of the enemy. The carnation knife must be pulled out of the waistband and then put to the throat of Saturn, dragging the blade across the skin and stubble of his neck, letting his ink drip. Because if that is what he wants, to write, let him write his own blood letter on the cloth and foam of his mattress. A dense, warm prose that stains the floors and always reappears six coats of paint later. Something that will remain longer than any novel will.
At the very least, if rushed, steal the plot lines and the hundred and five pages that have been written. Leave nothing behind but the title page and table of contents, on which you write, 'You are not so powerful.'"
Plascencia's debut novel (published in 2006), reads like a string of never-ending obituaries. For most of the book, the text is presented in single columns for each character, usually two to a page (but only one column on one page, the left, for Saturn's passages). These are spaced intermittently with longer passages presented in the more standard fashion of formatting with text filling the page in full sentences and paragraphs.
Ultimately, this is a grand soap opera on a massive scale. The movements between the characters on the ground becomes an obvious allegory for the movements between characters in Saturn's world; there is a mirror-imagery that becomes more apparent the deeper one dives into the novel. This in itself becomes a kind of critique of writing (and writers themselves) that I've experienced in the past: how much of ourselves finds itself on the pages of our stories? How do our characters reflect the people of our lives outside of writing?
I worried that this metafictional trope would be used to ill effect by the time I finished the book, but Plascencia does a fantastic job of weaving the two worlds into each other beautifully and with an imagination many would kill to have. Rather than focus on answering the questions of the novel vs. real life, Plascencia digs in and gets into the tiny cracks and rivulets that make up the relationships (no matter how solid or fractured) of the characters introduced throughout these pages. By the time one finishes the book, it's hard to figure if there is a true protagonist or true antagonist relationship between anyone.
While mentioned in small spurts, the use of a whore made of paper who ends up inadvertently leaving cuts on her lovers, becomes the main point of the book: as lovers, we leave scars on those we come in contact with. What those people do with those scars and how they feel about us after is entirely up to them.
Ralph and Elisa Landing
"We came to see the war that we funded. We read the field reports; with our fingers we followed the path of Saturn over maps that illustrated the topography of land and the perilous terrain of love.
But that was on paper. And if we had learned anything from this story it was to be cautious of paper - to be mindful of its fragile construction and sharp edges, but most mostly to be cautious of what is written on it."
(23,248)
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