“The story of Oda Sotatsu begins with a confession that he signed.

He had fallen in with a man named Kakuzo and a girl named Jito Joo. These were somewhat wild characters, particularly Sato Kakuzo. He was in trouble, or had been. People knew it.

Now this is what happened: somehow Kakuzo met Oda Sotatsu, and somehow he convinced him to sign a confession for a crime that he had not committed.

That he should sign a confession for a crime that he did not commit is strange. It is hard to believe. Yet, he did in fact sign it. When I learned of these events, and when I researched them, I found that there was a reason he did so, and that reason is—he was compelled to by a wager.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 22, 2014)

I have never quite read anything like Silence Once Begun. It’s disturbing, lyrical, original, provocative, and experimental in the best of ways. Yet it stands on the shoulders of giants that came before it: Sartre comes to mind, as does Camus.

The premise is instantly (pardon the pun) arresting. A thread salesman named Oda Sotatsu signs a confession for a crime that has baffled the Japanese authorities – eight older individuals disappear without a trace in what becomes known as the Narito Disappearances. Yet once jailed, he utters barely a word….even though we, the readers, know he is not guilty from the first pages.

A man who refers to himself as the Interviewer – named Jesse Ball – meets with Sotatsu’s parents, brother and sister, jailers, and a woman perceived as a love interest. Written in the conceit of notes drawn from interviews via tape-device, the story takes on an immediacy and fascination – particularly as we realize that the character Jesse Ball is in search of existential answers in his own life.

“One can’t say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards.”

And so it is here. Each person whom Jesse Ball encounters provides a credible part of the puzzle, yet each urges him not to trust anyone else. From one character: “You have to be very careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong.” Who is telling the truth and who is lying – and in the grand scheme of things, does it even matter? As Sotatsu’s brother says about their father: “He said I had a liar’s respect for the truth, which is too much respect.”

The author Jesse Ball (through the character of Jesse Ball) raises the most elemental and universal issues. Among them: it is impossible to see things while we’re still searching; we can only find things by seeing what is there. Reason alone is not the answer; we go to absurd lengths to prove ourselves reasonable.

Interwoven with fables and poetic language (it is no surprise that Jesse Ball has published several works of verse), this story is also grounded strongly in reality. For literary readers, this book is sheer genius and has put Jesse Ball firmly on my radar for his past and future books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jesse Ball
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Way Through Doors

Bibliography:

• Samedi The Deafness (2007)
• The Way Through Doors (2009)
• The Curfew (2011)
• Silence One Begun (January 2014)

“We’re not the kind of people who take taxicabs.”

Book Review:

Review by Maggie Hill (AUG 3, 2011)

Like a fairy tale, way (way) back in the day when you could still be enchanted, and yet they were happy makes you feel giddy and haunted at the same time. I found myself blinking a lot while reading, as if I couldn’t quite believe what my mind was seeing. Slowly, I realized:  I believe.

This is a novel for lovers – of wonderful writing, of mothers, of stories, of husbands, of the nature of the beast. What’s being traversed, in this fabulous world, is the personal odyssey, the high drama, the biblical quality, of joining with another human being in matrimony. Sure, it happens every day….but the literate, unique mind of the author gives us a peek inside the kaleidoscope of one young couple’s journey like you’ve never heard it before. Ever.

Here is its geography: there are 19 chapters, each with roughly five two-page stories. The journey has floods, fights, failures. There are monsters, mistakes, hauntings. The line-up includes brides, mothers, wives. Far-flung families, regimes, and punishments have to be accounted. And, like the Bible, there will be droughts and apocalypses. So, where is the love?

Love sits in your hand as you hold this book. Every page, every word, all the punctuation pulses with it. If someone asks me what’s and yet they were happy about, I’d tell them it’s about love. Real, true, scary, effed-up love. Here’s fight#2:

“He slams her face into a maple tree until the bark is imprinted on her skin. She becomes a maple tree. He taps her for syrup. She poisons her sap. He falls beside a stream. She becomes the stream. He vomits in the stream. She slaps his face. He feels rejuvenated by the water and goes to punish the tree. She becomes a honeybee and stings him. He yanks her wings off.”

If this isn’t exactly, crazily, what happens when well-married people fight, then I don’t know what’s what. There are four more paragraphs to this fight, each successively straining and morphing and, finally, exhausting the couple toward the last line:

“…Their hearts become strong, and marigolds pile up in the yard.”

I’ve been married a long time; lots of marigolds in our yard. Nice to visualize this past detritus as having nurtured a garden, fertilized by years of living together.

An important point: each of the stories in the novel is two pages long. That means, when you open the book, the two facing pages are the whole story. Depending on the number of words per paragraph, the whole story averages about five or six paragraphs. It’s really incredible how much story, love, and Life can fit into that small of a space.

Helen Phillips is a magician. She invokes fable and reality, a tiptoe through the tulips is followed by woods snaked with monsters. You go into the woods anyway, because the author has cast a spell on you. You will follow her words anywhere. Every word in these stories is chosen, crafted, polished. Every story makes an impact – there is an utterly brilliant and fantastical human universe being miniaturized across two pages, right before your very eyes. Open wide. Allow yourself to be swallowed up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Leapfrog Press (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Maggie Hill
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Phillips
EXTRAS:	Huff Post interview with Helen Phillips
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	another uniquely written book: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Bibliography:

• and yet they were happy (May 2011)

“The steward leaves. As he passes the kitchen door on his way back to the stairs a Sudanese cook comes out and tips the scraps from a bucket over the Borromeo’s stern. The steward pauses and watches the scraps bobbing in the churned-up water for a while. The moon’s gone: only the ship’s electric glow illuminates the wake, two white lines running backwards into darkness. When the stretch in which the scraps are bobbing fades from view, the steward turns away towards the staircase. The wake itself remains, etched out across the water’s surface; then it fades as well, although no one is there to see it go.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd (SEP 26, 2010)

Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, C, is a strange book that, without the draw of a gripping plot or the pathos of interesting, well-rounded characters, somehow manages to intrigue all the same. Perhaps the appeal lies in McCarthy’s haunting prose. Or, perhaps it’s the unshakeable feeling that underneath it all – underneath the layered ideas – there’s a message of sorts, a message as profound as it is ephemeral: just as you think you’ve figured it all out, it escapes you. Whatever the reason, C, while far from perfect, is a bizarrely captivating book.

The novel, in four sections – Caul, Chute, Crash, Call – follows the life, birth to death, of Serge Carrefax. Serge is born in the English countryside, at the turn of the 20th century, on his family’s estate, Versoie. The first section, Caul, deals with Serge’s charmingly tragic childhood. Serge’s mother floats around the grounds – and the warehouses of her silk factory — in an opium-induced fog. Serge’s father is equally preoccupied: when not tending to his school for deaf children, he holes himself up in his workshop, devoted to developing various wireless transmitters. Fortunately, Serge is saved from unbearable loneliness by his older sister, Sophie. However, an incestuous shadow hangs over their relationship, and when she commits suicide over a bizarre (and disastrous) love affair, Serge’s unpurged grief leaves him ill enough to be sent to a restorative spa in Central Europe. Wonderfully strange, the charm of this section lies in the details: silk-production, Serge and Sophie’s Realty Game, the mechanics behind a school production of Seduction and Marriage of Persephone, Sophie’s taxidermy, Sophie’s rigged grave.

The second section, Chute, tells of Serge’s experience as an aerial observer in World War I. Aerial observers accompanied pilots on reconnaissance flights. Their job was to sketch, and later to photograph, an area, as well as signal, via wireless transmitters, the location of enemy artillery or soldiers. Although intricately detailed, and wonderfully written, the horrors of war – death, destruction, destitution — as experienced by Serge, are rendered flat, superficial, and narrative drive slackens to a halt.

But perhaps that’s the point: it’s during the war that Serge develops his penchant for cocaine and heroin. Narcotically numbed to the horrors around him, Serge’s observations, while inappropriately cold, are also strangely beautiful:

“In states such as this, he finds himself captivated by the German kite balloons. . .He fires on the airbourne ones that come into his range, not out of hatred or a sense of duty, but to see what happens when the bullets touch their surface, in the way that a child might poke at an insect. When flame-tendrils push outwards from inside the balloons and climb up their surface before bursting into bloom, he watches the men in their baskets throw their parachutes over the side and jump. Often they get stuck halfway down, tangled in the ropes and netting. Seeing them wriggling as the flame crawls down the twine towards them, he thinks of flies caught in spiders’ webs; when they roast they look like dead flies, round and blackened.”

Or:

“As they sink through the smoke-cloud, Serge sounds his klaxon again, then looks down. The battlefield’s now strewn with fragments: of machine parts, mirrors, men. Legs, wedged in by earth, stand upright in athletic postures, crooked at the knee as though to sprint or straightened into sprightly leaps but, lacking bodies to direct and complement their action, remain still; detached arms semaphore quite randomly across the ground; torsos, cut off at the waist, mimic the statues of antiquity.”

Unfortunately, drug addiction follows Serge home from the war, and it’s the third section, Crash, that chronicles (rather disappointingly) Serge’s descent into the drug-fuelled London underworld. After the eponymous crash of this section, it’s decided that Serge should be sent away, far from the temptations of London. In the fourth and final section of the book, Call, Serge tags along on an archaeological dig to Sedment, Egypt.

Actually, the failure of the last two sections is instructive as to what is wrong with this book: while the novel is a brilliant (dare I say, genius) exploration of ideas, Serge has all the depth of a paper-doll. There’s so little at stake – so little emotional investment – that as his addiction worsens, or as he falls ill in Egypt, there’s little to compel the reader to turn the page.

C , much like McCarthy’s celebrated debut, Remainder, isn’t for everyone. What it lacks in rounded, interesting characters, or any semblance of a traditional plot, it makes up for in its exploration of ideas such as the subjectivity of experience, our need to force meaning onto meaninglessness, communication and connectedness, cycles of birth, death, rebirth. This isn’t a novel to lose yourself in. It isn’t even a well-told story. It is, however, a complex mesh of themes that, for those so inclined, will provide some bulk to chew on.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 52 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Tom McCarthy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book structured much the same, from birth to death of the main character: Spooner by Pete Dexter

Bibliography:

• Remainder (2005; 2007 in US)
• Men in Space (2007; Not yet published in US)
• Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006)
• C (September 2010)

Nonfiction:

• Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006; 2008 in US)

“The sea is not for the likes of you I heard it say inside me. At least they had come far enough towards me—into me—that they were willing to talk.

Or is the voice I heard saying that just (just!) a voice that has always lived inside me, or inside every me, whoever it might be, the Resident Orator who tells you the one thing of all possible things that you most do not want to hear?

For whom is the sea, then, if not for me? And what do you (does it) mean by the likes of me? What are my likes?

I was just standing there in the aspens, trying to figure out why I hated this place so much. Because it hated me. ”

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes (AUG 2, 2009)

An unremarkable boy named Billy sets out to find the spaceship that landed near the boarding house where he lives with his family in rural Philadelphia. He’s invited on this adventure by Eileen who also lives in the boarding house and is beginning to show signs of womanhood. Young Billy is driven to distraction by her smell, her silhouette, her touch. This part of the novel reads like an epic poem.

When they find the spacecraft, Billy is taken, leaving Eileen crying at the foot of a tree. Billy’s curiosity and wonder overshadow some of his fears at being abducted by aliens – until the vivisection begins. This is where the book gets bizarre. While Billie is conscious, the aliens replace his vital organs with mundane objects. Two live squirrels serve in place of his lungs, a shoe takes the place of his heart, a wind-up clock with bells on top replace his bladder – you get the idea.

I searched for some allegorical meaning around all these substitutions, but found none. No pattern, no symbolism, nothing. Meanwhile a duplicate of Billy, filled with his organs, is sent to Earth in his place.

Billy’s education by the aliens begins on board their ship en route to an island on another planet. When he arrives on that planet, he goes to school with people (presumably abducted) from other worlds. He learns many languages and reads alien books. The descriptions of the aliens and other people on that planet are scant.

The aliens bring Billy back as an adult to Earth to educate us about ourselves and our universe with wisdom from his journal, The Book from the Sky.

I appreciated the stream of consciousness at the beginning of the book and during some of Billy’s sojourn on that other planet. The book within the book, which is a sort of book of proverbs, had some interesting commentary. The following is from an essay written by a follower of the adult Billy about the United States:

“The government exists to protect merchants and manufacturers. Individuals are kept alive as long as they can produce economic activity—you can be in a coma and still be making a fortune for medical personnel. The proper business of other countries is to buy what we want to sell them, keep their own neighborhoods clean and picturesque, and to sell us their goods and services cheap. When other countries don’t do this, they become enemies and we try to destroy them. This is the American way. No other country has ever had a way of its own, a way that God intended for us. No other country really has a good relationship with God. … Sell us cheap goods and labor, buy our grain and meat and machines, and everybody will be happy. Choose leaders who know how to be polite. … They have to understand that we’re right—that’s the most important thing.”

It was difficult to understand the protagonist’s stoic acceptance of his circumstances. Yet, one can see that perhaps Billy ceased to really be Billy after the aliens altered him. But then, for whom do we feel sympathy? The Billy that was, the duplicate Billy or the new creature that he has become that doesn’t miss his family? It is difficult to determine if the altered Billy has become like his abductors, because we don’t learn enough about them to make that determination.

Someone with a more philosophical attitude may find meaning that I have missed. I hope so. Without it, I was left with only morbid curiosity to keep me reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	no customer reviews yet
PUBLISHER:	North Atlantic Books (September 30, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AMAZON PAGE:	The Book From the Sky
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Robert Kelly and Earthlink page
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another review and an Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books meta-physical or close to it: The Way Through the Doors by Jesse Ball First Execution by Domenico Starnone The Scream Queens of the Dead Sea by Gilad Elbom

Bibliography:

• The Book From the Sky (September 2008)

“I had learned that the representation was not the real thing, but in a way this dissonance was what made it so good: the distance between the map and the territory allowed us breathing room to figure out where we stood.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Poornima Apte (JUL 05, 2009)

Twelve-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet—T.S. for short—is as quirky as his name suggests. Extraordinarily gifted, his one way of making sense of the world around him, is to map it all out. So it is that Reif Larsen’s debut, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, has many of these maps and diagrams on the margins—a glimpse into the workings of a gifted mind. Worth mentioning are maps describing the locations of McDonalds in a Midwestern town, the many physical forces acting on a rodeo cowboy and the long list of random names picked by an IBM 1401 for the soda, Tab.

As the story opens, T.S. lives in a ranch house located just north of Divide, Montana with his farmer father and his scientist mother. The boy has a mentor in Dr. Terrence Yorn, a professor of entomology at Montana State, who encourages Spivet and even submits his work to the Smithsonian for a special award. Not knowing that all the insightful work has been produced by a 12-year-old, the Smithsonian grants Spivet the award and invites him to D.C. to deliver the attendant keynote lecture.

After much back and forth, Spivet decides he will bite and take the bait. He will travel to D.C. especially because lately, he believes he doesn’t really belong in small-town Montana. So T.S. travels hobo style, hitching rides on freight cars and somehow managing to make it all the way to the nation’s capital.

T.S. is a kid plagued by many worries. For someone who is used to mapping out the world in definite, objective terms, many things don’t make sense—his parents’ marriage, for example, is one that he can’t quite figure out. “These were two creatures cut from entirely different cloths…How could these two be drawn to each other?” Larsen writes. Even as Spivet articulates these questions, he desperately wants the marriage to be alive and well.

T.S. also worries about his mother, whom he refers to as Dr. Clair. He is afraid that in her blind search for the tiger monk beetle, she has let her career slip by. In other words she has become a “stenpock.” Spivet coins this word—fashioned after one of his school teachers—for “any adult who insists on staying within the confines of his or her job title and harbors no passion for the offbeat or the incredible.”

Finally there is the one that nags at him the most—T.S. Believes that he is somehow responsible for the accidental death of his brother, Layton, in a shooting accident on the ranch. The weight of all these comes out quite often as in here: “I wanted to hold her (his mother’s) hand and apologize for taking this book, for leaving without asking her permission, for not saving Layton, for not being a better brother, or ranch hand, or scientist’s assistant. For not being a better son.”

These worries slowly play themselves out during the course of the book as T.S. finds some answers in a diary he steals from his mother’s desk just as he leaves.

Once T.S. reaches D.C. the initial thrall is soon gone when he realizes he is sought after only as a publicity machine for the advancement of the Smithsonian’s cause. “You may be the ideal instrument to draw us plenty of attention and get people all jazzed up about the Smithy again,” an official there tells him. Spivet, as it turns out, has the perfect “trident : Grief. Youth. Science.”

Author Reif Larsen has created an engaging personality in T.S. and his debut effort is very commendable. The novel is not without its faults though. For one thing, the turning points in the story depend almost on only one action—the fact that T.S. brings his mother’s diary along for the ride. There are a couple more storyline pivots that seem too forced and therefore undercut the narrative. Then there’s the slight problem that the story itself is not that complex. That Spivet would have had to travel all the way to D.C. just to realize that all that glitters is not gold, seems a bit of a drag. Even the book’s novel concept (with its many sidebars and diagrams) seems to fade after a while. Because of the sidebars, the book is also physically wider than most hardcovers so it is a little physically unwieldy.

All in all though, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a promising debut. There is no doubt that Reif Larsen is exceptionally talented—he is surely not a “stenpock.” With a touch more work on narrative, Larsen could come out with an even stronger read the next time around. And I’ll be there when he does.

The book’s major triumph is T.S. Spivet. Larsen gives his protagonist an endearing and original voice and portrays him with all his adolescent vulnerabilities. It is really hard not to fall in love with this bright and engaging companion. In the end, T.S. Spivet makes the long ride from Montana to Washington D.C. well worth the price of admission.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin Press HC, The (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (fun site!)
EXTRAS:	Excerpt      Also, open above link for Amazon and scroll down for sample artwork.
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	This reminds me of:      Wolf Boy by Evan Kuhlman Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlman

Bibliography:

• The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (May 2009)

“…entire effort United State to incite desire, inflict want, inspire demand. Every today American vermin offered too many objects for acquire. Offered too numerous formula for succeed. Too vast selection religion, vocation, lifestyle. No ever able make choice. Resulting outcome no happiness, forever striving pursuit next objective. Next possession or experience or reproductive mate.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mike Frechette (JUN 06, 2009)

I Begins here review of literary object Pygmy, product American capitalist publishing machine, ISBN 978-0-385-52634-0, subversive author Chuck Palahniuk. Mission to summarize, analyze, and assess.

If you could not appreciate this broken, propaganda-laden English for over two-hundred pages, then Palahniuk’s new novel might seem tedious to you rather than engaging. For more willing readers, though, Palahniuk rewards with thematic richness, an enticing plot, and plenty of laughter in his latest dark comedy. Foreign exchange students from an unnamed oppressive socialist regime have arrived in an unnamed midsized Midwestern city to create chaos in America’s virtuous heartland. Armed with years of political indoctrination and martial arts tactics, their mission – Operation Havoc – consists of progressing to the National Science Fair in Washington D.C. where they will commit a massive act of biological terrorism. The story is narrated by of one of the operatives himself – dubbed Pygmy by his ignorant American peers – all the while pointing a painfully truthful finger at some of the ugliest aspects of American culture and society.

Those familiar with Palahniuk’s work will quickly realize that Pygmy in no way constitutes a departure from earlier novels such as Fight Club. An angry protagonist reacts aggressively and excessively to a society that reduces people to mere consumers. Like Fight Club, Pygmy takes aim at capitalism, this time through the eyes of an outsider who holds America responsible for the world’s injustices. To Pygmy and his comrades, America runs on desire, transforming everything into a commodity to be possessed – from women to religion. At the school dance – the “student mating ritual” – Pygmy notices the “females ranked along opposite wall,” like products on a Wal-Mart shelf. At church – the “religion propaganda distribution outlet” – he speculates on the history of the building’s capitalist functions: “first sell foodstuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life…sell religions.” Religious merchandising and the language of ownership confront and register with Pygmy almost as soon as he steps off the plane, receiving a t-shirt from his host family that says “Property of Jesus.”

Such a perspective, while humorously seductive, must nevertheless provoke only uneasy laughter from readers, even those most critical of the excess of American life. Though truthful, Pygmy’s worldview – itself propaganda – justifies in his mind an indisputably evil act of mass murder. What’s really at issue in this novel, therefore, is not so much the troubling intersection of religion and capitalism as the danger and inescapability of ideology itself. Opposing ideologies spar throughout the story – capitalism versus socialism, self versus society, democracy versus authoritarianism – each turning the other into a corrupting falsehood, an impostor of the truth. Pygmy, victimized and brainwashed by a brutal socialist regime, represents an opportunity for his host family, the Cedars, to further spread the gospel of Americana: “We’ll make an American out of you.” On the other hand, Pygmy sees his host family – the overweight father, sexually repressed mother, ADD-ridden teenage son, and jaded, deceptive teenage daughter – as a classic product of the “degenerate American snake nest.” In this regard, the novel seems to offer just two inadequate ideological choices. Readers feel forced to accept the reprehensible America of this novel as the only viable option compared to the fatalism of Pygmy’s homeland where the individual self means nothing in the face of the all-powerful state. Such restriction inevitably creates feelings of discomfort and despair and leaves the reader wondering if, by the end, Palahniuk will show us a middle way.

Palahniuk’s novels have been criticized as gratuitously graphic and disturbingly twisted, meant to generate attention by simply shocking a young audience all too willing to be manipulated. No exception to this characterization, Pygmy will certainly further reinforce this chorus of naysayers. Peppered with scenes of violently graphic sexuality, Pygmy could turn the stomach of even the most desensitized reader. If such criticism is justified, though, then therein lay the novel’s most brilliant irony, calling attention to itself as just another product in the capitalist scheme.

Suffice it to say, Palahniuk is a smart writer but understandably cannot be appreciated by everyone. However, he does have a cultish following, and his biggest fans will certainly not be disappointed by this newest publication. He presents complex, weighty ideas in a novel that creates laughter and keeps the reader turning the page to find out what happens next, all the while maintaining a bizarre writing style. There’s even some romance – bordering on incest, of course (this is Palahniuk, after all).

Ends here review of literary object Pygmy. Hope induced consumer to purchase product, generate capital for individual author and publishing company.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 199 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mike Frechette
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chuck Palahniuk
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of HAUNTED, DIARY, LULLABY Also, if you like this, try: THE RAINBOW SINGER by Simon Kerr LUDMILLIA’S BROKEN ENGLISH by D.B.C. Pierre

Bibliography:

• Fight Club (1996)
• Survivor (1999)
• Invisible Monsters (1999)
• Choke (May 2001)
• Lullaby (September 2002)
• Diary (August 2003)
• Haunted (May 2005)
• Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey (May 2007)
• Snuff (May 2008)
• Pygmy (May 2009)
• Tell-All (May 2010)
• Damned (October 2011)

Other:

• Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (July 2003)
• Stranger than Fiction: True Stories (June 2004)

Movies from Books:

• Fight Club (1999)

“The world is wonderful because the world is horrible. And therein lies [a] great wisdom. The crazies get on a bus with a bomb and kill all the passengers. Or that gigantic wave that was on every TV news show. Those are things that make the world wonderful…A world like us. For us. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (MAY 30, 2009)

Filled with the fragmentation, incoherence and ambiguity that typify much of post-modernist thought, Wonderful World is a challenge for the reader, since the very characteristics which make it “post-modern” are also characteristics which are off-putting for readers who expect a novel to have a clear beginning, middle, and end. And when that novel is almost five hundred pages long, the challenges are even more daunting, since it is difficult to know how much of the incoherence and fragmentation is deliberate and how much may be the result of less than rigorous editing.

In his first novel published in English, Spanish author Javier Calvo creates a dynamic novel which explodes in several different directions at once by the sheer energy of his writing. Setting the story primarily in contemporary Barcelona, he introduces several plot lines which progress seemingly independently, and without explanation, for the first third of the novel, and while they and the huge cast of characters do eventually overlap, the overlaps are almost irrelevant by the conclusion of the novel.

The novel opens thirty years in the past in a bizarre, mood-setting scene in which Lorenzo Giraut, the most important antiques dealer in Spain, hides in a protective “hut” he has made from furniture and a mattress in the living room of an apartment in Camber Sands. Pope John Paul I has just died, the skies are filled with storm clouds and lightning, police cars are screaming, the “American Liaison” is climbing out the window of Lorenzo’s room, and the word “captors” comes inexplicably to Giraut’s mind.

Immediately, the scene shifts to twelve-year-old Valentina Parini, a lover of Stephen King novels, who is awaiting his next book, Wonderful World, due out in less than three weeks. Valentina has written her own book about the decapitation of the girls’ basketball coach and a bomb in her school locker room, and she plans to read it at the school talent show.

In successive scenes, a young engaged couple, vacationing in Ibiza, is told they must pay their hotel bill immediately, though he is out of money. Fanny Giraut, widow of Lorenzo Giraut, is plotting a takeover of the family business from her son Lucas, the legal heir. Lucas, in turn, is planning a major art heist with the aid of four demented criminals. Chapters of the (fictional) Stephen King book are unfolding, with a climactic battle taking place as humans try to escape “Them.” In “real” life, a war between two gangs associated with Lucas’s father Lorenzo plays out in dream sequences, as Lucas tries to unravel who betrayed his father, while his own crooks and a group of Russians compete for the same ill-gotten rewards.

Switching back and forth among plot lines and through different times, Calvo creates a wild, nightmarish world, filled with uninhibited, bawdy humor; violent sex; psychological breakdown; low-life women from all social classes , and even the history of Pink Floyd and its parallels to “life.” The characters are unknowable, though they are fully described, and their predicaments do not arouse empathy.

Unfortunately, long passages of description bog down the novel and dilute its effect—the details of an unimportant episode of “Friends,” being watched by one character, runs to three full pages, for example, and the irrelevant description of a car race for children runs for about the same length. Calvo is, however, a multi-talented young writer. His exuberance and energy operate full tilt for the entire novel, and with some judicious editing of his lengthy descriptions, he may find a broad audience in the English-speaking world for his next novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; 1 edition (March 17, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Wonderful World
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Javier Calvo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and or Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	If you like this, try: The Raw Shark Textsby Steven HallThe Amnesiac by Sam Taylor

Bibliography:

• Canned Laughs: Stories (2001)
• The Reflecting God (2003)
• The Lost Rivers of London (2005)
• Wonderful World (2007; March 2009 in US)