The People of Paper
The People of Paper is a novel with a sufficiently strange format that Salvador Plascencia actually had a lot of trouble getting it published. It turns out that when you absolutely need to have part of your text be scribbled out, part of your text covered in black ink of various shapes and sizes, and part of your text vertically-oriented, some people start to wonder if publishing you is really worth the effort. This is not to mention all the little illustrations, the gang tags set into the text, or even the fact that, at the best of times, you have three viewpoints per page, each with its own little column.
It's really all very cute.
That being said, the wacky format (which, okay, I admit that I'm kind of a nerd about wacky formatting) is all in service of a very interesting plot, which I'm going to go ahead and spoil for you now.* All the characters get sick of their magical realist lives full of magical realist sadness and revolt against the omniscient narrator and author, Saturn. First, they try to starve him by living the most boring lives they can. Next, they try to kick him out by having so many different viewpoints that he doesn't fit on the page.
Why is this interesting? Well, it points out some of the fun problems of metafiction. The characters are all annoyed because of how sad their lives are and how little privacy they get with Saturn always watching them. They want to live their own lives, uninterfered with by jerk authors who want to use their tragedy to sell books. They want to be able to have sex in their own homes without an omniscient pervert staring at them. Who wouldn't, right? But here's problem number one: The author isn't the only one on trial here. We readers are just as nosy as Saturn. And, of course, we love sad story lines. The more tragedy, the more interesting the story. So when the characters fight Saturn, they're also fighting us. That leads neatly into problem number two, which I'm going to separate from this huge block of text for emphasis. Just wait and see.
Fictional characters are not real.
This seems obvious, I know. But part of our suspension of disbelief requires us to forget how fake the characters in novels are. In order to engage with them, we have to realize them in our own minds, convince ourselves that they're real enough to matter. But this kind of novel, the kind of novel that actually goes and petitions for fictional character rights, rips through that suspension of disbelief. If they're real, we shouldn't be prying into their lives. If they're real, we shouldn't be paying Salvador Plascencia $14.00 (softcover) to put them through unspeakable tragedy. But if we admit from the start that they're not real, why are we reading?
Sadly, despite all the questions the book brought up for me, I find that Plascencia's book works better in theory than in practice. When your two strategies are to make your book boring or to produce an incredible number of viewpoints, you're in danger of ending up with either a boring plot or a confusing book. I found that there were plenty of viewpoints that I just couldn't care about.
In summary, People of Paper an excellent book to think about and write about, but it turns out to be kind of a pain to read. I recommend it for people like me who get all tingly when they think about metafiction and who don't mind slogging through some nonsense to get at that pleasure. I don't recommend it for people who want a sensitive portrayal of women who've abandoned their male lovers, because HOO boy is this book ever harsh on women who've abandoned their male lovers. Ew.
Yours,
C.
*Expect a post from me later about spoilers. Why you can spoil a novel but not a folktale or an epic. What it means to spoil a work of genre fiction compared to a "more serious work." I can already tell how fascinated you are.
It's really all very cute.
That being said, the wacky format (which, okay, I admit that I'm kind of a nerd about wacky formatting) is all in service of a very interesting plot, which I'm going to go ahead and spoil for you now.* All the characters get sick of their magical realist lives full of magical realist sadness and revolt against the omniscient narrator and author, Saturn. First, they try to starve him by living the most boring lives they can. Next, they try to kick him out by having so many different viewpoints that he doesn't fit on the page.
Why is this interesting? Well, it points out some of the fun problems of metafiction. The characters are all annoyed because of how sad their lives are and how little privacy they get with Saturn always watching them. They want to live their own lives, uninterfered with by jerk authors who want to use their tragedy to sell books. They want to be able to have sex in their own homes without an omniscient pervert staring at them. Who wouldn't, right? But here's problem number one: The author isn't the only one on trial here. We readers are just as nosy as Saturn. And, of course, we love sad story lines. The more tragedy, the more interesting the story. So when the characters fight Saturn, they're also fighting us. That leads neatly into problem number two, which I'm going to separate from this huge block of text for emphasis. Just wait and see.
Fictional characters are not real.
This seems obvious, I know. But part of our suspension of disbelief requires us to forget how fake the characters in novels are. In order to engage with them, we have to realize them in our own minds, convince ourselves that they're real enough to matter. But this kind of novel, the kind of novel that actually goes and petitions for fictional character rights, rips through that suspension of disbelief. If they're real, we shouldn't be prying into their lives. If they're real, we shouldn't be paying Salvador Plascencia $14.00 (softcover) to put them through unspeakable tragedy. But if we admit from the start that they're not real, why are we reading?
Sadly, despite all the questions the book brought up for me, I find that Plascencia's book works better in theory than in practice. When your two strategies are to make your book boring or to produce an incredible number of viewpoints, you're in danger of ending up with either a boring plot or a confusing book. I found that there were plenty of viewpoints that I just couldn't care about.
In summary, People of Paper an excellent book to think about and write about, but it turns out to be kind of a pain to read. I recommend it for people like me who get all tingly when they think about metafiction and who don't mind slogging through some nonsense to get at that pleasure. I don't recommend it for people who want a sensitive portrayal of women who've abandoned their male lovers, because HOO boy is this book ever harsh on women who've abandoned their male lovers. Ew.
Yours,
C.
*Expect a post from me later about spoilers. Why you can spoil a novel but not a folktale or an epic. What it means to spoil a work of genre fiction compared to a "more serious work." I can already tell how fascinated you are.