Louisiana Alba, Uncorrected Proof
, Elephant Ears Press, 2008."His espionage novel stolen by a celebrity "sweeper" author, Archie Lees embarks on a helter-skelter odyssey seeking justice inside the dark worlds of Anglo-American publishing, the tale swinging from London to Barcelona, New York, Aigues-Mortes and back again over twelve months, November 2003 to October 2004. Louisiana Alba ransacks categories, voices and genres, excavating plagiarism and influence, reanimating modernism, realism, magic realism, poetry, pop, drama, screenwriting and the postmodernist novel, defrocking the methods and madness of major and minor literary techniques and reputations in a century of writerly solitude."
"The Story: His espionage novel stolen by a celebrity ‘sweeper’ author, Archie Lees embarks on a helter-skelter odyssey seeking justice inside the dark worlds of Anglo-American publishing, the tale swinging from London to Barcelona, New York, Aigues-Mortes and back again over twelve months, November 2003 to October 2004.
The Style: Louisiana Alba ransacks categories, voices and genres excavating plagiarism and influence, reanimating modernism, realism, magic realism, poetry, pop, drama, screenwriting and the postmodernist novel, defrocking the methods and madness of major and minor literary techniques and reputations in a century of writerly solitude."
"Uncorrected Proof is the title novelist Louisiana Alba uses for his 2008 released novel, exploring themes of plagiarism and influence. The story is set in the publishing industry and following the conflicts and writing life of a writer whose novel is stolen by a celebrity author.
The uncorrected proof is the penultimate version of a literary work or book before final publication [1] [2]. An uncorrected proof is sometimes called a galley proof or an advance reading copy (ARC), and is used for book reviews, sent out by publishers to dedicated journals, newspaper and magazines. Many reviewers prefer, even insist on, seeing the uncorrected proof, not the final printed book.
Alba cites James Joyce’s parodic and myth-based technique in Ulysses by following Homer’s Iliad. But rather than follow the narrative poem itself as Joyce did with Homer’s Odyssey, Alba traces the prequel conditions in Greece before Helen’s flight with Paris to Troy parodying over one hundred modernist and postmodernist writers. Alba's stated aim is to enface a portrait of the artist as a postmodern, reversing Joyce’s attempt at self-effacement from the text of Ulysses.
The wider relevance Alba intended in his use of uncorrected proof in the title of his novel is rooted in his belief that a literary work is not 'bound in' by a cover. In Alba’s view a novel never begins or ends with an individual work, the boundaries of influence and interdependence always crossed, with sources shared consciously and subconsciously between literary works and writers’ imaginations. "
"This book was finished when it was Finnished, printed and bound in Finland, bound for England, and bound to arouse curiosity on many levels. Following in the footsteps of old Dublin Jim, Louisiana Alba draws from Homer the armature to build a novel upon. Rather than the Odyssey, here it is the Iliad, but the characters are as recognizable as Molly Bloom was as Penelope: Archie Lees? Achilles. Anthony Gamenman? Agamemnon. Menny Lowes? Menelaus. Ellen Spartan? The face that launched a thousand novels. Here, as in Homer, Ellen is a willing participant in her "rape" and runs off, in this case, to rather than with Paris. What was really stolen here, however, is not just joy and a plum, not just one man's babe, but rather, one's man's baby, Archie's brainchild, his novel, stolen by Folio Publishing. So Archie infiltrates Folio in order to subvert the publication plans.
The sections are written in a multitude of styles, the way old Dublin Jim recaps the history of literature by parodying, in the famous "Oxen of the Sun" chapter, the various styles of English prose preceding modernism. Louisiana Alba includes the modern and postmodern and takes on Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Jay McInerney, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, and dozens of others, including old Dublin Jim himself. The names of those parodied or homage appear in the acknowledgments. Droogs, strangers, the mysterious second person, fish, and JFK all populate the background of the mise en scene, all to delightful effect.
Beneath this quixotic and playful novel that reveals a very deft hand at the pen is a significant novel that asks of itself the question that makes readers of lesser novels so often shake their heads: Does this work have any significance? Here we must emphatically nod. We are reminded exactly how enormous this artform can be, covering as it can any armature at all--from one repeated note to twelve-thousand pages of twelve-tone serial technique, from hastily slung handholdy storytelling to tangrammatically constructed transgressive metafictions. The ultimate postmodern novel is, after all, the interface of everything. And Alba points us there with joy and aplomb." - Eckhard Gerdes
"Can something be playfully and overtly postmodern and still be readable – driving you through a compelling plot? Louisiana Alba proves it can be done. Uncorrected Proof is a postmodern novel that entertainingly riffs on form, style, character, tense, person – but with an overall thriller/quest type plot appropriation, it folds you into its delicious bizarro metascapes and humorous oft-satirical, oft-homagical visions.
Somehow Alba (if that’s who she really is… death of the author etc.) incorporates stylistic elements of hard-boiled fiction, screenplays, cookbooks, metafiction, the spy novel, cyberpunk, the literary novel, A Clockwork Orange, Gaelic, intertextuality, memoir and so much more in a book that self-consciously satirises the entire book and publishing industry – authors, editors, publishers – literary celebrity, literary delusions, literary snobbery, literary stupidity and so on.
So what’s it ‘about’? Archie’s novel manuscript has been pilfered and plagiarized by Martyn Varginas, prolific mystery writer. Archie and his friend Cal plot a convoluted revenge through Archie getting work as an editor, and employing a re-plagiarisation of the book by a young hired-gun (or pen, as it were). What follows are kidnappings, political intrigues, sex, jaunts to New York and Paris (from London), Stake-outs, party crashings, a couple of book launches, boardroom drunkenness, author cameo appearances, mean streets, cop/spy banter, and a few disturbing murders.
I was completely absorbed in this book – somehow Alba makes it so easy to read, despite the switcheroos in style, and shifts in narrative drive and character motivation. The book’s title Uncorrected Proof displays irony – those not in bookselling or publishing may be unfamiliar with a ‘proof copy’ or ‘uncorrected proof’ – books that become available before release, oft-unedited versions of the final with spacing, grammatical and typing errors. This ‘published’ book, has a few (tongue-in-cheek) placed throughout.
Alba has worked in publishing, and is actually avoiding traditional distribution methods for the book, keeping in the uber-hip underground spirit of the novel – with a well-handled guerilla internet and out-of-hand distribution system. I came across the author through Facebook.
This book proves to me that extraordinary talent can be represented through shunning traditional publishing methods. This book is inventive, imaginative, and inspiring. It is a unique publication. If you enjoy Italo Calvino or John Fowles, or if you also work or have worked in the book industry, even on the fringes, you would get a great kick out of this novel." - Angela Meyer
"Who is Louisiana Alba and what does she (or he) have against the publishing industry? It’s a rhetorical question since most authors inevitably have some gripe against the media giants they are forced to rely upon to shepherd their creative works to the masses. Yet usually, besides the odd drunken cocktail party diatribe or expletive-laden rant to one’s spouse, authors won’t, or can’t afford to, bite the hand that feeds them. Alba on the other hand has decided to go straight for their throats, going public with the writer’s eternal screech – the bastards have (add your own word here – ruined, stolen, fucked up, etc.) my book! – then framed it within a literary conceit so audacious and capricious, that to stumble just a little bit is to fall off the mountain completely.
It’s a high wire act that literally co-opts the style of dozens of literary untouchables and pop culture icons from James Joyce to Jimi Hendrix, Anthony Burgess to Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway to Quentin Tarantino (there are over a hundred authors and artists listed in the book’s acknowledgements starting with ABBA!). Alba (an obvious nom de plume) uses each successive voice in her vast arsenal to tell the story of Archie Lee, the plagiarized author who schemes to get his novel back from the people who stole it – the celebrity novelist Martyrn Varginas, his greedy publisher Menny Lowes, and his man-eater of an editor, Ellen Spartan.
Using The Iliad as a starting reference point (in a deliberate cracked mirror image to Joyce’s use of The Odyssey in Ulysses), the novel playfully winks at Homer not so much for his epic poem’s style as for its archetypal tale of love, abduction and revenge. The characters all are sly doppelgangers for their Greek counterparts; Archie Lee for Achilles; Ellen Spartan for Helen; Menny Lowes for Menelaus and so on. But the book does not rely solely on post-modern mimicry or clever homage to keep our interest. It more than holds it’s own as a thoroughly enjoyable pulp story about stolen manuscripts and deferred vengeance in the volatile, cutthroat world of publishing. Making publishing a life and death enterprise involving kidnapping, murder and the CIA is a nice conceit that no doubt will give even the crustiest of publishing execs a knowing chuckle.
The novel starts with Archie out to expose his literary theft at the Crocker Prize banquet (read Booker Prize). He gets cold feet when he comes face to face with his nemesis Varginas and Varginas’ attractive editor Ellen. She unexpectedly offers Archie a position at her new imprint when he stammers out that he’s “expert with espionage thrillers.” From there the story follows Archie’s desperate scheme to wreak revenge from inside the publishing mecca using his newfound influence to try to get his original novel into print under the name of an opportunistic young hustler he has hired for the part. Nothing goes according to plan as the novel ricochets from London to Barcelona to the South of France to New York and back; from pulp crime to spy thriller, memoir to meta-fiction, screenplay to redacted text.
It may sound like a daunting task for the narrative to constantly shape-shift from one disparate source to another but the effect is breathtakingly kaleidoscopic and in most cases wholly appropriate (even the few typos in the book seem correct given the title). In truth it would probably take a tenured literature professor with a vast music and DVD collection to decode all the stylistic shifts in Uncorrected Proof but that’s not really the point. Given all the literary byplay and conceptual ambition, the story is still amazingly accessible, so when you are able to pick up on a particular author or style, it just adds to its kicky pleasure.
In the end Uncorrected Proof is also a cautionary tale about ego and ambition run amok in a world where ego and ambition are the only character traits that seem to really matter. With no clear winners or losers it could almost be read as a twisted metaphor for our own troubled times, with the publishing industry standing in for Wall Street and the banks, where the “best and brightest” have had their way for too long and have grown fat on the bones of those crushed under their Gucci loafers and stiletto heels. Perhaps I’m reading too much into Alba’s remarkably varied prose, but the seeds of a revolution are there, if not on the economic front, then maybe just in the publishing house." - Paul Duran
"... the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion." Fredric Jameson.
‘Uncorrected Proof’ could be seen as a labyrinthically shaped many-dimensional map, pointing above and beyond itself by showing mirrored images of other places in literary time and space. And that's one reason why you do not feel trapped by the, also present, postmodern paranoia. In this book as in real life. Painting pictures pointing beyond themselves out into a vast literary universe, you may feel lost in a labyrinth but it can, and for me does, feel like an opening, or a broad road, in it's freedom to play out and stay away from an apparent order of themes according to fit the forms in the styles of the past, and norms or ideas of originality and individuality. The text stretches out of and becomes wider than the thickening plot, which is something I think can be inferred if employing multiple perspectives on the puzzle pieces presented - which, to use the map metaphor again, can be viewed from a distance at the same time as you are caught up in it/them. In other words it does, in my opinion and to my appreciation, knit parodies and parallells into something in which it is possible to discern a pattern, in and through the somehow accented spy novel style, making the pictures and scenes full rather than fragmented in relation to the substratum one can sense somewhere in the heart of the text. To try and concentrate my impressions in one sentence I would describe it as confusion in association with the flexibility of not being one and itself. I have personally become deeply involved in this hectic story, and though I have read it over and over from cover to cover I still do not feel I am done with it. I use the word hectic as at many points there is a bit of a stressful atmosphere with the characters and the ones who in parts in their turn play the characters, as with the authors from various times and places who file past. Others such as the fishing scenes and the pasta recipes are a bit of a break, through being a bit more worldly. Alba's work in itself is in my view an original one. To pick but a few illustrative quotes which echo my impressions when reading:
"It is not just a runaway relentless river of words following mental storms or unauthorized brainwaves",
"Themes do not overflow story into labyrinths of uncertainty, ruthlessly impoverishing if not demolishing, exactitude".
Who in the book in the end is the one or ones who has/have done wrong, if there is such a one in the story, is hard for a non-literary person like myself to express. As for picking the parodies, who has written what may not be the (only) point of interest. Hopefully. I for one am unable to identify most of the over a hundred authors said to figure in the text. To try and espy one final conclusion, a main paradox may be that the novel builds a lot on parody/pastisch as technique and in turn plagiarism as a theme, which could lead to some interesting questions on where the line can/should be drawn, for what kinds of creators, and what you have the right to do what with/with what.
Notes from the diary of the reviewer’s work raw thoughts which c(sh)ould be refined. the truth may be purer in this version than in the next. i'll go with the next one. The first copy I read was from the library. I saw some review, got curious, and made a suggestion for the library to buy it (which is my normal way of getting many of the books I read). I read this first, borrowed, copy of the book, among other contexts, while washing clothes and while watching clothes wash.
1: Excerpt Six; Inside the plot (UP, Acknowledgements)
2: Excerpt Four; Archie thinks it through (UP, p 65)
3: Excerpt Five; Alessandro gets on the case (UP, p 71)
4: Excerpt Three; Archie & Cal try to sort it out (UP, p 81)
5: Excerpt One; Ellen Spartan contemplates her fate (UP, p 86)
6: Excerpt Two; Chaos at Folio (UP, p 109)
And later, through X months' hard labour, resulting in the above, I won my own copy. Fair enough. And fair and square. "[I] found the order (or found the copy on Google Book Search :) Either way, [I] did it."
"Hi Kristin, the copy will be sent to you on Monday."
I re-read it when on a flight to New York. And back. I might not have concentrated as hard as I should. At this moment a clarinet played by a neighbour is mixed with birds singing through the open window mixed in turn with relatively silent electroacoustic music from my computer. The temperature is very/too high. And in addition coffee pipyng hoot out of the glede. I also made my own correspondences between style, theme and reading. For example, eating haggis when I read the part on scots. "And yer nae even scottish". I made the pasta in the recipes in the book when I read those. Following the instructions I did use olive oil. And then I didn't. (But to use another one of my jotted down quotes from the book "every author lies in every case", you shouldn't take my word(s) for this. As for haggis, I'm a vegetarian.) I have also been pondering on the author. One personal (but still quite unoriginal, I have read this opinion in other places) guess on the subject of the author Louisiana Alba, is that this is not a non-fictional character. But I would not swear on that either. "Because I know nothing about this guy." But I am a "friend" of "his" on Facebook. Some other intriguing passages are for example the equations describing how the book (the book(s) in the book/the actual book) was written, the question "Is that Heidegger quoting Kundera or Kundera quoting Heidegger or Homer Simpson misquoting both?", and speaking of Homer; blurbs by Homer and Brontë, the pictures of authors on the cover, the thank yous to many more in the preface. The familiarity of them seem to cover and cushion some of the literary tumbles of the eponymous author, the implicit author, the fictional author and the reader.
As at the moment being involved in library and information science, I also at points in my reviewing progress saw parallels to knowledge organization and cataloging, as well as some kind of hyper- or at least intertextuality, in the alphabetical list of authors and artist in the preface, pictures of some of them quite neatly organised on the cover, and and as mentioned reminds me of a map - which a catalogue can be as well, often concerning documents such as literature and often interesting in itself in what has been chosen for representing and how it is represented, making new stories out of, as well as new relations and associations, between older works. Some of the charm of this book lies in it waking curiosity and associations, and some of the challenge with the book lies in it making you want to solve some of its riddles, such as where allusions are, to whom, and what this in turn might imply if interpreted "correctly."
The Paste Land
"Lou maintains you have look through the prism of Duchamp's Mona Lisa... the mustache on the most famous woman in art... Everything is a comment, a value add on, a parodic piece of fun, a slide off the original text into something else..built inside text which itself is built inside text and so on... Foucault's comment in 'What is an author', an author is only a collection of statements that have come before, comes into play. Writers often play with borrowed stories (Shakespeare mercilessly so)..Lou borrowed styles. T.S. Eliot borrowed from the whole of the literary world.
The Waste Land could be The Paste Land. (You are quite free to use our emails as well if you like - Uncorrected Proof is an open book published by an open press)" - Kristin Johannesson
"Literary pundits have jumped out of their Ivory Towers to proclaim the greatness of a book called Un-Corrected Proof by Louisiana Alba. Some claim the book is a reworking of Homer’s Illiad and the tale of Achilles. Others declare that each of the 100 or so names listed under acknowledgements appear in some form in the book: as a way of speaking, a style, a category, even an insight or two. No one denies he or she (Louisiana Alba is almost assuredly a pen name) purposefully breaks every literary rule that dares rise up in the path of this strange parody of the world of publishing.
On the surface, Un-Corrected Proof is just that: it’s a book yet to receive a final edit and proof read. There are enough glaring errors planted throughout the book that one intuitively knows they must be purposeful in nature.
Also found within the covers of this book is a tale of revenge. Archie Lees wants it known that award winner Martyrn Varginas stole his book, and he’ll cook up virtually any scheme to make this happen. In fact, he ends up accepting a surprise offer to work as an editor for the very company that published his stolen book. Using convoluted thinking and outright madness, Archie decides to pull his version of the book (much more political than what Varginas published) out of the slushpile and present it as the next big thing—under someone else’s name.
Now things get really crazy. The writer Archie’s company hires comes from a family of assassins, who are determined to return him to the family fold. They aren’t impressed with the boy’s career choice, and Archie’s book, it would seem, is too much like true events in the top echelons of American politics to be allowed to be published. Result? Archie’s boss is kidnapped, mysterious figures (some of who are assassins themselves, politicians and/or competition) get involved, while Archie’s company appears to be more interested in drinking as much as is humanly possible and finding new sexual conquests than they are in actually publish anything. Oh, yes, we must not forget the convenient murders.
Now, if Alba had stopped here (with what I’ve mentioned in the last two paragraphs), I would have been alright. You can see there’s a story to tell. But he/she doesn’t. Let me give you a few examples:
- Early in the book we are treated to stream of consciousness writing. You don’t have to like it but most of us have seen it before. Not Alba’s. He’s way over the top with respect to the actual thoughts we’re supposed to believe his character is having. People just don’t think that way!
- When the young writer’s family is introduced, the local jargon/slang/ makes it virtually impossible to understand the entire passage. What’s the point? Go ahead, deconstruct, but make the effort worth something. Don’t waste your time and mine.
- Then, when Archie is thinking over what he has done by inserting yet another user of his talent, he comes to an overall conclusion of his situation by using a one page mathematical formula to prove the rightness of his interpretation—never mind that the math is complete gibberish.
- Even the author inserts himself/herself into the story every now and then as an overt narrator. Again, the actions are unnecessary, much in the way a child will jump up and down and holler “Look at what I’m doing.”
- Alba constantly changes scenes and conversations, using different writing styles or techniques, so that the only thing we can count on is the names of the characters, and the goals they have or the parts they play. By all means follow the characters and the story but never the style. It’s what Alba seems to expect.
Does Alba give us a worthwhile parody of the publishing business? I’d say most of the time, going even so far as to say there are places of brilliance in Un-Corrected Proof. The actual, physical, thumbing of the nose toward modern writing standards might have seemed a good idea at one point, but I believe it should never have been put before the public. Yes, I know we of the masses have been spoon fed far too long; on the other hand, there’s always a tendency for the pendulum to overcorrect: Alba would have produced a better book using a lighter touch.
Un-Corrected Proof is for those of you who want a book to be mentally challenging. If you’re just after good entertainment, I’d skip this one." - Clayton Clifford Bye
Read it at Google Books
Louisiana Alba’s blog
