Matt Madden performs a kind of homage to Queneau's "Exercises in Style" by doing the same thing, only in comix

Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Chamberlain Bros, 2005)

"99 Ways to Tell a Story is a series of engrossing one-page comics that tell the same story ninety-nine different ways. Inspired by Raymond Queneau's 1947 Exercises in Style, a mainstay of creative writing courses, Madden's project demonstrates the expansive range of possibilities available to all storytellers. Readers are taken on an enlightening tour-sometimes amusing, always surprising -through the world of the story. Writers and artists in every media will find Madden's collection especially useful, even revelatory. Here is a chance to see the full scope of opportunities available to the storyteller, each applied to a single scenario: varying points of view, visual and verbal parodies, formal reimaginings, and radical shuffling of the basic components of the story. Madden's amazing series of approaches will inspire storytellers to think through and around obstacles that might otherwise prevent them from getting good ideas onto the page. 99 Ways to Tell a Story provides a model that will spark productive conversations among all types of creative people: novelists, screenwriters, graphic designers, and cartoonists."

"In 1947, Raymond Queneau—mathematician, poet, fiction writer, and member of the Oulipo group dedicated to using formal constraints imposed on one's own work as a method of generating creativity—published Exercises in Style. He took a simple story and told it in 99 different styles (as a letter, various kinds poems, moral lesson about The Youth of Today, etc.). The narrative itself is wholly unremarkable: a young man gets on a crowded bus, complains about being jostled, and then sits down when a seat becomes available; later, the narrator sees the man who jostled him in another part of town talking to a friend. In 99 Ways to Tell a Story, Matt Madden performs a kind of homage to Queneau by doing the same thing, only in comix. The narrative itself is even more unremarkable than the original: a man who has been working at a computer stands, closes his laptop, and walks to the refrigerator. His wife asks him what time it is from upstairs. He responds 1:15. Then he bends in front of the fridge, looking puzzled, wondering "What the hell was I looking for, anyway?" Madden retells that narrative in a variety of comic-book styles, points of view, settings, angles, with different characters, without one of the two leads, without the refrigerator, as a paranoid religious tract, as an existentialist parable, you name it. The outcome, which sounds like it should dreary as dust, is fascinating, stimulating, and a micro-education in narrativity. One way I know I'm reading a wonderful text is that it makes me want to go out and write, and Madden's does like few I've come across recently." - Lance Olsen

"Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story is essentially a comic-book riff on Raymond Queneau's formalist experiment, Exercises in Style, published in 1947, a retelling of two humdrum encounters no fewer than 99 times, using every possible tense and type of voice, from free verse and sonnet to exclamatory telegram.
Mercifully, Madden's comic-book homage manages to sidestep the creaking pretension of Oulipo, Queneau's 'potential literature workshop', and balances postmodern irony with genuine invention and amusement.
In 99 Ways, our protagonist takes an apparently uneventful trip to the refrigerator and peers inside, while a voice from out of frame enquires about the time. After looking at his watch and providing an answer, our protagonist stares blankly inside the fridge, having now forgotten what he was looking for. This is Madden's basic one-page 'template', to which all subsequent retellings refer, however indirectly. This nondescript scenario is developed with each new iteration and unexpected possibilities are gradually revealed. Each time, the same events are depicted, but from a different point of view or in a different visual style - from Japanese manga and romance comics to cartographic diagrams and even the Bayeux Tapestry.
Slight changes in context, dialogue and framing have surprising and sometimes funny results, and the overall effect is oddly compelling. Inevitably, Madden stretches his basic template almost to destruction, with a version as seen initially from outer space, another told as praise overheard in a bar, and another as viewed by a crime-scene investigator, complete with wrecked and blood-smeared fridge. Other notable versions include parodies in the styles of Winsor McCay, George Herriman and Fantastic Four illustrator, Jack Kirby. (For readers unfamiliar with arcane comic-book references, explanatory notes are provided.)
99 Ways is in part a demonstrative textbook on formal possibilities, and partly a wry diversion. Either way, Madden illustrates how the story and its telling are tightly braided; even a small shift of perspective transforms the most banal series of events into something that is by turns farcical and intriguing." - Daniel Trilling

"This is either the most maddening comic ever or a small work of genius. A few pages would suggest the former. By the end, thankfully, it reveals itself as the latter. One banal exchange in the illustrator's life is replayed over and over, in a new style each time. He gets up from the computer, is asked the time, answers, and opens the fridge. That's the story, but we see it refracted in every style from monologue to extreme close-up, silhouette to political cartoon. Due respect is paid to Raymond Queneau's original text, Exercises in Style, but this visual counterpart might even be better. The book acts as a primer to the different styles of illustrated novel, from manga to the "comics mainly without pictures" of poet Kenneth Koch. Madden's best decision is to give his protagonist a single last line to deliver to the fridge: "What the hell was I looking for anyway?" Innocent enough when he's staring down the mayo, but it becomes by turns poignant, creepy, suggestive and, in the variation entitled "Creationism", altogether celestial. "Yet on the eighth day, He did wonder what the hell He was looking for, anyway." - Craig Taylor

"The original 'story' is simple and banal: a man is working at his laptop, gets up and goes to another room, hears someone from upstairs ask what time it is, answers ("It's 1:15"), opens a refrigerator, and finds that he's forgotten what he was looking for. The brilliance of 99 Ways to Tell a Story is almost as banal: Madden simply retells essentially the same story again and again. Yet it is never the same story - and one of the wonders of the book is how very different a story and one's appreciation of it can be even when it has just been slightly altered.
Some of the variations are merely a change of the perspective, others relate the story in a different way or style (both drawn and/or written), or add or take away elements. A few are radically different approaches - the story presented as a graph, a map, a binary version. There are numerous homages and the story is presented as everything from a public service announcement to a part of the Bayeux tapestry.
It sounds like an amusing game, but it really is more than that. The variations are well-done (some in full colour, all as simply sketched or complexly rendered as each variation demands), and the overall effect is one of allowing -- or even forcing -- the reader to appreciate how much form can affect content. It might seem a trite point, but readers are so used to simply accepting as given how a writer presents his or her material that they often forget that, in fact, presentation plays an enormous role in how the story is perceived. Madden's book is a revelatory demonstration of how readers can be manipulated and how a text can mislead.
Working with both text and images Madden has even more to play with than Queneau did, and he makes the most of it. Astonishingly, for a book that is above all else repetitive, it never gets boring. Even the obvious is interesting, and Madden also comes up with a lot of great stuff, ways of seeing that might not have occurred to the reader.
Fantastic and thought-provoking fun. Highly recommended." - The Complete Review

"Queneau's book serves as a textbook on form and narrative. It's also a mainstay for college creative writing classes. Its popularity can no doubt be linked to its outright challenging of preconceived notions of exactly what defines a narrative. Can a telegram or a book jacket be considered a narrative - or literature, for that matter? According to Queneau, narrative and form are inextricably bound, and form has the power to completely transform even the simplest of narratives.
Madden explores these same issues - as well as other questions regarding comics' place in literature - in 99 Ways. A simple trip to the refrigerator can turn into a funky acid trip (in his "Underground Comix" exercise a la Robert Crumb) or a public service announcement condoning safe sex; it can be represented by a map or as a lesson in closure (moment-to-moment, action-to-action, non-sequitor, etc.). Madden's book is enjoyable when, as in these noted moments, he fully stretches and transcends the limits of his "template" (the name he gives the narrative basis for his exercises).
While it's mildly interesting or amusing to see the template switch perspectives to the subjective or tell the story in flashback, these more conventional variations have nothing on Madden's wild experiments or his many witty homages or parodies. His references range from the obscure (George Herriman's Krazy Kat dailies from the 1920s and '30s) to the widely recognized (Fantastic Four creator Jack Kirby); from the reverential (a tribute to Rodolphe Toppfer's satirical pamphlets, considered the foundations for the modern comic) to the satirical (the cleverly titled "Exorcise in Style"'s take on the Tales from the Crypt). You don't need to be a comic book aficionado to enjoy even the most obtuse references. These comics stand on their own because of the skilled drawing and subtle humor. And Madden provides concise, informative notes on his inspirations and objectives at the end of the book.
Because of the deconstructive, analytical approach Madden adopts, 99 Ways -- much like Queneau's book -- functions as a textbook of sorts, a catalogue of comic history, writers, theory, and methods. It teaches by demonstrating, rather than merely telling or explaining. Madden, when not writing, teaches at Yale University, and he can no doubt use his exercises in the classroom setting, as a companion to the definitive encyclopedia of comics, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.
The publication of 99 Ways further perpetuates the idea of comics as an art, as literature. Long considered low-brow, comics have over the years seen an acceptance and reverence in academia and art circles: Phoebe Gloeckner (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) teaches at the University of Michigan; Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) writes award-winning screenplays; Art Spiegelman (Maus) has a Pulitzer. By modeling his book after the work of a prose writer, Madden holds his work alongside works of literature - asserting comics' place in the literary realm -- but he also differentiates it, which keeps his reworking of Queneau's thesis on formalism and story from redundancy. Just as a story changes with the manner in which it's told, the decision to tell a story through pictures or through only words radically changes its meaning or effect.
99 Ways to Tell a Story achieves something few theoretical works do -- it entertains as it provides its thoughtful analyses. Madden never lets his ambitious, even lofty, ideas burden the storytelling. And the exercises, when you strip away all their historical contexts and theories, make for enjoyable, humorous reads." - Raquel Laneri

"Matt Madden has created his own Exercises in Style in comics form, and I'm here to say that it stands as an equal to Queneau's linguistic masterpiece. Matt tells a simple story:
Matt gets up from working at his computer. He walks into another room of the apartment. From upstairs his wife Jessica asks for the time, and Matt answers her. He goes to the refrigerator and opens it. He can't recall what he was looking for.
That's the story, and we read it ninety-nine times without getting bored.
The first comic in the book is the "Template," the stylistically generic form of the story, though, as Matt points out in the introduction, after reading the others, even this generic comic begins to show its stylistic decisions.
Though it is futile to try to categorize the 98 variations that follow, it is also an inevitable draw to make some attempt--certainly many of the variations work in linked groups or have similarities in their type of variation. Early on, a group of pages vary the point of view: Matt's first person view, third person from upstairs in the apartment with Jessica, a view from the refrigerator, a voyeur's view from outside the building. Matt does an extensive group of generic (as in genre) variations: fantasy, romance, police procedural, horror (a four-color EC Comics pastiche), superhero (one example where Matt's mimicking skills fail him with the drawing), manga (complete with right-to-left reading, excessive speed lines, and a gratuitous panty shot), political cartoon, and more. Many could be considered as variations on framing both formally and content-wise: reframing the original drawings to all hands and punctuation marks (which is a powerful statement on how much can be said with such a little amount of information), shrinking the original panels and adding absurdist images outside the borders, telling the story as a scene with actors and a director, the story as a flashback, the story as overheard in a bar... A number of pages fall under formal game playing (anagrams, palindromes) or structural variation (one panel, thirty panels).
My favorite group, and one where Matt really shows off his chops, is a sequence I'll call "Matt Madden's History of Comics." Matt pastiches a hall of fame of important historical creators: a "newly discovered" piece of the Bayeax Tapestry, Rodolphe Toppfer, Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay (the emulation of his Rarebit Fiend is amazing), George Herriman, Herge', and Jack Kirby. This sequence (sadly not all in order, because a few of these appear in the color section of the book) alone is worth the price of the book. As with any other art, I believe it is important to know some of the history, and Matt kindly shows us why.
I could go on and on talking about various variations, but I'll restrain myself and let the reader find them. In the past couple days, I've read this book twice through and browsed a good number of the pages more times than that. So many times reading that same story... yet, it's never the same.
Narratology, the study of narrative and how it works, is an area ripe for comics exploration, or perhaps an area ripe for comics readers and creators to explore. Narratology, among other endeavors, differentiates between the "story"--the "raw material" of the events in any narrative--and the "plot"--the final arrangement, order, and duration of the narrative as it is conveyed to the audience (I'm simplifying a bit). At a most basic level a story can offer up hundreds of plots; the raw material can be reworked over and over again. The author John Gardner once said that all novels have one of two plots (in a narratological sense he means "story"): someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Think about it a moment: his two stories apply to a great number of cases.
How does this all relate to the comic in front of me? Matt Madden has materialized this concept in comics. The vast range of "plots" he creates from the same "story" is not only fun to read and interesting to contemplate but also a veritable textbook for the comics creator. With this book, he has shown how far the imagination can take us from the simplest of beginnings. Comics is an extremely versatile art form, and there is no need to be stuck with the same old same old. Even a simple autobiographical event doesn't have to stay a straight realist autobiography.
Looking at all these variations also exposes the choices that are made in each comic. Compare the "Horizontal" variation (all thin panels that stretch across the width of the page) to the "Vertical" variation (all thin panels that stretch across the height of the page). The latter focuses much more on the human figure, probably because the tall thin panel more clearly fits a figure, while no matter how you try, fitting a person into a thin wide panel is a piece meal process. Once we have seen all the variations of viewpoint and distance (longshot, extreme close-up) from which the story can be told, we must reevaluate the viewpoint of the template (a mid-range third person) and wonder: why that view? Why that distance? Each variation in juxtaposition with the others opens a space for questioning and learning.
I'll leave off here. If there is any justice (or taste) in the comics world this book will be both a big seller and a hot topic of conversation. Read it, laugh, marvel, enjoy, and then put it alongside books like McCloud's Understanding Comics and start really thinking about comics.
You'll come to the next comic you read with a keener eye and a sharper appreciation." - Derik A. Badman

"Writing too much about books full of pictures is probably some sort of crime with its own circle of hell, but two art/graphic/comic/something books I've read/looked at recently have held my attention: First & Fifteenth: Pop Art Short Stories by Steve Powers and 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden.
Powers's "pop art short stories" aren't exactly stories -- they're more like incidents, moments, glances, jokes. First & Fifteenth looks and feels and even smells like an art book, and it is an art book, but it's more than that, too -- it's a subtle bit of fun, a way to take a couple kicks at some of the assumptions of what a story can be and do. It's not profound, but since when did anybody go to pop art for profundity -- pop is the province of weasels and corn: it can sneak up on you, and plant roots.
99 Ways to Tell a Story is a more substantial book, and a more ambitious one. It's an attempt to do to the graphic form what Raymond Queneau did to fiction, providing a single, simple story told in various genres, forms, idioms, and styles. (Many of Madden's results are online here.) The story becomes like the joke in The Aristocrats, with the accumulation of iterations being the source of pleasure. Madden is an extraordinary artist, and his ability to copy the style of other graphic artists is particularly impressive, but it is his fidelity to the original, simple story that is the truly amazing feat here. Queneau would be impressed.
Madden's book has a strange blurb on the cover that makes it sound like some sort of touchy-feely how-to book: "An exploration of storytelling that will amuse and delight you, and inspire your own creative work - your novel, your comic, even your film." Well, maybe -- it certainly shows that there are no limits on how many ways a story can be conceived and structured, and that each choice changes the emphasis and effect. But there's much more here than a guide to digesting the artist within; 99 Ways to Tell a Story is a true tour de force, a valuable work of art in and of itself." - Matthew Cheney

Patrik Ouředník - The fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, English, 1,547, Germans, 3,010, so the average length of a corpse was 172 m

Patrik Ouředník, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Translated by Gerald Turner (Dalkey Archive, 2005)

«Ourednik, a Czech who emigrated to France in the 1980's, has written a ponderous-sounding, textbooklike monologue that accomplishes a literary sleight of hand. Europeana, translated from the Czech, has no protagonist and essentially no plot. Instead, Ourednik piles on lists, statistics and a hodgepodge of social theory - an annotated Harper's Index that gradually takes the shape of a bizarre narrative, a frenetic tour through the absurdities and horrors of the past century. Touching on subjects and events as disparate as the invention of the bra, Barbie dolls, Scientology, eugenics, the Internet, war, genocide and concentration camps, it unspools in a relentless monotone that becomes unexpectedly engaging, even frightening.» - Anderson Tepper

«Patrik Ouredník's Europeana defies categorization. At first glance, it gives the impression of disjointed excerpts from the author's reading furnished with comments and modest commentaries. These might serve as a basis for a lucid essay on the recent past in the spirit of the mediaeval chroniclers who interspersed their accounts of real events with invented stories, wondrous statements by miraculous sages, obscure teachings and religious doctrines, and unverifiable hearsay. But Ouredník doesn't even respect the procedures of the old chronicler and refuses to string the events he refers to onto a time axis, allowing them instead to wander freely through the space of the entire century like liberated atoms touching each other, disappearing and returning, colliding and fusing no distinction being made in terms of importance. The invention of the brassiere is ranked equally with the discovery of nuclear fission.
The apparently spontaneous testimony is reminiscent of Uncle Pepin's monologues in Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. However, the narrator of Europeana is no rhetoricist rambling on in orgies of endless self-expression. There is not the slightest hint of his involvement in events and he is present solely in the tone of the language; we simply sense him, which makes his desperate irony all the more poignant. Apparently devoid of composition, the text achieves its effect by a discreet construction principle akin to Kolár's 'rollages', where two pictorial reproductions cut up into narrow strips blend into each another. Ouredník has 'cut into strips' two basic thematic levels. The first of them consists of information about the frightful brutality of wars and revolutions, the collaboration of science and technology with evil, bizarre games with liberated sex, the misrepresentation of reality by the media, the madness of redemptive utopias, and other phenomena associated with human hysteria. The second basic 'picture' consists of an outline of various intellectual theories that Ouredník denudes of their speculative magic by re-formulating them laconically and laying bare their foundations, which often betray emptiness, confusion or sterile striving for effect. The result of this blending of the two worlds is a grim burlesque, in which the picture of life in the mirror of intellectual interpretation appears even paltrier than in the first place.
Europeana may be seen as an attempt to cleanse social memory. The author has created a narrator who has broken free from all particular loyalties, knee-jerk attitudes and adopted standpoints in order to relate afresh the general experience of the twentieth century. To a certain extent the reader shares that reality with him, knowing it from school, the press, books and TV documentaries, and one would think that its narrator would need some unusual opinion or provocatively sharpened attitude to draw attention. But that would run counter to the sense of the text, in which striving for a sharpening of attitude and a radical departure from common sense appears as one of the main causes of the tragic events. Instead, the author places the narrator in the position of a kind of Martian, approaching human history with the detachment of an impartial researcher, whereby the reader is enabled to view notoriously well-known events as if for the first time. Fresh light is also shone on them by placing them in unexpected contexts and providing revealing, though maybe fictitious detail.
European integration has been accompanied by intense efforts to replace traditional national historiography with the image of a shared history. Everything that divided the European nations in the past and led to conflict ought to take a back seat and allow the common features of a supranational European identity to assert itself. Over the centuries, many nations were encumbered with countless faults, each of them was guilty of war, genocide, enslavement of the defenceless and looting of weaker neighbours. In the relaxed climate of the new Europe, however, past transgressions cancel each other out and any remaining incongruities will be eliminated adminstratively after careful discussion in Brussels. Once more a splendid future awaits us, but we must come to terms with the past and call things by their proper names before putting it all behind us like so much useless junk. Who wouldn't be ready to assist in the achievement of such a hopeful vision? Only a dyed-in-the-wool prophet of doom, perhaps. Ouredník does not adopt a categorical attitude. His Europeana can be seen as Euro-optimistic or Eurosceptical. The text provides plenty of instances where bestiality resulted from the pursuit of national aims, but also demonstrates the frightful outcome of messianic ideologies and the pursuit of radical change with the help of various universal panaceas. The narrator does not join the chorus of enthusiasts who sing the praises of Europe as a delightful maiden. So far he tends to see it as an old Beast that Beauty can be enthralled by, but need not be. The book's message is a warning: even if Europe looks good in its new outfit, caution is imperative.» - Viktor Slajchrt

«Europeana is not judgmental: events are often baffling (genocide, wars, ideologies, fads), but the narrator does not presume to say what is good or bad. Europeana is an account-book, collecting facts and information. Contradictory ideas - especially that of bettering humanity by killing lots of people - are a constant, but the narrator does not even bother to spell out the contradictions for the reader, opting instead merely to list, describe, and juxtapose. Any inferences are to be drawn by the reader (though some are made fairly obvious by the presentation).
The book is divided into sections of a page or two in length, each a riff on some aspect of the twentieth century, or some specific events. The World Wars, various religions and ideologies, and technological advances are among the subjects frequently returned to, but from a variety of sides. A typical section progresses like this one:
Some historians preferred the Second World War to the First and said that the First World War was a national and patriotic war, while the second was for the defense of civilization. And in the First World War people were fighting for narrow-minded concepts that were already outdated, while in the Second World War they were defending a humanist ideal. After the Second World War people did not become pacifists and instead tended to speculate about whether a Third World War would occur between the democratic and the Communist countries. And there were spies snooping around everywhere. And the ministries of information pondered on ways of assisting the final victory. And scientists invented new weapons and new poison gas and atom bombs and warheads and carriers and bombs with parachutes and electromagnetic perturbations and neutron radiation and macromolecular cytotoxicity. And new words and expressions were invented to describe the new scientific discoveries and inventions, as well as the new social phenomena and theories, THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY and BLACK HOLE and TELEVISION and YUGOSLAVIA and CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY and RADIO and MODEM and DADAISM and SOCIOGENETICS and POSTMODERNISM and GENOCIDE and BIOETHICS and EUGENICS and TRANSGENETISM and CUBISM and EXOBIOLOGY and NUCLEAR DISINTEGRTAION and INTRA-PERSONAL RELATIONS, etc.
The wondering narrator does occasionally peek through - the observation that: "After the Second World War people did not become pacifists", for example, is a clear if subtle rebuke - but s/he generally offers only the facts themselves. The only other device of note: the tired: "etc." that's frequently used to cut off what otherwise could be a catalogue of endless variations and possibilities.
Any summary-description is bound to give the impression that Europeana is a very odd work - and it is. It may sound like an awkward mix of fiction and non-fiction - and lacking the best or at least vital qualities of each (plot and character in fiction, a clear, orderly presentation of facts in non-fiction) - and a tiresome one at that, but it's absolutely compelling. Most of what is related is familiar material, but this presentation does allow -- or even demand - the facts be reconsidered and recalled; especially in the connexions that are made as events, ideas, and fads are rattled off one after another. Compressing the century into so little space is also a reminder that while all these facts and events can be dissected and analysed at great length, and an endless number of motives and reasons can be found for every- and anything, they can also be reduced (largely in their foolishness) to such simplicity. Ourednik's novel is dry, but not without humour, and it's delightfully subversive without revelling in the absurdities and contradictions that defined the century too obviously.» - The Complete Review

«There are times when Europeana sounds oddly like something a bright-but-confused student would write in a high school class about world history. There are other times when it sounds like Vonnegut, others when it sounds like David Markson, and still others when it sounds like the sort of thing someone might ramble after waking up from a nightmare. Except so often the nightmare is true. Except so often truth is just a portrayal, a nightmare of itself.
Patrik Ourednik was born in Prague but has lived in France since 1984. We should not be surprised, then, that the items he returns to repeatedly in Europeana involve Communists and Nazis, neither of whom he much likes. The narrative also swings back to World War I, because it was supposed to end all wars, and to ideas of eugenics and perfection, religion and belief, science and progress. For instance, this passage from the beginning:
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was the first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and the general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative. And when the Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Sengalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And the soldiers wore green and camouflage uniforms because they did not want the enemy to see them, which was modern at the time because in previous wars soldiers had worn brightly-colored uniforms in order to be visible from afar. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916. they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soliders, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English, 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average length of a corpse as 172 meters.
The remarkable thing about the book is its structure: so much of the above gets returned to, but with new twists, different perspectives and details, so that the writing gains a kind of music through repetition and revision. Gerald Turner's translation is remarkable for finding an idiom to convey such wit and weirdness without letting it all sound stupid and pointless.
An excerpt from the book on the back cover says it is "from the novel" - it is interesting to think of Europeana as a novel, because it only fits the most open definition of that form. Yet it would be dangerous to call this nonfiction, because it is so vehemently subjective. There are no footnotes or source notes, no attempt at a systematic representation of history - no, this is history as it unfolds in a mind, facts and fancies cobbled together in a single consciousness, the echo of a century stuttered by an inner voice. I'm perfectly comfortable with the book as a novel, because the narrative voice conveyed a character to me. As I read, I kept imagining an old man sitting alone in a dusty little apartment full of books, an insomniac nattering on and on to himself like Hamm in Beckett's Endgame. History requires more than accumulation, it needs nuance and perspective, but what we each do to history in our minds and imaginations is the real subject of Europeana, and such a subject is, like the twentieth century, both terrifying and absurd.» - Matthew Cheney

«In an interview on the Dalkey Archive website, Ouředník observes that “when you sell more than a few thousand copies [of a book]—no matter how big the market is—it is probably due to a misunderstanding”. A book such as Europeana stands little chance of such misunderstanding, and we are the poorer for it, as this is a book which should appeal to – and surprise – almost anyone who goes near it.
The overall effect is hypnotic, dizzying, funny and disturbing.. The cool distance which the book offers, amid so much seductively expressed barbarity, means that after a while, the reader is moved to wonder by all this absurdity: Who are these crazy people? Oh. It’s us.» - John Self

«In an interview, Ouredník called Europeana a “stylistic exercise,” making explicit the allusion to Queneau’s Exercises in Style. But Europeana is an exercise of an entirely different sort. It is a hilarious book, disturbingly so, and perhaps more disturbing than funny. Ouredník’s Europe is a strange and nasty place, as is evident from the book’s very first sentences:
The Americans who fell at Normandy in 1944 were sturdy young men and they measured an average of 173 cm tall, and if they were laid one after another, with the soles of their feet to the crowns of their heads, together they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were also sturdy young men, and the sturdiest of all were the Senegalese riflemen in World War One. They measured 176 cm, and so they were sent into the front ranks to scare the Germans. It was said that in World War One people fell like seeds, and later the Russian Communists calculated how much fertilizer a kilometer of corpses would yield, and how much they could save on expensive foreign fertilizer if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals.
Just who is speaking here? The voice is third-person, impersonal, businesslike, but this is not the disembodied objectivity of an omniscient narrator or, for that matter, a history textbook. The narrator is more deadpan than neutral, too quirky and unstable to be truly informative. His childlike naïveté begins to seem cunning as he leaps from topic to topic:
In the twentieth century there was a turn away from traditional religion because when people realized that they descended from monkeys and could travel by train and make telephone calls and go down in a submarine, they began to turn away from religion and go less and less to church and they said that no lord god exists and that religion maintains the people in ignorance and darkness and that they were for positivism.
It is as if a professor of history has mounted the podium to deliver not the usual lecture in his survey course on Western civ, but a half-mad harangue, pseudoscientific and yet somehow commanding, in a voice both droning and captivating, with undertones of scorn and helpless-ness. In a recent interview Ouredník suggested that the century itself might be speaking.
The book’s first sentences hand us, in a nutshell, the themes and technique of the work. First of all, the syntax: Ouredník’s favored conjunctions are and and but, joining without ordering. He will string together his statistics, anecdotes, and interpretations, one after the other, like the dead soldiers lined up head to toe; there is no underlying structure or hierarchy of interpretations; there are no whiles, whereases, unlesses, or thuses. Chronology is no help; thus the sudden shift, in those first sentences, from one World War to another, and then to the Stalinist purges. There are becauses, but rather than structuring and explaining, they merely throw into relief the narrator’s (feigned?) naïveté:
Then people began to compare languages and contemplate who had the most advanced language and who was furthest along in the civilizing process. Generally they decided it was the French, because various interesting things were happening in France and the French knew how to converse and used subjunctives and pluperfect conditionals and smiled seductively at women and their women danced the can-can and their painters invented impressionism.
It is almost as if the twentieth century were such a rhetorical exercise (“write a discourse using no subordinating conjunctions”), sucked up into its own breathless, thoughtless syntax, bordering on moral idiocy—an inability to distinguish high from low, important from trivial, and horrific from silly.
Nevertheless, if there is no hierarchy here, there is some organization, or at least some obsessions that run through the text like a red thread. One is the reduction of history to statistics. Numbers reflect the reign of science (the Big Bertha has a range of 128 kilometers, the V2 missile reaches speeds of 5,800 kilometers per hour) and pseudospirituality (the Age of Aquarius will last 2,160 years, 144,000 chosen Jehovah’s Witnesses will rule the earth from the heavens). The numbers of tortured, deported, and murdered embody not the calculability, but rather the incomprehensibility of genocide. And numbers accompany the division of people into the superior and the inferior: the eugenicists
said that an eighty-three-year-old alcoholic woman will have 894 descendants altogether, of which sixty-seven will be criminal recidivists, seven murderers, 181 prostitutes, 142 beggars and forty insane, altogether 437 asocial elements. And they calculated that those 437 asocial elements would cost society as much as the construction of 140 apartment buildings.
147 Asocial elements: as much as numbers, Europeana takes aim at words, the jargon and self-justifying phrases that power uses to disguise its own barbarity:
And in 1934 [in Russia] they thought up reservations for Jews and called all the Soviet Jews to move there. The reservations were on the border with China in the Chabarovka region and in winter the temperature fell to -40 degrees, and the Communists said that it was not a reservation but an autonomous region.
It is these stereotypes of power, above all, that the glosses in the margins reflect and repeat, like a yammering chorus on the sidelines, echoing the phrases of the age: from “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “bourgeois decay” to “interpersonal relationships” and “Peace will rule the world.” Official language is a target familiar from Ouredník’s earlier works, but there is less faith here in the resilience and inventiveness of popular language—notice how the “wooden language” of the communists inexorably filters down into everyday speech: “Gradually people learned to use it to talk about everything, the weather, vacation, television shows, or the fact that their wives had started drinking. . . .”
In fact, reading Europeana closely, we realize that it is less a book of history than a book of how people talk about history. There are fewer events than opinions, reports, hypotheses, interpretations: “The Germans said the French ate frogs and the Russians little children, and the French said the Germans ate little children and tripe,” “and British women on posters said WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY—GO!,” and fascists said, and communists said, and Scientologists said, and Catholics said, and Jews said, and anthropologists said, and psycho-analysts said, and historians said, and people said... These endless reports emphasize the rhetorical nature of all our constructions of history and memory—and above all remind us how many times we’ve gotten it wrong, how many errors we have earnestly propagated, how many insanities we have persuaded ourselves were reasonable and necessary.
Against this endless chorus of deluded voices there stand out a few anecdotes, brief stories that do not “say” but rather form an eloquent commentary, outside language, on the chaotic events surrounding them: the young Jewish girl playing an aria from The Merry Widow in Dachau; the prisoner who has just returned from a concentration camp, dancing with the woman who has been scorned for sleeping with Nazi officers, leaning their shaven heads on each other; the World War One soldier trapped in the mud, who resembles no one so much as the friend growing in the field, but with a difference:
Near Courtai, a Belgian soldier got stuck in the mud up to his knees and four of his friends couldn’t pull him out and all the horses were already dead. And when they retreated along the same path two days later, the soldier was still alive, but only his head was sticking out and he wasn’t yelling anymore.
The human word is the most beautiful of gifts, indeed. To my mind, these anecdotes are the most powerful moments in the book, standing apart from the current of deceptive speech, a bit like the shells on the seashore when the tide of memory has ebbed. They are some of the few times when the narrator’s pitiless irony falters, if only for a moment.
What is compelling about Europeana is the way in which it mixes the light irony of the stylistic exercise with the effort to get beneath rhetoric, to approach what may be spoken about but always remains unspoken. Ouredník, lexicographer and rhetorician, helps us see language’s possibilities (for good or ill) by exploring its outer reaches. When the Czech literary magazine Host recently asked a number of critics and authors whether the function of literature had changed since 1989, Ouredník portrayed literature as a self-contained system, a kind of language game for those who happen to be interested in it—perhaps like chess, or, to use his own analogies: Literature, Masonry, and stampcollecting have at least one thing in common: they enable the initiated to communicate in a pre-arranged system of references and unspoken-nesses. Which is very pleasant and delightful, but doesn’t testify to anything further.? Which may be true, but it doesn’t testify to the skill with which Ouredník has enriched our field of references and our sense of what’s unspeakable.» - Jonathan Bolton

More excerpts:

«The first law on the sterilization of defective and asocial elements was enacted in 1907 in the United States. The law permitted the sterilization of hardened criminals and the mentally ill and in 1914, at the urging of psychiatrists, it was extended to recidivist robbers and alcoholics and in 1923, in Missouri, it was extended to chicken thieves of Negro and Indian origin, because in the case of chicken thieves of white origin, the opinion was that they could still find a way back and reintegrate themselves into the life of society through hard and conscientious work.»

«Historians concluded that in the twentieth century about sixty genocides had occurred in the world, but not all of them entered historical memory. Historians said that historical memory was not part of history and memory was shifted from the historical to the psychological sphere, and this instituted a new mode of memory whereby it was no longer a question of memory of events but memory of memory.»

Salvador Plascencia - Sublime And Hallucinogenic Dangers Of Orgasms With Origami

Salvador Plascencia, People of Paper (McSweeney's, 2006)

«Wow! This has to have been the most weird, wild and wonderful book I’ve read in the longest time. The book begins with a boy who creates paper organs to save his butchered cat and becomes the world’s first origami surgeon. The book goes on to tell of monks in secret factories, a woman of paper, a little girl named Merced and her father who cures himself of sadness by burning his flesh.

Merced and her father Fernando de la Fe leave Mexico and wind up in El Monte, California picking carnations. They encounter gangs, the woman of paper, and a whole assortment of strange and unusual characters. An unlikely war begins against the planet Saturn and the gang members from Monte Flores, led by Fernando.

The People of Paper is violent and bloody, haunting and strangely beautiful. A man’s tongue bleeds and bleeds from paper cuts received while giving a woman of paper cunnilingus, a wife leaves her husband because she is fed up with sleeping in pools of piss, turtles become armored tanks. It is unreal and real, fantastic and sublime.

The book is allegorical, beautifully written and most surprising. There are paper tricks throughout the book as well that normally would annoy me but in this, they just fit so well with the story that I found myself enjoying them hugely. What really surprises me is that this is a debut novel.» - Gina Ruiz

«Salvador Plascencia’s debut novel The People of Paper is a wonderfully strange, hallucinogenic and hypertextual blending of fiction and autobiography. The Prologue’s first sentences thrust us into an almost familiar yet purely mythical world while introducing Plascencia’s sly brand of humor:

“She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets—rare exceptions granted for immaculate conceptions.”

The papal decree shuts down the monk-run factory where people were made so that humans could be free to populate the world in a more organic fashion. They begin a march that “was to proceed until the monks forgot the location of the factory—an impossible task for a tribe that had been trained to memorize not only scripture but also the subtle curvature of every cathedral archway they encountered.”

But one monk, the fifty-third in the procession to be exact, sneaks away from the formation and wanders off. He eventually gives the coordinates of the padlocked factory to the brilliant paper surgeon, Antonio, who uses the factory to create his masterpiece, the “she” of the first sentence. Antonio, when finished, collapses on the factory floor, blood dripping from his hands. The paper woman silently steps over him, leaves the factory and walks into a storm:

“The print of her arms smeared; her soaked feet tattered as they scrapped against wet pavement and turned her toes to pulp.”

Now comes the strange part (or the first of a series of strange parts). Chapter One switches from standard book-page format to what will become a recurring visual motif: columns (similar to the look of a typical newspaper), each one headlined by the name of a character and written either in the first or third person. We learn of Saturn, the omniscient presence who lets us see poor Federico de la Fe, a bed wetter who is married to the beautiful Merced. They have a daughter, Little Merced, who sucks limes like her mother and who loves her father very much. Merced cannot stand the bedwetting (at least that is Federico de la Fe’s belief) so she leaves him for another man. To quell his heartbreak, Federico de la Fe discovers a “cure for remorse”: the infliction of pain through fire. He also decides to leave Mexico and head to Los Angeles where he and Little Merced can begin a new life. On the bus, they encounter the Baby Nostradamus whose columns are not filled with words but with black ink. They also meet the paper woman who tells Little Merced that she was never christened. So Little Merced dubs the woman Merced de Papel—a name that can translate loosely to “paper favor” or “at the mercy of paper” or even “thanks to paper.”

Federico de la Fe and Little Merced eventually settle in El Monte, a predominantly Latino community about a dozen miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is here that Federico de la Fe becomes the leader of an army to fight Saturn who lives in the sky and can read everyone’s thoughts. Federico de la Fe recruits a gang of cholos as his troops. Other story lines abound. There’s Margarita Cansino, the Mexican beauty who sleeps with lettuce pickers until Hollywood discovers her after she changes her appearance to look white; she becomes Rita Hayworth. Merced de Papel makes a home in Southern California and passes the time by sleeping with many men who cut their tongues and fingers on her private parts; these men belong to a secret society of those who have suffered such exquisite paper cuts. There’s also the wrestling saint, Napoleon Bonaparte, a curandero, flower pickers, Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, a glue sniffer, and a mechanic who makes robot tortoises whose lead shells Federico de la Fe uses to encase the homes of his troops to keep Saturn from penetrating their thoughts.

And who is this mysterious Saturn? As the novel progresses, we learn that he is a Mexican who is dumped by his Mexican girlfriend, Liz, who falls for a white man. Saturn eventually attempts to fill the void with another woman, Camaroon. All the while, a curious cholo, Smiley, who doesn’t heed Federico de la Fe’s warnings, searches out Saturn to learn whether he is good or bad. How does he do this? He rips a whole in the sky and enters the bedroom of Saturn aka Salvador Plascencia. Saturn is really nothing more than a writer. And his creations are taking over his life. Smiley confronts Plascencia who sadly does not recognize him much to Smiley’s consternation. Is he not important enough a character that his creator should know him immediately? Too many characters, apologizes Plascencia. Too many to remember.

The battle continues. Plascencia fights heartbreak. His creations fight for autonomy. When Plascencia is too depressed to control his characters, their voices spill onto the page in haphazard fashion, columns running vertically and horizontally, all semblance of plot ripped apart by voices wanting to be free and heard. At one point, the novel begins again when Camaroon complains about being turned into a character in Plascencia’s book.

What an astonishing, strange and deeply moving novel this is. In all his playfulness, Plascencia nonetheless grapples with troubling issues of free will, religious fidelity, ethnic identity, failed love and the creative process which he melds into a dreamscape that is impossible to forget. Plascencia—the God of his paper people—has given us a startling work of fiction that stretches not only the norms of storytelling, but also the bounds of our imagination.» - Daniel A. Olivas

"Like Dave Eggers’ obtrusive authority over the text of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The People of Paper becomes not only the story of the people of El Monte, but of Salvador Plascencia, as the novel falls apart over a woman. He writes: “You weren’t supposed to spill put of the dedication page. But then you fucked everything. Made holes in my ceiling, cracks in my ribs, my whole wardrobe to dust. All for a white boy.” And in a BS Johnson “fuck all this lying” moment, Liz, of the dedication (“And to Liz, who taught me that we are all of paper”) and the cause of Sal’s heartache, dispels the lies Saturn has told and retaliates with: “In a neat pile of paper you have offered up not only your hometown, EMF, and Federico de la Fe, but also me, your grandparents and generations beyond them, your patria, your friends, even Cami. You have sold everything, save yourself. So you remain but you have sold everything else. You have delivered all this into their hands, and for what? For twenty dollars and the vanity of your name on the book cover.”

Spurred by lost love, Saturn wages a Napoleonic war on Federico de la Fe and EMF (El Monte Flores), a gang de la Fe employs to bring about the Saturnian fall, to wrestle back control of their privacy, a counter-war “for volition and against the commodification of sadness,” a revolution against tyranny and eventual emancipation from the sight of Saturn. News of Saturn’s war reaches New York millionaires Ralph and Elisa Landin, who pledge funds to sponsor Saturn’s war for love, but with provisions — “Number of times the word ’sad’ appears (inclusive of ’sadness’ but excluding ‘Pasadena’ and ‘asad’): 53, Number of times the word ‘happiness’ appears: 4, Inventory of heartbreaks” — only to withdraw support at later on.

The People of Paper is a fantastical world, no doubt: part Swiftian, part Borgesian, entences full of Garcia Marquez and Kafka and with more than the occasional nod to Italo Calvino. It is also a dazzlingly designed novel: the narrative is rendered as columns of multiple perspectives on the page, with each chapter lead by * * * * glyphs, and as the order breaks down, black spots blot out Saturn’s prying, words are literally punched out of the paper, ink fades… And what of the ending? Sublime. Little Merced and Federico de la Fe walk south and “off the page, leaving no footprints that Saturn could track. There would be no sequel to the sadness.” - Susan Tomaselli

For once, a summarist almost got it right with the jacket copy:

Amidst disillusioned saints hiding in wrestling rings, mothers burnt by glowing halos, and a Baby Nostradamus who sees only blackness, a gang of flower pickers heads off to war, led by a lonely man who cannot help but wet his bed in sadness. Part memoir, part lies, this is a book about the wounds inflicted by first love and sharp objects.

Except there's so much more. Instead of The People of Paper, they should have called this The Book of Extended Metaphors, to go along with one of the books between its covers, The Book of Incandescent Light. They should have called it The Book of Heartbreak or The People of Sorrow. They should have equipped it with warning signs and seatbelts to protect those of us naive enough to get caught up in the fairy tale first pages, those of us who ignored for a moment that this is a book for mature adults, people with scars, people who should not expect a book about a childproof world. They might have dropped a few more hints, might have whispered: "This book will lock you in a shed of tears."

They should have said the truth: This book is sublime.

I read the book like a person in the first throes of love, blindly, enraptured, captured, chained, and, in the end, tortured and bereft. This one's for you, Susan: Here is your erotics of art.

Except isn't The People of Paper all about the dangers of orgasms with origami? Remember the story it tells of Merced de Papel, the last of the paper people made by St. Antonio in the days after ribs and mud and before Swedish bioengineering - Merced de Papel, who traveled to Los Angeles and was loved by many men, creating an ad hoc tribe of people scarred with paper cuts on their most sensitive skins. Remember the story of Liz, who loved Sal, who dreamed a world and wrote a book and couldn't have the book and the world and Liz, and so he created a Saturnalia of spite and loss, of names cut out of pages and dedications taken away.

I don't know of another book where the metafictional games are so necessary to the ultimate emotional effect, where the fireworks explode fantasy and reality to rain down not wonder, but heartache. The experiments of typography do not create any real difficulty for the reader, but instead evoke a visual and sometimes even physical analogue to the narrative, bringing the story beyond words. Watch the colors, for instance. It is no coincidence that dominoes are a passion for so many characters here - letters combine into words and words combine into sentences like a game of dominoes with twenty-six numbers to place together in infinite possibilities, to stack up in paragraphs and knock down in pages, the black dots of ink on the white tile of paper. Notice, too, how little color is in this world, how much depends upon green lettuce, the green rind and pulp of limes, a green dress. Little drops of poison. Paper cuts, each.

I could go on and on. I could tell you that what might feel like an anarchic concatenation of voices in the book is actually one voice trying to find a way out of grief, I could tell you why I think this is a novel that cleverly dresses up anger and hurt to pretend they are sorrow, I could exhort and proclaim. But instead I will end with two paragraphs among the many I loved:

He folded the letter, stuffed it into an envelope, and affixed postage. Saturn did not know her zip code or apartment number or the city where she had gone. He put her name on the envelope. Below her name he described the types of places where she might be: cities with rivers, streets with breezes, apartments with steps, rooms with canopies.

Still, three weeks later, there was no reply - just an itemized bill from the Postmaster General requesting reimbursements for maps of cities and waterways, for wind-velocity meters, and for all the man-hours spent climbing steps and peering into strangers' bedrooms.

It could be a bill from a voracious reader, that. It could be a cry against a book that, if you have any heart at all, will make you cry.» - Matthew Cheney

"In The People of Paper, Plascencia mythologizes his hometown, El Monte, drawing inspiration from the fables he learned as a child at his grandparents' farm in Jalisco. Among the novel's dozens of overlapping vignettes are those of a woman who escapes to El Monte when her Mexican town suddenly, and inexplicably, turns to dust; a soothsaying infant who transmits his prophecies through ESP; a girl obsessed with sucking limes, who dies of ''citric poisoning,'' only to be resurrected several days later by a miracle; an origami woman constructed from old newspapers, whose kisses give her lovers nasty paper cuts on their tongues and their other extremities; Rita Hayworth (nee Margarita Carmen Cansino and, in Plascencia's version, born in Jalisco instead of Brooklyn), who is mocked by the lettuce pickers in Jalisco when she abandons them for Hollywood; and a man who persuades a local gang to wage war against the planet Saturn, which he suspects of reading the townspeople's thoughts. (Saturn is later revealed to be the author himself who, alas, emerges as a central character in his own novel.).

As wondrous and comically inventive as many of these episodes are, they never cohere into a single, larger story, a problem that Plascencia's exhausting use of typographical gimcrackery - blotted-out text; razored-out text; sideways text; text split into as many as five columns across two pages, each column representing a different character's narrative - cannot camouflage. Still, Plascencia has done a nice job of creating a radiant, peculiar world that forms a convincing borderland between Hollywood and Jalisco.» - Nathaniel Rich