Juan Filloy -Some people’s brains border their anal regions; Part Pnin, part Werther, Op Oloop’s fragile sanity is held together by a lucid imbalance

Juan Filloy, Op Oloop (Latin American Literature), Trans. by Lisa Dillman, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.


"Mr. Optimus Oloop is a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires. His life runs according to a methodical and rigid schedule, with everything—from his meals down to his regular visits to the city brothels—timed to the minute. But when an insignificant traffic delay upsets this sacred schedule, and on the day of Oloop's engagement party, the clock begins ticking down towards a catastrophe that no amount of planning will avert. A playful and unpredictable masterpiece of Argentinean literature, raising comparisons to Ulysses and serving as a primary inspiration to authors such as Julio Cortázar and Alfonso Reyes, Op Oloopis the first novel by lawyer, Hellenist, boxing referee, and decagenarian Juan Filloy (1894-2000) to be translated into English."

"The first English translation of the 1934 novel by prolific Argentinean author Filloy (who died in 2000 at age 106) is a meandering day-in-the-life chronicle of Optimus Oloop, a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires, who is described as method personified—an accomplished executioner of spontaneity. His wanderings begin one morning when, on a routine trip to a Turkish-Roman bath, a minor traffic accident unglues him from his punctual reality. Filloy zips frantically between lengthy ruminations steeped in flowery, occasionally madeup language as Op unravels recklessly through his day. Like its main character in the throes of his breakdown, the narrative is at turns fascinating and impossible: Filloy shines in small moments when he displays his expert wordplay—Op's hilarious journal of the prostitutes he's known, or the occasional colorful aphorism—but more often the dense landscape of his language swallows the narrative and ditches the reader." - Publishers Weekly

"A prolific polymath, Argentinean writer Juan Filloy mastered seven languages, worked as a boxing referee, lawyer and judge, and authored 55 novels during his 106 years. The first of these to arrive in English translation is his most famous work, (originally published in 1934), which follows a Finnish statistician on a daylong romp around Buenos Aires.
The meticulous, titular Oloop metes out the deeds of daily life according to strict routine. Once that routine is thrown asunder on the day of his engagement party, Oloop’s battle to regain composure becomes his mental—and marital—undoing. At a bathhouse, the Finnish consulate, botanical gardens, a hotel banquet, and finally the portside brothels, Oloop loses his marbles amid rollicking descriptive flourishes from Filloy, an expert palindromist who delighted in multilingual flights of fancy.
Occasionally ranting against the depravity of life unhinged from his beloved “method,” Oloop’s struggle is at turns pathetic and hilarious, though he persists to the very last." - Paste Magazine

"The first time I heard of Juan Filloy was during an editorial trip to Germany, organized by the German Book Office and including a day of “speed dating” with other publishers. It was at one of my first “dates” that I met the very hip editors from Tropen Verlag who, after finding out that I worked at Dalkey Archive, the publisher of David Markson’s best works, suggested that instead of doing any of the German authors they might recommend, the one author that Dalkey absolutely had to publish was the Argentine writer Juan Filloy, especially his Op Oloop.
Before even getting to his actual novels, there’s a lot Filloy had going for him:
■He lived in three centuries—born in the nineteenth, and passing away in 2000 at the age of 106;
■Julio Cortazar loved him, and references his Caterva in chapter 108 of Hopscotch;
■Freud was a fan of Op Oloop, which led to a personal correspondence between the two;
■Filloy was a lover of palindromes and wrote over 6,000;
■and, not to be overlooked, almost all fifty-plus of his novels and collections of poems have seven-letter titles. (Op Oloop, Caterva, Vil y Vil, so on and so forth.)
Who wouldn’t want to publish someone like this? And thankfully, six years later, Op Oloop is finally available to English readers. (Hopefully it won’t take another six years for Caterva to come out.)
The plot of Op Oloop is pretty simple: it chronicles the final day and night in the life of its titular character, Op Oloop, a Finnish transplant in Buenos Aires who is recently engaged to Franziska, the Finnish consul’s niece. As he likes to state, Op Oloop is a “man of method,” a statistician who lives his life in a very orderly, pre-arranged way.
Thus, Op Oloop was convinced yet again that it was simply impossible for him to act contrary to his nature. “SUNDAY: WRITING, BETWEEN 7:00 AND 10:00 A.M.” That was the rule. When life is as ordered as a mathematical equation, you can’t just skip a digit whenever you feel like it. Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine; even such a trivial, graphical set such as addressing an envelope he’d already begun while still within the allotted time.
It’s clear from the start that Op Oloop isn’t all there—his speech to the employees at his local spa about the need to unite on tipping and form a “Gratuity International” is proof enough—but on this particular day, things go from bad to worse, as Op’s “method” is thwarted and he can’t regain his sense of order.
Filloy’s protagonist is a step beyond eccentric, and Lisa Dillman’s ability to capture his peculiar speech, wordplay, and insanity is quite impressive. This is especially true in the lengthy section detailing Op Oloop’s special dinner with his friends (in preparation for him to sleep with his 1,000th prostitute—a situation that doesn’t go according to plan and is the final nail that breaks Op’s mind). This dinner is the section of the book that seems most Cortazar-like (Hopscotch is filthy with groups of characters bantering and making statements about Argentina and its people), although Filloy’s not quite as tight and witty and fluid as Cortazar (who is?).
“In Hollywood, everyone knows the caloric value of everything. Just as they all aspire unanimously to stardom, they’re all equally fanatical about being tres mince rather than overweight. Truly, there’s a veritable obsession with fat. Dieting forces them all to undertake endless calculations and combinations. All portions are measured on a basis of one-hundred-calorie units. For example, one hundred calories equals: a tablespoon of honey, or two mandarin oranges, or four dates, or twenty asparagus tips, or a quarter-inch thick steak measuring five inches long and two and a half inches wide . . .” “So you must’ve gone round with tape measures, eyedroppers, and scales . . .” “It’s not a joke. You know, I’ve noticed that Argentines in general tend to be quite sarcastic, yet they’re entirely lacking in humor deep down. They make fun of everything in particular, and yet as a nation are all unanimously dull. It’s truly incongruous!”
As the novel lurches from scene to scene, Filloy creates an interesting account of one man’s mental breakdown. With the exception of what happens at the whorehouse, most of the underlying motivations for his breakdown are mysterious, summed up by the idea that he’s “method personified.” A more conventional book would delve into this issue, maybe explain how the hell he ended up with Franziska in the first place, etc., etc., but this isn’t a conventional book. It’s a more daring, playful novel, that, while not perfect, is one of the most fun novels I’ve read this year. I only wish the graph of Op Oloop’s day that’s in the Spanish edition was also included in this galley."- Three Percent

"Op Oloop, the protagonist of this novel, is a Finnish statistician -- and ratio incarnate, "method personified". He is governed by numbers, and hence:
Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine; even such a trivial, graphical act such as addressing an envelope he'd already begun while still within the allotted time.
Yes:
When life is as ordered as a mathematical equation, you can't just skip a digit whenever you like it.
Needless to say, life doesn't always play along (indeed, it's a wonder he's gotten this far), and early during the less than twenty-four hour span of the novel Oloop gets bumped slightly off course (which is enough for him to find: "All my methodology has gone straight to hell") and never manages to get quite back on again.
Love is a further complication, as he has fallen in love with the niece of the local Finnish Consul, Franziska Hoerée. It was on his way to an engagement party for the two of them that he got thrown off track -- thrown for an (unending) loop, in fact ("I can't seem to bring the experience to a close", he notes with considerable dismay). And he finds:
My personality is built on reflection, but I can no longer see myself.
Still, he remains somewhat attuned to what is happening to him, even as he senses it is destroying him:
The miracle of love has plotted the definitive sabotage of my spirit. I note intolerable obstacles, steel traps that make my psychological gears slip and destroy the harmonious mechanics of my system. It's deplorable.
Both he and Franziska are quite undone by the turn of events -- yet also find themselves connected on a higher spiritual plane: a meeting of minds and souls that continues through the book, even as they are separated. Oloop stumbles through the rest of the day and night, spending most of it at a grand dinner with some friends, still unable to gather himself. A further crisis comes in the form of the discovery of an unexpected link to his past. It's all a bit much for him to bear.
A friend diagnoses:
His tragedy lies in numbers: in being all method and no style. His esprit de geometrie forces a square peg into a round hole, as it were. He wants to chart and graph it all ! But the sentimental beings who inhabit our souls can't be organized into numerical series, coordinates, formulas. We've heard his heart explode. Perfection, shot to pieces ! Filloy focusses largely on the already broken man, his precision and pedantry a memory that Oloop desperately tries to cling to but that slips like sand through his fingers. The novel veers between slapstick humor, philosophising, and ethereal romance; just as he doesn't allow his protagonist to get his bearings, Filloy toys with the reader, too.
Filloy - one of whose favorite literary forms was the palindrome -- can well be considered a pre-Oulipoian writer with the games he plays in his text and the mix of maths and wordgames, and he uses all these to good effect in this novel. Not all of this comes across in translation: Filloy likes his puns, and only some of these can be conveyed in the English. His fondness for the grand pronouncements and philosophical flights of fancy comes across better: the novel is full of wonderfully put thoughts, from the pithy -- "Love is a plane crash of the soul" -- to the discursive:
Life itself - which for Goethe was multiple in character, and for Kant, rational - is not necessarily extinguished by the demise of one or even thousands of its integral elements. So, for people who are chronologically infirm, the voyage of life is nothing more than a funeral cortège mathematically culminating in the necropolis, when matter finally becomes entirely overwhelmed, and perishes.
And, of course, there's Oloop's wonderful cri de cœur to Franziska:
Oh no, cherie ! They'll never be able to abelardize us ! Our union is incoercible. It can't be touched by vulgarity. If any difficulties arise, our mutual trust will overcome them. I'm nothing like Abelard. No one can abelardize me ! And they'll certainly never manage to abelardize us ! (No one has any idea what he means by that, but someone does note: "It's a neologism. That's a bad sign")
Op Oloop is a strange, playful novel, as Filloy twists the story around the flights of fancy and philosophy that seem to be the main excuse for it. It is decidedly odd, but sparkles in its oddity.
Well worthwhile." - M. A. Orthofer

"Juan Filloy was an Argentine writer with a dramatic bio that includes boxing referee and palindromist. His writing exhibits the love of words and philosophy of the latter; the no-nonsense, unflinching eye of the former. He lived to be 106, having died in 2000, and in some circles is placed alongside some of Latin America’s best writers of the 20th century, such as his friends Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges.
As if all that weren’t enough, he’s also funny. Would that Op Oloop, the main character from Mr. Filloy’s first translated novel Op Oloop, could have shared a bit of the whimsy that Filloy sprinkled through the text around him. Oloop’s worldview and the “life” he lived—for lack of a better word—might have been far different.
Optimus “Op” Oloop is a man bound by his wristwatch. His life is a carefully timed, systematized, and ultimately hollow mechanism. Locked into patterns that dictate every action, he finally winds the spring too tight when he prepares for his engagement party. His self-imposed binds are evident in his preparations. As invitations are prepared the clock strikes ten. Oloop stops, mid-invitation, that of his closest friend, because in his schedule he doesn’t write letters after ten.
His servant mails the others, but his best friend isn’t invited. On the eve of his biggest achievement, the marriage into politically connected and successful family, Oloop won’t break free of his own arbitrary rules.
This is because success, for Oloop and his friends, is the result of ignoring better impulses. Rewards fall upon those who close their eyes to suffering.
The irony of this is heightened by the novel’s location and setting: Argentina in the ‘30s, a world not yet past the scars of the First World War and the Great Depression, not yet willing to see the horrors of World War II on the horizon. Ironic, too, is that Oloop is a communist who is successful in capitalism. He treats workers poorly, offers unwanted advice about unionizing immediately after snarky criticism. He talks to the proletariat as if waiters and pedicurists can’t hear him simply because he isn’t speaking to them.
His regimented lifestyle has made him an expert on the world. His statistician’s eye keeps his nose in ledgers, deciphering the world through its use of lumber, condoms, and the reclaimed remains of soldiers lost on the Great War’s battlefields. Emotionally scarred by horrors he saw in an unsuccessful communist uprising in Finland and work for the US ARMY identifying soldiers’ remains, Oloop lives so rigidly it’s a wonder his ties don’t snap when knotted.
When an emotional outburst makes him late for an appointment with his fiancé and others, his descent begins. Nothing has been lost, his future father-in-law urges him to realize, but for Oloop it’s too late. His gears have slipped. Undone, he ricochets between manic, moralizing speeches and catatonic episodes. By the time Oloop reaches his engagement party, which takes up most of the book, he has already suffered a head wound (from the Finnish Ambassador) and undergone a sexually themed vision shared with his fiancé (which may or may not be a psychic link).
It is at his party that a variety of life-philosophies collide, in the form of Oloop’s “friends”. His friends include a submarine captain who worked for the Germans in the First World War, a French pimp and white-slaver, a medical student who intentionally fails school to avoid graduation, the head of city sanitation, and the chief air traffic controller. Each is subjected to Oloop’s strange behavior and each judges it, consoles it, or encourages it through the evening meal. The meal itself, a gastronomic tidal wave of overly rich, rare foods, served in numerous portions, awash with alcohol, and like the guests it overwhelms.
Slipping further and further away from reality, Oloop reveals the purpose of the evening. It is, he tells them after many catatonic slippages, a celebration of love and sexual record-keeping. He intends to visit his 1,000th prostitute that evening and add her to his well kept files. Oloop is sexually obsessed, as both his diary and the sexual fantasy involving his fiancé (or psychic-linkage with his fiancé, depending on whether you’re a romantic or not) reveal. His friendships with a syphilitic med-student and French white slaver/pimp remind us further of this proclivity.
The book is surprising in its use of sex. The humor is often dirty, language rude, but ultimately very real. The party conversation is frat-boy authentic. The sexual fantasy with his fiancé is beautifully absurd. For him it is time to revel in his achievement: 1,000 whores and a pending marriage.
The dinner and alcohol draw out his friends’ judgments and prejudices against him and one another, and Oloop leaves, in a fit, ready to find the prostitute, his 1,000th, that his white-slaver friend promises is a “new Swede”. Oloop ultimately cannot handle the encounter, the prostitute is not whom the madam or pimp claim, and she brings with her too much of Oloop’s past, his hurt, his claims to living too forcefully in love. It drives him to action as unavoidable as it is expected.
At this point it is worth remembering that an old maxim states it’s not the destination but the journey. So, although much of the novel is predictable, it still forces consideration; both for its bluntly stated philosophies, and its jokes, parodies and satires of those philosophies. The novel is both humorous and absurd. Like the best satire it is an understated undermining of a lifestyle it illustrates in perfect, chiseled detail.
At times, however, the novel almost doesn’t hold together. It is so in Oloop that it is nearly as rigid as he, and perhaps denser. Little plot, much character. Despite this, it maintains a sense of itself, in much the same way that Oloop, despite fantasy and self-satisfied-delusion still maintains some sense of himself. And while the end is easily seen coming, it is not disappointing.
Finally, the best and worst compliment for the novel is that it skewers those social mechanisms and the gears within it that still labor today, making Op Oloop sadly, obviously, relevant to contemporary readers.Op Oloop is set in an economically collapsed society with an out of touch bourgeoisies, just after a bloody war based on sloganeering, and its rife with individuals soaked in patriotism and sexual identity who wear their success as a burden." - Sean Ferrell

"In the spirit of our PerecFest, I recommend Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop, published last summer by Dalkey Archive in Lisa Dillman’s ingenious translation. The title chimes with upending as well as with Oulipo, both appropriate cognates for Filloy’s ludic acrobatics.
Filloy spoke seven languages, created over six thousand palindromes, used only seven letters in the titles of his books, and lived in three centuries, dying in 2000 at the age of 106—a description worthy of his creation Optimus Oloop, a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires. Oloop, the ultimate method man, lives on a rigid schedule—“Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine” —and a timetable straight fromMussolini’s trains; a minor delay throws him off the grid and into chaos.
Op Oloop has, to his surprise and dismay, fallen in love: “The miracle of love has plotted the definitive sabotage of my spirit. I note intolerable obstacles, steel traps that make my psychological gears slip and destroy the harmonious mechanics of my system. It's deplorable”; he struggles to reconcile his precise nature with the vagaries of emotion (“I like you just the way you are: Height: 162 centimeters; neck: 32.4 centimeters; bust: 82 centimeters . . .”). Late for his own engagement party, he falls into a reverie when he realizes he has arrived at 10:04 on April 22—22:04 on 04/22; but this is the last gasp of the rational man. “We’ve heard his heart explode,” observes a friend. “Perfection shot to pieces.”
Chockablock with neologisms (“They’ll never abelardize us!”) and word play (he refers to France’s “three great clods”: Bernard, Monet, and Debussy), this pre-Oulipoian (Oloopian?) romp is a must read for lovers of Perec, and a fine introduction to this dazzling writer." - Susan Harris

"Filloy lived to be 106, finally expiring in his sleep in 2000. Unlike Rosales, Filloy lived a charmed, somewhat leisurely life. He spoke seven languages, and was a talented caricaturist, boxing referee, palindromist (he composed over six thousand), and judge in his hometown of Río Cuarto, Argentina, where he lived, some say, to escape the pernicious literary society of Buenos Aires. According to Op Oloop’s translator, Lisa Dillman, much of what Filloy wrote “he simply passed around to friends” instead of submitting it for publication. Nonetheless, Julio Cortázar cited Filloy as a formative influence, and he’s said to be experiencing a “cult following” in Latin America today.
Op Oloop was first published in 1934. The protagonist, Optimus (“Op”) Oloop, is a 39-year-old Finnish statistician whose legendary gift for self-discipline goes to pieces when he falls in love—for the first time—with a beautiful virgin named Franciszka. The story takes place in one day: the eve of his betrothal, which is also the night of his 1,000th “fuck” with a prostitute. And, though it begins cinematically, with Op gallivanting about town, it quickly fades into an extended lyrical discourse on love, with echoes of Montaigne (“Love, at times, follows the path of truth. But friendship, almost unfailingly, follows a more tortuous path”) and Freud (“The human condition imposes ineludible obligations which it is necessary to fulfill so as not to fall into psycho-moral trauma”). The plot is all but replaced by armchair psychoanalysis and a fragrant cloud of aphorisms: “Love, like blood, contains biological permanent characteristics;” “Love requires freedom, or else it asphyxiates;” “Love is a plane crash of the soul.”
One is left with the impression of a virtuosic, wildly passionate, and often hilarious writer writing primarily for his own aesthetic amusement. Filloy’s storyline exits at so many metaphorical cloverleafs—with lengthy explorations, for example, of the similarities between crime and pregnancy, or between the psyche and the Mediterranean Sea—that the novel runs out of gas before reaching its destination. The language is impressively ornate, with lovers’ souls merging “telestically in the grace of a Pythagorean rapture.” And the author provides a splendid portrait of the pre-modern metrosexual, personified by Op Oloop, whose symptoms include “inexcusable levels of urbanity” and “respecting himself altogether too much.” Yet Filloy’s verbal facility couldn’t hold this reader’s attention. Which is another way of saying Op Oloop lacks urgency of purpose—something which might be too much to ask from a 75-year-old work that may not have been written for publication." - Jed Lipinski

"Quirky Argentine writer who was born in the 19th century and composed more than 6,000 palindromes JUAN FILLOY, who has died a few days before his 106th birthday [2000.], was a prolific and adventurous writer, admired by Sigmund Freud, among others.
In his native Argentina he remained largely unknown until his last few years. He spent the whole of it in provincial obscurity, far from Buenos Aires literary society. Lately he has been rediscovered by younger writers and critics, who have compared him with Jorge Luis Borges and even with Balzac.
Filloy enjoyed his latter-day acclaim, but had never bothered to cultivate a readership or follow fashions. He wrote as he pleased, and did not mind if his work was unappreciated by public, critics or publishers. It did not worry him that he never made enough to live on from his writings. Indeed, he made a virtue of working purely for his own satisfaction - he said he felt a physical compulsion to write.
Most of his books had tiny print runs, which he paid for himself. He would point out that he was rarely noticed by the Buenos Aires papers because his publishers did not send out review copies. Filloy wrote 40 works of fiction and poetry that grew quirkier with every volume, crammed with allusions and conceits. Several had seven-letter titles: Estafen, Aquende, Finesse and Balumba, all written in the 1930s, his most creative period.
The best known, Op Oloop (1934), was about an obsessively tidy and methodical mathematician who eventually went mad. Some considered it pornographic, but Freud liked it so much that he sent Filloy a hand-written letter of congratulations - and kept up a correspondence for several years.
A later novel, Vil y Vil (1975), was banned by the military dictatorship then ruling Argentina, which was suspicious of intellectuals of every stripe, and Filloy was pulled in for questioning. They soon let him go, as he refused to talk about anything but literary theory.
Filloy cultivated almost every genre, including short stories, essays, plays, journalism and - most remarkable of all - palindromes, of which he wrote more than 6,000. One example gives something of the flavour: dábale arroz a la zorra el abad (the abbot used to give rice to the vixen - though the Spanish syntax is convoluted).
Filloy was president of the Argentine society of authors in 1939, but wider recognition came much later. The government gave him an award for a lifetime's achievements when he was 102. He never lost his lucidity and mental energy; he was at work on eight different manuscripts at the time of his death.
Juan Filloy was born in Córdoba, Argentina, on August 1 1894, the son of a Spanish grocer and his French Basque wife, who took in washing to make ends meet. They were illiterate, but scrimped and saved to send Juan to school. He spoke French at home before Spanish, and his writing had a strong French influence.
Filloy practised for more than 40 years as a lawyer in his native province of Córdoba. He later moved to R¿¤o Cuarto, and accepted tiny fees to defend the poor. He also founded a local gallery for Argentine art.
Filloy married, in 1930, Paulina Warshawsky, who was born in London of Jewish immigrant parents; she died in 1983. They had a son and a daughter.“ - The Telegraph

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William S. Wilson - I have been the librarian of time, able to see and to feel with my hands the shape of things to come ever being reshaped

William S. Wilson, Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka, Fiction Collective 2, 2002.


"In a 1978 New York Times book review, Kenneth Baker described Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka as: "…the most powerful New American fiction I have encountered in years. A demanding, exhilarating work." Nearly 25 years later, FC2 is proud to reissue this classic collection of short fiction by William S. Wilson that seems even more relevant today. It touches on controversies over the role of science in our lives and deals with cosmetic surgery and the medical uses of human embryos, heart transplants, and regenerated genitalia. And that's only the beginning. The story "Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka," implies that Kafka responded in his fiction to questions that no longer need to be asked in fiction. The epistolary story, "Conveyance: The Story I Wouldn't Want Bill Wilson to Read," is an intimate letter from a woman who had wanted to write fiction and who now challenges Wilson's reaction to her report of a tragedy. "Interim" chronicles the imaginary reforestation of Scotland and "Anthropology" turns on the actual moment in Structuralism when Claude Levi-Strauss relocates the ear to the back of the head in order to interpret a myth. Written with cool precision and a subtle touch, these meditations and metafictions will continue to reverberate for decades to come."

"...an ear for the frightening or ironic music in words... that should have the likes of... Barthelme looking to their laurels." - Kirkus Reviews

"Wilson's lucid and witty reverence for the fascination of the irreducible makes his 'experiments' an irresistible comprehensible whole." - The Baltimore Sun

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William S Wilson, Birthplace moving into nearness (Birthplace CL), North Point Press, 1982.


"THIS eccentric, often brilliant first novel by the author of the highly praised short-story collection Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka is difficult to describe without seeming to fall into parody. Set in the near future on an Edenic island called Primavera, ''Birthplace'' is a novel in the form of an extended letter from an old man to his long-absent grandson, Octavio. There are recognizable human transactions in William S. Wilson's literary tour de force - births and deaths, adoptions and marriages - but the novel is mainly about its own engendering. Its true subject is the relationship of language to the workings of the imagination.
''I have been the librarian of time, able to see and to feel with my hands the shape of things to come ever being reshaped,'' the maker of this book of letters, Salathiel, says of himself. His is the role of the artist giving coherence and form to fragments of memory. In writing to his grandson, the septuagenarian Salathiel is also seeking to make sense of his own life as he readies himself for death. Letters are included within the larger letter, communications from other members of the family - notably, the boy's parents, Orlando and Olivia, and his aunt and uncle, Aurelia and Oliver. Although playful and at times parodic, ''Birthplace'' is essentially a meditative work, an implicit wisdom text (advice from experience to innocence) dealing with death and renewal. It is related both in theme and imagery to Shakespeare's ''A Winter's Tale'' and ''The Tempest.'' In their sharing of knowledge and experience, the letters occasion themselves as gifts, the written word as gesture of love.
Although composed solely of letters, ''Birthplace'' has almost nothing in common with conventional epistolary novels, such as Samuel Richardson's ''Pamela'' or ''Clarissa.'' Mr. Wilson has only passing interest in the psychology of character. The figures in his cast at times seem interchangeable, defined only by their occupations. Aurelia is a doctor (a scientist in her predilections), Olivia a film maker (''Content is merely the accident of the era,'' she says), Oliver a poet and Orlando (a once backward child) a father and failed novelist. The Mayan Indian, Delenda Kinh, a godlike figure who comes to rule Primavera, is inchoate and wise. Salathiel, as artist, includes the qualities of the others as he includes their letters in his book. At the end, Salathiel marries a young woman named Yolanda and fathers a child. The title of the book, like a prophecy, achieves literal fulfillment.
A narrative of sorts - the oblique exposition of an embryonic story - evolves through the letters that Salathiel shapes for his grandson. We learn of the overthrow of the tyrannical ruler, Kwant - a figure representing the inhumanity of the past - by the enlightened Delenda Kinh. (''Delenda treated time as though every day were a reunion, greeting the face of day like the physiognomy of a friend, to be recognized.'') Under Delenda's benign authority, money is replaced by writing paper as a mode of transaction. After 14 years of wise rule, Delenda is killed by his beloved Aurelia in a self-devised ritual: He is cut open and a calcified fetus sewn up inside him. His death is intended as a sacrifice, the taking on of the ''infections'' of his people. We learn eventually of the deaths of Orlando, Oliver and Olivia, though their letters, at times delivered posthumously, live after them. Renewal is the book's central issue. Salathiel gives up the notion of dying, becomes a father and completes the letter to his grandson. The rest is implication.
Not all of this self-conscious novel is as good as when it is at its best. On occasion, obsession extends itself into tedious repetition. The notion that life on Primavera is a ''party'' palls after excessive reiteration. Still, this odd species of experimental fiction sustains itself at an impressively high level much of the time. What moves us in this work are the esthetic qualities and not tragic events, not what happens to the characters but the language and form in which events are revealed. ''Birthplace'' is a long philosophical poem in the guise of utopian fiction. In Mr. Wilson's description, the coming together of Salathiel and Yolanda becomes a metaphysical act. ''Yolanda, who can speak for herself, spoke for herself, I looked up and named her Hope, and we conferred, two active objects arriving safely at another border and crossing alive, with our collateral love intact.''
In his last letter to Octavio, Salathiel writes, ''Your memory lives on credit in my heart. I have humored my longing for you, fond old grandfather waiting on a cliff. I am half afraid to look out to sea lest I catch myself looking for you. Not knowing what or how to think of you, I grow reluctant to think of you at all.'' Instead of being a memorial to the past, this book-length letter becomes an invitation to the present. Salathiel finds his absent grandson in himself and so renews his own life as he completes the letter. It is art that Mr. Wilson cares most about, that frozen moment when the imagined world - the world itself - achieves an illusory completion. ''Birthplace'' as it ends offers us that triumphant illusion." - Jonathan Baumbach

William S. Wilson, Black Mountain College Dossiers No 4: Ray Johnson, Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 1997.

"A powerfully influential artist, who has been designated both the principal member of the New York Correspondence School and founder of Mail Art as a whole, Ray Johnson discovered in Black Mountain College the perfect environment in which to nourish his distinctive creativity. His work after his departure extends the exploration of freedom championed by the school perhaps as far as any other student at Black Mountain College."

"...The preface to Wilson's text indicates that the text is actually the result of a 69 double-spaced page letter Wilson sent to Wenk, which Wenk, with Wilson's permission, proceeded to "dynamite." The resulting fragments were composed specifically for the book. This conceptual aspect of taking something apart and putting it back together directly relates to Wenk's method of working, and therefore complements Wilson's insights into the artist's work. Additional documentary photos of multiple uses of tape in the real world - duct tape holding broken windows together - offer graphic reinforcement of Wilson's observations, "The tape, as viscous, is dangerous, for it threatens to stick to one like glue or like honey ..." A smart group of texts, Wilson's writing reveals the complexity of Wenk's seemingly innocuous actions and prosaic material. In his next publication, Wenk would be better served in attempting not to deconstruct the writer.
Of course Wenk's body of work at this point in time can't stand up to Ray Johnson's oeuvre. However, Wenk should look closely at how the caretakers of Johnson's estate understand the important relationship between an artist's personal image and the perceptions of his work. If Wenk's publication falters because he conceptually tries too hard at times to position himself as outside the art world, Black Mountain's elegy to Johnson succeeds because it takes the opposite approach - it embraces Johnson precisely because he was an artist. Such clarity does not lessen the richness of the work on Johnson. Instead it provides the necessary framework for comprehension and revelation.
An elusive individual whose suicidal jump off a New York City bridge in 1995 was thought to be his final piece of "mail art," Johnson the man, like the eclectic fragments that comprised his collages, was open to multiple and varied interpretations. Living a life that appeared to be an extension of the puns and palindromes that shaped his collages and mail art pieces, Johnson, to be taken seriously, must be lent a poet's grace through a comprehensive interpretation of the fusion of his life and artistic practice. This is beautifully accomplished by another William S. Wilson text that blends his personal reminiscences of Johnson with insightful readings of his body of work.
The "dossier" on Ray Johnson immediately announces itself as a poetic recollection of the artist through the close-up, soft-focus, black and white photograph of the artist that graces the cover. The contours of fair-skinned, youthful Johnson's face seem to disappear and merge with the background - appropriate for a man from whom personal identity was constantly in question.
In the text for this book, Wilson has the advantage of drawing on both the man and artist as he knew him. This is incredibly important in establishing the relationship between private acts and the creative process. Whether one is familiar or unfamiliar with Johnson's body of work, Wilson's recollections of seeing first-hand how Johnson interpreted the visual world around him, and then integrated into his unusual collages, are immensely engaging. An excerpt of Wilson's explains this phenomenon:
Walking on the Lower East Side Ray frequently saw a Ukrainian sign advertising a dance in letters which looked to him like "3-A-BABY." He then equated "dance" with "three," so that when three babies were involved in his life, he put the dance of three into the word "correspondance," thereafter usually writing New York Correspondance School.
It is this expression of Johnson's idiosyncratic logic that Wilson articulates with not only particular clarity, but poetry as well. In describing Johnson's suicide Wilson writes, "When Ray dropped himself from a bridge between two opposite shores on a dark winter night - he dropped himself as he would drop an envelope in a letterbox." Here Wilson weaves the memory of a lost friend into the aesthetic that shaped the artist's life. The dossier on Ray Johnson is an example of how the best art writing embodies the soul of the artist that is its subject. Both writers and artists could learn from this example." - John Brunetti

William S. Wilson: Ray Johnson Ray Johnson. PDF, 1977 Between Books edition

William S. Wilson: Ray Johnson John Willenbecher. PDF, 8.3Mb. A second Between Books edition

William S. Wilson internet sources

Sergio De La Pava – For those who like The Wire, rewarding, difficult fiction, literary, high-quality artistic and hilarious yet moving novels

Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity, Xlibris Corporation, 2008.

"A novel wherein Casi, a young NYC public defender and son of Colombian immigrants, will suffer his first loss at trial then seek to reduce the sting of that defeat by using inside information to meticulously plan and execute a heist of illicit millions. Where said actions will not only come to the attention of a persistent police detective but also unleash a menacing giant bent on violent revenge; two pursuers Casi must then outrace while navigating a world expanded by theoretical physics to encompass the rise and fall of boxer Wilfred Benitez, Alabama s death row, psych experiments involving Ralph Kramden, and enough comedic energy to power the stars."

"A Naked Singularity is a perfect example: it s by first-time author Sergio De La Pava, it was published by Xlibris in 2008 with no fanfare and no acclaim, and it s a masterpiece. The book s plot is at once simple a grubbily valorous lawyer in the New York public defender s office buffeted by conscience and tempted by the possibility of an illicit fortune, takes on the case of Alabama death row inmate Jalen Kingg and watches his entire life spin out of control and bewilderingly complex, involving hundreds of outsized characters and thousands of digressions on topics ranging across the entirety of the 21st century intellectual spectrum, from baseball to pop culture to (as its title suggests) particle physics. In its sheer scope, its extended stretches of rhetorical razzle dazzle, and the utterly deadpan way it grapples with all that s darkest in human nature, A Naked Singularity propels the reader into a literary maelstrom worthy of Pynchon, and Gaddis....[T]he fulcrum of criminal justice allows A Naked Singularity to explore the wide array of subjects that obsess its author; whaling gave Melville the same freedom in Moby-Dick, and in both books, characters converse in baroque homilies that are as far from the bulleted minimalism of modern fiction as it s possible to imagine. This is very much the Karamazov, not the Coen, brothers... I didn t miss A Naked Singularity and neither should you." - Steve Donoghue

"What's behind the nature of selfishness? "A Naked Singularity" is a novel about boxer Wilfred Benitez. Using Benitez as the stage, author Sergio De La Pava writes a story that gives readers something to think about. Speaking on the nature of evil, human nature, psychology, Hispanic life, and much more, Pava picks at the readers mind as the story rolls on and hopes to leave them wiser having read it. "A Naked Singularity" is a fine and highly recommended read." - Midwest Book Review

"At the end of 2008, Sergio De La Pava self-published his novel A Naked Singularity, a postmodern, re-envisioned, linguistic assault on the standard crime/heist/legal thriller. It’s very good—one of the best and most original novels of the decade.
It’s narrated by a public defender named Casi. Between his ruminations on boxing, television, philosophical conundrums, the existence of God, the legal system, ethics, morality, how to make empanadas, why you should never talk to the cops, and diverse other subjects, he processes the cases of the criminals who come through his office and works pro bono on a death penalty case involving a mentally retarded man named Jalen Kingg, who is imprisoned in Alabama, while elsewhere in New York an infant has been kidnapped and Casi’s downstairs neighbors are working on bizarre psychological experiments.
It’s one of those fantastic, big, messy books like Darconville’s Cat or Infinite Jest or Women and Men, though it’s not really like any of those books or those writers. Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook and The Easy Chain are perhaps the most apt comparisons, though the heavy use of dialogue will of course bring William Gaddis to mind as well. (I mean messy as a compliment: books that just fill themselves with facts and stories and subplots and digressions and in doing so create a much richer reading experience than novels which only include the details necessary to move the plot forward.)
But see here: I refuse to divulge too much of the plot, because watching it unfold is one of the great joys of the novel. The first 300 pages of A Naked Singularity are a joy to read—frequently very funny, insightful, gripping—for in those 300 pages it’s never entirely clear where, if anywhere, the narrative is going, but then around page 300 you start to get suspicions of what is going to happen and then when it clicks, you realize that De La Pava, in a purposely meandering and thorough manner, has been setting up the final 400 pages, which are an explosion and immensely difficult to stop reading. (The book itself also offers no sort of plot summary on the back, just a quote from the novel.) It’s a masterful display. In the end, it’s a thriller for people who can’t abide mass-market tripe—a wonderfully-written genre novel that’s too smart for its genre (think Plus, Joseph McElroy’s foray into sci-fi).
De La Pava is almost certainly a lawyer himself, or involved in that profession in some manner; otherwise he has gone to great lengths to make it seem that way. The prose in A Naked Singularity is remarkable—De La Pava handles pretty much everything with ease, from the chatter of the criminals to the legalese to the language of deadbeats to the articulation of complex philosophical issues to the narrative nonfiction recounting professional boxing in the seventies and eighties. Much of the early part of the novel has Casi interacting with the people he’s been assigned to defend (all of whom are obviously guilty), courtroom showdowns (both the mundane/routine and the exciting/unexpected), and legal strategizing/philosophizing with his colleagues, all of which display De La Pava’s skill with dialogue, as seen here in Casi’s discussion with a robbery suspect:
Well the fact is that I done come up with a new chess opening. And the truth is that this chess opening has confounded the grandmasters and dumbfounded the neophytes.
Great, so where’s the problem?
Well the further fact is we had irreconcilable philosophical differences respecting just how good my opening was.
What’s the opening?
You really want to know?
Sure.
And you won’t tell anyone?
No.
You sure?
Yes. Even if I wanted to, the attorney-client privilege would prevent me. I’d lose my license to thrill.
Casi, who’s never given a last name, talks and listens a lot—long stretches of the novel are composed almost entirely of dialogue, whether through arguments, conversations, or long, slowly related stories (including one of the funniest scatalogical tales in contemporary literature). He’s a wily defender, taking an avant-garde approach in many of his arguments.
The novel takes place in the present but is fortunately free of cellphones/internet/texting/et cetera—one of De La Pava’s several themes is our unhealthy obsession with entertainment and the media. All the descriptions of television (always written “Television” in the novel) are hilarious—it’s a world with commercials-only stations (which people watch!)—and The New York Post’s front-page exclusives are increasingly ridiculous but never enter the realm of the unbelievable.
What I keep coming back to is the audacity of this novel, which is truly a towering, impressive work—De La Pava’s not hesitant to break and then mirror the narrative with the story of professional boxer Wilfred Benitez, or insert a recipe, or the heartbreaking letters between him and Kingg (“I cannot just come and get you out, that’s true. But we can, and will, make it so you cannot be executed”), none of which hinder the narrative but rather shape the entirety of the book, making the actual story and its effect on the characters (and the characters’ actions that shape the story, et cetera) more profound.
It’s mindblowing (but I guess not really) that something this good had to be self-published—not that traditional publishing has recently shown interest in difficult works of genius (Evan Dara’s The Easy Chain—another candidate for best of the decade—seems to have been self-published as well). Without knowing any of the backstory, my suspicion is that no publisher would look at a 689-page debut novel, no matter how good it was. As Casi himself says later, about a lengthy brief he’s written to get a stay of execution for Kingg: “It’s not really that long if you look at it from a certain perspective, provided of course that perspective is one from which things that are very lengthy nonetheless appear to be quite short either due to Lorentz contraction or some other as yet undiscovered phenomenon. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
Near the end of the book, another public defender named Toomberg, speaking about Casi’s brief, could be talking about De La Pava’s novel: “And all that work for nothing. I hate to say it but you may have poured your very soul, as you obviously did, into the creation of this work and it may never be read by anyone [ . . . ] how awful.”
We have to keep that from happening. If you like The Wire, if you like rewarding, difficult fiction, if you like literary, high-quality artistic and hilarious yet moving novels that are difficult to put down, I can’t recommend A Naked Singularity enough." - Scott Bryan Wilson

"The book is narrated by one Casi (Spanish: “almost”; Italian: “cases,” not in the legal sense, but both are applicable here), last name left blank, a 24-year-old public defender in New York. Casi is something of a wunderkind, having maintained a perfect record; over the course of the book, he loses his first case and is brought low by the injustice of the world. The year is 2002; he lives in Brooklyn Heights with a set of college students who seem like they might be a television-mad version of the brothers Karamazov. His family is Colombian; a cousin has been put away for selling hot dogs without a license. The city is obsessed with a pair of seven-year-olds who have murdered an infant; there’s a blackout. A mentally impaired prisoner, failed by the legal system in every possible way, is on death row in Alabama. And there’s a heist, which doesn’t go according to plan: crime is imperfect. Through it all in interpolated a recent history of boxing, having as its center the career of Wilfred Benitez.
The work is meant to speak for itself; there’s something comforting about being back in this space, though the era of the anonymous author has all but vanished. A Naked Singularity, however, loses no time in making clear its antecedents. The book this most resembles is William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, similarly entangled in the legal system; that book’s celebrated first line (“Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law”) might serve as a theme for this one. De La Pava also shares Gaddis’s knack for unattributed dialogue. There’s an early invocation of the Pynchon of Mason & Dixon: “Now several acorns had successfully flown their sorties, cutting through the frigid air to form interrupted parabolas, when I began to conceive the inconceivable.” (p. 56) Like Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s books, this one is bursting at the seams: court transcripts, letters, and all manner of legal documents find there way in. There are cartoonish names, like in Pynchon, but the clownishness never fully escapes. The language is hyperactive and breathless and might bear the stamp of David Foster Wallace: the word “television,” for example, is always capitalized. But Wallace’s imprint might be found less in the language and more in the book’s deep sense of morality: De La Pava shares Wallace’s concern with how difficult it is to live in a flawed world. Bartleby is invoked, not surprisingly; Dostoevsky is never quite mentioned, though his presence floats through the book (Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, as well as the aforementioned Brothers Karamazov).
It becomes clear to the reader that this isn’t an ordinary work on page 14, when Casi goes off on a two-page digression about the history of Miranda rights, culminating thusly:
The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never gets overruled with John Flynn saying, and this is a direct quote (no it isn’t): “look dudes, and I refer to you thusly because this is way pre-O’Connor/Ginsberg, your Fifth Amendment deal is only protecting the rich and powerful: those who are brainy enough to know what their rights are or who have the dough to rent a lawyer.” The Warren Supremes actually agreed and, in the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy, held that before future police could torment some illiterate sap who nobody cares about into confessing his sins, real or imagined, they would have to inform him of certain rights not covered in your average eighth-grade Social Studies class.
The voice here is what’s astonishing: informed but colloquial, flippant but engaged (there’s a tenderness in “some illiterate sap who nobody cares about”). We can tell exactly what the speaker thinks about the justice of the law (“sins, real or imagined”); but his approach is also pragmatic: this is the America that he has to live in. The breathlessness drives the reader on: while the book is long, it’s never imposing. But most important is the quality of empathy: Casi cares about the illiterate saps in a believable way. This is a book deeply concerned with the preterite: those who don’t have the resources to get themselves represented by others. It’s refreshing to find a recent New York novel that doesn’t bother to mention Williamsburg or Park Slope; the Upper East Side or Upper West Side might be mentioned in passing, but the Village, the East Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, the neighborhoods of New York that are seen in movies and literary fiction are absent from this book. There’s plenty left over; but we don’t usually read this.
And this also stands out in that it’s a novel of work: Casi is a public defender, and spends most of his time at his job. The job isn’t lionized here: the protagonist is actively trying to be a good man, but he is decidedly not a hero by virtue of his work alone: the other occupants of his office are noticeably flawed, as he is. The criminal justice system is deeply flawed, as are the people that Casi is given to defend; but it is what there is, and Casi does the best that he can with them. But the job has an inexorable impact on him. This knowledge of one’s own imperfection in the face of the world expands to take over the book: Casi might be any bright young person coming to grips with the world: the heartbreaking career of Wilfred Benitez is made to serve as a sort of parable for the dissolution of dreams.
I’m also struck by how the book, comical as it often is, never has recourse to anything resembling magical realism, for my money one of Pynchon’s primary flaws. The world is often exaggerated in this book – as it well might be when described through a first-person narration – but the world described is always recognizably our own, with all of its horrific flaws. There’s a seriousness underlying this book’s comedy: the book draws its power from the outside world. The joking about the media circus around dead baby Tula that spans the book is funny because we know how sadly real this sort of thing could be.
One can’t help wondering about the author: has he actually worked as a public defender as the abundant legal detail – to say nothing of the clear feeling for the job that comes through – suggests? The effusive acknowledgments page thanks the NYCDS; and a cursory search of Google suggests that someone of the same name was working in legal aid in New York around the time the book is set. A more important question, though: how did the publishing industry fail this book? Someone should be paying Sergio De La Pava for the right to publish him; that work of this caliber is being published by a vanity press is depressing. The publishing industry prides itself on being a filter saving us from the mounds of garbage that are annually written; but honestly, this book could advantageously be pitted against almost any novel published in the past ten years by the big houses – especially the endless raft of New York novels. This is a book that deserves to be read more widely; in a better world, people would be reading this rather than Freedom." - With Hidden Noise

"A Naked Singularity is a wondrous, beautiful mess of a book that I was so absorbed in, I couldn’t put it down. The writing style is great: funny, clever, funny, philosophical, funny, legal, funny and at times rather violent.
I’m torn when writing this how much of the “story” to give away. I didn’t know anything about the book (the blurb on the back is just a quote from the book–there’s no summary or anything). So I’m going to rob you a little of the “what the hell is going on in this story” aspect that I had, but I’m not going to give anything major away.
The story opens in a the middle of a conversation between a prisoner and a lawyer. It’s a bit confusing until the story pulls back and we get the whole deal. The story is about Casi. He is a wunderkind lawyer who has never lost a trial (in 14 attempts). He plays the system, but he’s also dedicated to getting his clients off (even though he–and everyone else on staff–knows they are guilty) mostly because he is undefeated.
The entire first Part of the book (320 pages) introduces us to Casi, to his workload, to his clients, to his coworkers and to his family. His clients are mostly drug dealers. His coworkers are mostly jaded and are no longer excited by their jobs. His family is wonderful, a group of Colombian immigrants who love each other and fight with each other loudly. (The early scene at his family’s house is hilarious scene in which unattributed dialogue overlaps–it’s wonderful).
And yet for all of that, the first part never quite gives us a plot. This might be a problem for some books, but the whole set up is so compelling that you just go with it, from one amusing (or hilarious) segment to the next.
In addition to introducing us to his cast of drug addicts and low level criminals, Casi also indicts the New York Justice system (in hilarious detail). There are quite a few chapter spent talking about “bodies” (criminals) and how many of them sit in jail for 72 hours until they see a lawyer.
Of course, when he gets home, all is not normal there either. His apartment is free (because his downstairs neighbor’s father owns the building and Casi squats there). The neighbors are a curious bunch of college students. One of them is a total TV junkie. And, there’s a bizarre, wonderful subplot about him trying to bring Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners to life in his room by watching the shows nonstop for weeks. Yes.
Textually, the story also plays with lots of styles. In addition to the dramatic scene with his family, we also see many court transcripts. The second one with Mr McSlappahan is quite funny not least of which because the judge cannot get the poor man’s name right and the official transcript changes his name throughout the case. There are also letters to and from one of the clients. There’s a chapter-long epic poem (which was probably the hardest thing in the book for me to digest). There’s even a recipe for empanadas (which sounds delicious).
In addition to some wonderful wordplay and punning there is also childish gross-out humor. A scene with frozen burritos (pp. 150-158) had me laughing out loud for several pages. But there’s also a lot of commentaries on society. For instance Television is always capitalized and treated as a proper noun. The mayor of New York is named Toad. There are street vigilantes with cameras everywhere and, most amusingly, there’s an in-the-making TV show: Clerical Confessions.
By the time Part Two comes around a plot starts forming. I was concerned that all of part two would follow this nascent plot, but it doesn’t. The book continues in a similar vein with the plot-instigator [coworker and lawyer, Dane, one of the most consistently amusing characters I've read in a long time] continually popping up on Casi’s periphery to try to get him to help him with…the perfect crime.
And that’s when boxing comes into play. Casi is a fan of boxing, specifically a fan of Wilfred Benítez (who I didn’t know was a real boxer, but whenI looked him up I found this part of the story even more compelling). And so, interspersed throughout the rest of the book is Benítez’ biography and fight history. It’s a rather lengthy character study of the man himself and boxing in general. Now, I’m not a fan of boxing, I’ve never watched a fight, but I was totally engrossed by the storytelling.
Because he is setting up a whole story about muiddleweight champiosn, the novel follows many boxers who I had heard of and knew from pop culture (I checked and even Sarah knew who most of these boxers were, so they really must get into the pop culture world): Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns (I didn’t know him, but De La Pava’s description of the 3 round Hearns-Hagler fight is so exciting that I’m going to watch them on You Tube) and Roberto Durán (she didn’t know him). And so the story of these middleweight fighters trying to knock each other over for the title becomes something of a metaphor for the Casi’s life pre- and post- crime. In fact, when they go to execute the perfect crime, the first half of that chapter is taken up with a story about Benítez…that’s quite unexpected.
While the crime is beign set up, Toom, one of Casi’s coworkers asks him to help with a case in Alabama. A severely mentally retarded man is to be executed and Toom has taken on the case to rescue the man. This plot adds a surprising amount of pathos to the story, especially when Casi flies to Alabama and meets the man. But even that sequence is lightened by a wonderfully absurd hotel scene. I totally want to stay at this hotel.
Part Three of the story is where the whole thing devolves into a crazy quilt of insanity. The crime has happened, and it is messing with everything. There is a city-wide blackout, Casi has no heat, no cars are allowed on the streets so he can’t even escape to his mother’s house. There’s also a strange guy in is building who looks and sounds suspiciously like Ralph Kramden. And, Casi is accused of contempt (and is about to be ousted by his law office’s morals group, the childish but amusingly named Committee to Oust Casi Kwickly). Both trials are as absurd as a Marx brothers movie (Karl of Groucho?).
The lead up to the end is very satisfying will all kinds of loose ends tied together (things that I thought he’s never address were in fact cleared up!). But with a story this all over the place, it’s hard to imagine how you would finally end it. The ending goes in a direction that is supported by the title (and is a little overwhelming). It’s a little unsatisfying, but aside from a tidy happy ending (which you knew you weren’t getting) I don’t know how else you could have ended the book.
Ending aside, this is a fantastic novel. There is just so much going on in it (I didn’t even mention the discussion of Hume vs Descartes “I guessed there was nothing wrong with Hume provided it was acknowledged that Descartes was The Man” (510)) or the whole subplot about the two kids who kidnap a baby), and it is very well constructed and tied together.
Somebody please publish this book officially! Yes it’s long, yes it’s multifaceted, yes it demands a lot of the reader,but the payoffs are wonderful and, frankly, this is the kind of unexpected story that could be embraced by, well, not the general public, but a niche market who enjoys clever books (and yes, probably fans of David Foster Wallace (and his progenitors))." - Paul Debraski
"A 700-page self-published novel. I can't think of anything I'm less likely to read apart from maybe anything by Dan Brown. Or Jeffrey Archer. Or Mills and Boon. Actually scratch those, why on earth would I bother to buy a novel that couldn't get a single publisher to take it on, and a long one at that? Because some reviews are tempting, and I'm up for a challenge, and something about it lit a fuse within me. A review that alludes to Pynchon, Gaddis, Melville, Dostoevsky and Rabelais might just as easily send you running for cover as rushing to see what's within the covers but it does at least give an indication of the ambition and scope of this leviathan. This book certainly won't be to all tastes but if you like any of the writers above and might be goaded into action by a book that says, 'Go on, I dare you' then I dare you too.
A Naked Singularity is one of those books so large, so ambitious and so bonkers that it makes the task of writing a review almost impossible. You either write something as bloated as the book itself in an attempt to include all of its maddening variety or you end up paralysed and providing little more than a pithy summary and some hyperbole. Let's see if we can find a compromise but I make no promises. The book does at least have a single, central character. Casi ('kind of like Lassie but not really') is a public defender in New York. We never learn more than his first name but learn its interesting origin from his mother at a gathering of his Colombian family.
'I almost died during the delivery Dios mio. The next day they asked me if I had a name yet. I said casi because we were getting close to deciding, I kept waiting for them to ask me again but that's the name they put down.'
In a fabulous opening we are thrown into his daily existence as a lawyer representing those that far from being presumed innocent are usually regarded as guilty, that fact having very little to do with whether they can be got off or not. In fact Casi is quick to correct one client who thinks his lawyer needs to believe in his innocence.
"You're wrong I don't, I just don't. It's not going to make me work harder on your case like in some stupid movie and it's certainly not going to make it any more likely that you walk. In fact, if you really are innocent then it's probably going to hurt you and your case more than anything because, for one thing, I would probably be so distracted by the novelty of the situation I'd be rendered ineffective..."
It is a great opening for two reasons the first of those being De La Pava's ease with the technicalities of law enforcement, legal process and the underbelly of New York. There's jargon flying about all over the place, a feeling familiar to anyone who has watched The Wire, something that I find pleasingly intoxicating and it isn't long before you feel you're starting to get a handle on how it all works. With so many crimes and misdemeanours Casi's perspective is that the police have 'the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wished, so widespread was wrongdoing' this decision often based on 'the relevant officers' need for overtime'. So we quickly meet his caseload and this is where the second strength immediately comes into play. The snappy dialogue of these early interviews is brilliant, idiomatic and well-observed. In fact it's in stark contrast to most of the dialogue in the book which can be florid, digressive, erudite, verbose, sometimes all at once - oh, and I mean that in a positive sense. Casi has warned us early on after all that he 'can wander a bit whilst storytelling' but some friends and colleagues also have a tendency to hold forth (with, for example, the 'mind numbing, intentionally yawn-inducing detail meant to replicate the utter inanity of such societal questions' as one character puts it later)
One in particular is a fellow lawyer called Dane who drives what you might call the plot. Dane has theories about many things but one of his obsessions is the pursuit of perfection. How on earth can we achieve perfection in such an imperfect world? Following on from his interest in perfect numbers (those numbers that are the sum of their divisors, excluding the number itself e.g. 6 (1+2+3=6) and 28 (1+2+4+7+14=28)) Dane determined to offer the perfect defence to one of his clients (number 6 on his caseload naturally). What is a perfect defence? Not just an acquittal but the most rigorous preparation for trial ever mustered so that acquittal is guaranteed. His research extended from an in depth knowledge of the case and even the possible judges, with a little manoeuvre to make sure that they would be assigned the one most favourable to their case, to a similar familiarity with his client. It may surprise you to know that the pursuit of perfection means a crash course in crack smoking so as to be able to empathise and understand one's client all the more effectively. That kind of commitment combined with another of Dane's obsessions, the human desire to leave a legacy, leads him to propose something equally shocking to Casi when their discussions lead them around to the allure of the heist.
"But then you need the will Casi. The will to execute it the one chance you get. This is where the adrenaline comes from and this is the universal attraction. This is why people love crime, the singularity of the will involved. And don't tell me people don't love crime to the point of near obsession. Just look at the newspapers, the visual news, and all other forms of popular entertainment, crime is their favourite process. The only question is whether crime is inherently a perversion, meaning error is necessarily built into it, or whether some degree of perfection can be achieved in that area."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the commission of a truly perfect crime."
"Oh."
"Possible?"
"Guess anything's possible Dane."
"And everything."
"So get cracking on it, could be your legacy."
Casi will live to regret giving Dane any encouragement in that direction, but I don't want to spoil anything by saying any more about the plan to commit the perfect crime itself. What is just as important as the thriller-like plan is what it means to each man. Casi's relationship to the plan is 'dysfunctional', for all his involvement in its formation he has his eye firmly on a hasty exit and yet something keeps him involved, something to do with the visceral connection this gives him to underbelly he is used to representing and the ability to impose his moral imperative at the same time (If reality is sometimes so intense and bizarre that it feels like bad, unpersuasive fiction, then this was fiction so powerful it outrealized reality.). Dane needs Casi for the plan's fruition, he knows instinctively that two heads are better than one and that Casi's own natural tendencies towards caution and disbelief will be the perfect partner to his own total conviction.
"You're as capable of perfection as I am. Join me in this and learn what it means to truly exhaust a potentiality."
I couldn't help but be reminded of the verbal sparring and jockeying of Tyler Durden and the Narrator in Fight Club. This mismatched pair have a lot to offer each other and the extraordinary conversations between the two of them and the thrust of the plot itself might be enough for some writers but De La Pava has much more in his sights. The novel is like a compendium. We have already encountered themes like justice, perfection and legacy; dialogue that ranges from the pithy to the polemic; characters that manage to attach themselves to your reading consciousness whether they are granted several chapters or a single paragraph. But there are also thought experiments in which another tenant in Casi's building aims to watch a TV series in its entirety, without commercial interruption, from start to finish, in order to prove his hypothesis that it will make the main character contained within as real or manifest as anyone else in his life. There is a satirical look at our reality obsessed Television (that word always significantly capitalised) and the public bands armed with cameras, known as the Video Vigilantes, who provide news outlets with footage of the gruesome crime-de-jour (a child abduction and murder that will have UK readers thinking of Jamie Bulger), and even the sanctity of the church confessional is in danger of being invaded by video cameras and our leering gaze for a new TV series ('It's not TV, it's HBO' - shouts the priest as comfort).
Significant sections of the novel are given over to the history of boxing involving one fighter in particular: Wilfred Benitez. I have no real interest in boxing but there was something fascinating about such a comprehensive examination of one man's career, particularly someone I had never heard of and yet who to this day holds the record as the youngest World Champion (he was just 17 when he won the light welterweight title in 1976). Benitez was famed for his defensive skills, seeming to hold an almost telepathic ability to evade blows, leading one opponent, Sugar Ray Leonard, to comment, 'It was though I was looking into the mirror... I mean no one can make me miss punches like that.' Like the best sports writing it makes you want to watch footage of it immediately, possible with ease thanks to YouTube, and that in turn makes you realise how good the prose description is, the detail of movement it contains like watching slow-motion footage with expert commentary. What is the purpose of these boxing sections amidst the plot of a crime thriller? That theme of legacy is one connection, a boxer's career defined by three numbers, the most vital of statistics, that measure wins, draws and losses (with KO's in brackets), that are often all that's left behind by those like Benitez who find themselves close to penniless at the end of their career and even their own memories destroyed by the degenerative brain disease that is the true legacy of those punishing blows in the ring. Boxing also picks up on the decisive moment, the need to face one's fear and not run away. There comes that moment in a fight when you get hit, hard, and then there's a decision to make. Do you go into a defensive shell, lose on points, sure, but 'avoid embarrassment and avoid needless pain'? Or do you step into the danger area and fight, make sure that if the other guy wants victory he will have to wrest it from you? That same choice is faced by Casi and Dane as they stand on the cusp of action in a moment typical of this novel's audacity. Invoking the theodicy of Leibniz and the modal realism of David Lewis, Dane uses his belief in all possible worlds to argue for what he sees as their only course of action.
"And I have nothing but contempt for these people, if you can call them that, who will turn around at this point," he said. "And when I think that one of them looks just like me and has the audacity to go around calling himself Dane it makes me want to draw blood from the anger. Remember that because right now it is certainly at least possible that you and I will go get that money, that means at least two of our counterparts will in fact get it. Don't we need to be those two? Of course we do, it absolutely must be us. I don't care what it entails. You have total power and control here. You just have to decide who you want to be and that's who'll you become."
Melville was mentioned earlier and there are many comparisons to be made with Moby-Dick, comparisons invited by De La Pava by his naming the novel's giant, almost non-human nemesis Baleena (balena being Spanish for whale). Melville's masterpiece received a mixed and often baffled response on its publication but now stands as one of the cornerstones of American literature. It's not possible to know what fate has in store for this leviathan, although we can say that in at least one possible world it is a bestseller, but De La Pava is well aware of what is at stake. After working tirelessly on an appeal document Casi is brought face to face with another possibility.
"I hate to say it but you may have poured your very soul, as you obviously did, into the creation of this work and it may never be read by anyone, it may never so much as influence a single person's actions. I just came to that realization, how awful."
It's tempting to say it would be a crime if that turned out to be the case, but the awfulness of the pun aside it's already inaccurate. More positive responses from readers and reviewers are certain to follow and if there is a publisher (and editor) with enough balls out there then there's no reason why this world shouldn't be the best of all those possible for De La Pava.
Oh, and I haven't yet explained what a naked singularity is. Here goes: The gravitational force around a black hole is so strong that light emitted from beyond that singularity's 'event horizon' cannot reach the observer. This means that the singularity cannot be directly observed. A naked singularity is a (so far) theoretical singularity with no event horizon and therefore observable from the outside. I'm not going to tell you how that fits into all of the above and you'll have to read until the very last page if you want to find out. Go on, I dare you." - William Rycroft

"The tale is of just-turning-24 year old Casi, an extraordinarily talented New York City public defender, during the coldest winter days of what appears to be the year 2002. It is not, however, a post-9/11 novel, but rather one in which Time and Space undergo a bit of progressive bending, resulting in some highly comic moments (including a disciplinary hearing held under the acronym COCK: Committee to Oust Casi Kwickly, and an unusual series of hallway meetings with Ralph Kramden).
These comic moments, though, are laid on top of a deadly serious analysis of Great Issues such as crime, tragedy, aging and death, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil, and boxing (yes, boxing!), in which De La Pava does a good job of incorporating tales that stem from what appears to be a very good undergraduate education in philosophy – running mostly from Descartes and Hume to David Lewis. The disappearance of an infant from her baby carriage outside a store casts a bit of a pall, and is bended into the ongoing tribulations of the drug addicts who are in and out of the Center Street Courtrooms, as well as a mentally-challenged death row inmate in Alabama. Casi’s family and his lawyer co-workers are painted quite brilliantly (especially eventual co-conspirator Dane), and thus the slip-sliding between the comic and the tragic shows remarkable deftness.
De La Pava shows some daring and inventiveness when it comes to language and dialogue (there’s a great poem, for instance, read to the silent-but-angelic young niece; the courtroom transcripts are absolutely hilarious; and the series of letters between Casi and Jalen Kingg, the death row inmate, is heart-stoppingly powerful). Like at least one other reviewer of this book, I would have liked to see more of this textual inventiveness, but one takes and appreciates what one gets, I guess, and in any case this book has far more than most. Did mention it is of the laugh-out-loud variety, and that most of the jokes are original?
Some readers will surely think the book is “sprawling,” but it never even threatens to spin out of control. The narrative is compelling – I didn’t put the book down for two days until I had finished it. As for the inevitable DFW comparisons? They are not really that appropriate, except for the fact that (a) the book is long, (b) it is smart and funny, (c) it deals very seriously with Entertainment, (d) it uses boxing instead of tennis to question the meaning of life, and there’s probably an (e), (f), and (g). For people who think IJ is too hard, you can try giving them this DFW-”lite” book, and showing them that a good sprawl will stay with you a lot longer than 99% of the books out there, and then turn them back towards IJ." - Jeffrey Paris

Excerpt

Todd Shimoda - The emotive essence of things, or the sadness in beauty, the moments which makes us gasp 'oh!' with heightened awareness

Todd Shimoda, Oh!: A mystery of 'mono no aware', Chin Music Press, 2009.


"Oh! is a hybrid novel, with nonfiction and artwork mixed in. The main storyline follows Zack Hara, a young Japanese American searching for an emotional life while traveling in Japan. Zack finds an ally in a professor and underground poet who introduces him to the concept of mono no aware, roughly translated as the emotive essence of things, or the sadness in beauty. The professor, grieving for a missing daughter, assigns Zack a set of mysterious tasks. Zack’s search for self-discovery turns into a search for the professor’s missing daughter, and draws him into the tragic phenomenon of suicide clubs."

“The mysterious tension between material things and emotional attachment to them oscillates throughout Japanese history and culture. With a keen and sympathetic eye, Todd Shimoda explores an individual's dangerous quest to waken his numb soul to this exquisite reverberation. As in Kawabata Yasunari's famous novella, The Master of Go, the lacrimae rerum of a dying tradition become a river, inexorably flowing toward the ocean of death. Fascinated, the reader cannot help but follow the flow.”—Liza Dalby

“Can an aesthetic concept developed in Japan 300 years ago be revived and made relevant to a contemporary American audience? This is what Todd Shimoda so masterly achieves in his fascinating novel Oh! A mystery of Mono no Aware. This is a journey through a delicate world of emotions and poetry on the part of a young Japanese American from Los Angeles who in his search for the native roots uncovers the complexities of being human in a world framed by skepticism and rationality. Structured as a thriller with a most unexpected finale, Shimoda’s novel unravels like a Japanese scroll—one cannot put it down until the last scene comes into full view and, with it, the realization that the realm of feelings (mono no aware) is far from being an innocent enterprise; it carries risks that one must be ready to pay in order to fully understand. This is a brilliant novel—it makes the reader feel the pleasure of thinking.”—Michael F. Marra
“This is the most compelling and complete account I have read of the exploration into the sudden, intense moment of awareness; the inherent state of sadness of life; the moments which, as Shimoda's character explains, makes us gasp 'oh!' with heightened awareness and wistfulness.”—Laura Pritchett

"On a lark, 20-something Zack Hara leaves his tepid life in L.A. for Japan. Following tiny shifts of fate, he quickly becomes fascinated by the ancient Japanese notion of mono no aware — an elusive concept that loosely means "the beauty of sad things," a sudden, intense moment of awareness that makes us cry "oh!"
In search of his own moment of mono no aware, and intent on awakening his own emotional life, he becomes captivated by the suicide clubs that meet in the Aokigahara forest. In seamless counterpoint to the philosophical current, Shimoda shapes a delicate mystery that grows darker as the novel progresses. The book itself is a fine work of art, with a gorgeous, embossed cover, rice-paper-thin pages, and textured paper inserts with illustrations that offer clues to Zack's fate — a triumphant kick in the pants for anyone who doubts the future of paper-and-ink books." - Lucia Silva

"Detached and contemplative,"Oh!" draws the reader into a mesmerizing journey of discovery while also exploring contemporary Japanese pathologies along the way. This philosophical mystery gives us leads on understanding sadness, loss, family ties, identity and suicide. It is also a search for clues about what connects and motivates people, one that overlaps with the protagonist's own search for roots and attempts to break out of his shell
Zack Hara, an emotionally numb and alienated technical writer, suddenly decides to bolt Los Angeles and visit Japan, his ancestral home. Working illegally as an English conversation teacher in Numazu, Zack seems to exchange one rut for another. Zack, however, confides his empty emotional life to a local professor who prescribes tasks aimed at unlocking his sense of mono no aware (the pathos of things), an archaic term analyzed extensively throughout the text.
Indeed, the search for mono no aware and its meaning is an engaging leitmotif in "Oh!" For me, it embodies a sudden sense of wistful melancholy stirred by an intuition of impending loss, but here one discovers dozens of definitions and situations that evoke a sudden realization foreshadowed in the title. The text is framed by several stand-alone snippets of learned commentary on mono no aware that Shimoda presents as "exhibits," all referenced at the end of the book for the curious researcher.
In searching for mono no aware Zack quickly learns that it has little place in contemporary Japan. These days, his girlfriend says, "No one has time for mono no aware anymore." Most of the people we meet seem incurious and mindful of very little, merely going with the flow. Everyone except the underground poets he meets.
We follow Zack to the town where he thinks his grandfather is from and share his discovery that everything is not as it seems in the family tree. From there Zack turns his detective skills to suicides, visiting Aokigahara forest where many occur, and tracking down members of a suicide club. Ironically, in the midst of this obsessive investigation, one that focuses on emotional sensitivity and loneliness, he manages to lose his girlfriend, but doesn't seem able to connect the dots about his fear of intimacy. He also loses his job and has the police on his trail, but he perseveres.
Along the way Zack discovers that he and the professor have more in common than he thought; they both intellectualize emotions rather than feeling them. Finding the professor's missing child becomes Zack's new mission, but life and journeys are never straightforward. While searching for her in Tokyo he catches a suicide-club street performance near Harajuku and picks up a young girl who tells him, "The biggest problem of suicide is that it is boring. . . . It would be boring to kill yourself. It's all over. It would be much more interesting to stick around and see what happens." Amen.
Explaining the alternate logic of the suicide victim, Zack comments, "Death becomes the only answer to every question and situation. Death becomes the inescapable conclusion." As we expect, he joins an Internet suicide club, trying to understand and perhaps tap into the poignant emotions he lacks, that drive so many young people to despair. The members, however, don't want to talk about why they want to kill themselves, only about how to do it. He asks himself, "Is it better to feel nothing or feel their pain?" He finds the answer to his koan in a taped-up car in Aokigahara. It is this event that also inadvertently sparks the professor's own epiphany.
I must add that aside from Shimoda's tremendous story, sparingly etched, this is a beautiful book, one that feels handmade and produced with pride. Showing off the aesthetic possibilities in publishing, this weighty tome of poetry and palimpsest is lavishly illustrated and printed exquisitely with an embossed cover. Hats off to the book lovers at Chin Music Press!" - Jeff Kingston

"Recent articles claiming the demise of our ability to read long pieces of prose, digest an entire magazine article without feeling the urge to check some social networking website or another, or even use Google without ending up dumber, have left many wondering about the future of "books". That is far too large an issue to discuss here, but TODD SHIMODA's OH! A MYSTERY OF MONO NO AWARE seems to beg the question, albeit from a more positive starting point: his combination of story, illustration and highlighted footnotes either points towards a multimedia future for books -- or perhaps a look backwards to art that is all-encompassing and not focused on a single style.
Shimoda's third novel is a rich mystery: complex, entertaining, intelligent and an absolute pleasure to unravel and digest. Following the "Oh" is the mystery of mono no aware, which loosely translates in English as a type of "sensibility", a sense of sudden emotional awareness and the need to then express emotion.
Collaborating with his wife Linda for the illustrations, Shimoda tells the story of Zack Hara, who has gone to travel and live in Japan. Zack is drawn to his father's birthplace and in the course of illegally teaching English he meets Professor Imai, who tasks Zack to understand the concept of mono no aware. Zack also becomes interested in discovering more about the suicide clubs, whose members kill themselves in Aokigahara.
As in any good mystery, layers of apparently insignificant details reveal themselves to be critical; less typical is the addition of Zack's personal search for something completely intangible.
Certain design devices - short chapters, larger type and boxed footnotes centred in the middle of the page - seem to cater to our now reportedly shortened attention spans. But while Shimoda makes use of "strikethrough" and other typesetting effects, the poetry and lovely illustrations tend towards a completely different statement -- that a book can be so much more than a mere plot with beginning, middle and end.
At times, Oh! is reminiscent of a classic narrative, affixed with footnotes to help the reader along. But Shimoda's explanatory notes are given center stage, anchoring chapters as the plot moves forward: it is not often that the reader is privy to an author's reasoning for selecting a certain word, for crafting a particular reference.
In Oh! Shimoda's Professor Imai laments that modern Japanese no longer have an understanding of mono no aware, although the concept still remains central to the Japanese psyche. Early on, as Zack tries to confirm this statement, he is told: "No one has time for mono no aware anymore". Perhaps Shimoda (or Professor Imai) would be pleased to hear that upon asking two Japanese people about the expression, both were able to speak of it with relative ease.
An introspective read, with moments of humour and others of surprise, OH! A MYSTERY OF MONO NO AWARE unwinds slowly, as if Shimoda has tasked the reader towards the same journey of understanding mono no aware." - Melanie Ho

"My immediate impression of the book is an appreciation for its highly interdisciplinary aesthetic. The production values for Shimoda’s novel are first rate and it is very clear that much attention was paid to the visual experience of the narrative inasmuch as the written plot. I agree very much with ’s estimation of the book as being akin to some of the collaborative poetry collections of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. I think more generally the issue of collaboration has been glossed over in critical estimations of Asian American literature.
I won’t refer again to Shimoda’s career or the plotting of the novel as the previous reviewed has already completed an excellent summation of the main points. I do very much appreciate though the narrative pull that leads the readers onward. Zack Hara develops a really unique relationship with a professor while living in Japan, who provides Zack with a number of mini-adventures related to the exploration of “mono no aware,” the keen sense of loss that Zack does not seem to be able to relate to or understand. In this regard, the novel seems to be very much invested in the ways that Zack seeks to move out of an emotional stuntedness that is emblematized most carefully by his brief and desultory relationships with women. Shimoda sets the novel’s spatial trajectory vividly and we get a sense of the various cities and villages that Zack eventually travels to and explores. Each location becomes a terrain upon which the protagonist can investigate various philosophical musings. As the novel moves more firmly into its various mysteries, the pace picks up and we are left with a cliffhanger conclusion that is supposed to be unraveled through a careful consideration of the visuals that have been included. The images that do appear in tandem with the text often are incorporated in the space between the short chapters; in this regard, the reader is forced to look back and try to make sense of them in a different way. The “mystery” then unfolds in the artistic vision that Linda Shimoda provides. The very careful and organic union of art and fiction adds much to the texture and the success of this work. I am also reminded of the continuing transnational valences of Asian American fiction, having just reviewed Mary Yukari Waters’s The Favorites and having taught some fiction by the short story writer Shimon Tanaka. In this regard, Shimoda’s novel continues to flesh out the contemporary Japanese terrain from a Japanese American perspective. Zack is certainly interesting because as a Japanese American he possesses a complicated perspective of one who can sometimes “blend” in with others, but also finds himself strangely unmoored regardless of his relative linguistic proficiency. At various times, we see him either get mistaken for a “native” Japanese and at other times, as a Japanese American. This liminal space is key to enfiguring the complicated psychic terrain that Zack inhabits, one that is increasingly problematic to him as the novel moves forward.
I would highly recommend this book simply for its production value; Chin Music Press has made it a point to reconstruct the “novel” into a multifaceted experience. Of course, I think it would add much to any Asian American literature course or for any American literature course more generally; I think for myself I could see it easily as a match to the experimental impulses that we have seen, especially with the inclusion of art into literature. A course for instance could start with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, move to a strong poetic sequence with Mong-lan and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and conclude perhaps with Todd Shimoda’s Oh! The course could also incorporate graphic novels, such as Mine Okubo’s work, David Kirk Kim, Gene Luen Yang, Lynda Barry, and Shaun Tan. I think it would be really fun =)" - Stephen Hongsohn

Excerpt

"Seeking mono no aware in and with literary art: Colin Marshall talks to experimental novelist Todd Shimoda"

Interview with Wendy Nelson Tokunaga

Todd Shimoda, The Fourth Treasure, Vintage, 2003.

"It is the very rare novel that can manage defy the basic physical conventions of the form—a book-length narrative told through a series of single-column pages of text—without feeling gimmicky, that can manage to use illustrations and design to enhance the reading experience. And it's the very rare author whose brain is big enough and fingers dexterous enough to pull off such a project without letting down one of the ends.
In The Fourth Treasure the stakes are even higher because the novel brings together two wildly different subjects—cutting edge neuroscience and Japanese calligraphy—while still telling an engaging and suspenseful, highly readable story.
In the case of this book, it is two people, husband and wife, who rise to these challenges: Todd, the writer, who has won awards and wide praise for his fiction, and is also a professor with a UC Berkeley Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (clearly, the brain is big enough); and Linda, the illustrator, an artist who has studied calligraphy in Japan (she's the fingers of the operation). Together, they have created a novel that is as full of complex characters and real suspense and romance as it is of beautiful artwork and multi-layered erudition."

"This isn’t the most moving novel I’ve read recently, but it’s in many ways the most interesting, and it’s certainly the most beautifully designed.
The author is a third-generation Japanese American who earned a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and works at Colorado State University as a cognitive scientist doing research in artificial intelligence. This is his second novel.
The book’s title refers to the “four treasures” of shodô, the Japanese art of calligraphy: brush, paper, ink and inkstone. The novel is a romantic mystery of sorts built around an ancient inkstone in the possession of an elderly shodô teacher, or sensei, who owns a small studio in the East Bay. Bouncing back and forth from ancient and modern Kyoto to today’s Berkeley and San Francisco, it’s also the story of a young Japanese-American woman, Hana Suzuki, a student in neurobiology at Cal. When the sensei suffers a stroke, she decides to study how it affects his calligraphy—and through this search discovers much about herself.
The book makes splendid use of marginalia, including an ongoing series of explications of shodô, with gorgeous calligraphy by Shimoda’s wife Linda. Intellectually, it’s a fascinating exploration of this ancient art form, and also of the complexities of neuroscience. These qualities, and the breadth of Shimoda’s tale, make up for his blandness as a stylist. There’s a coolness in his prose that could be called Zen-like but sometimes just seems flat. I kept reading, though, captured by Shimoda’s intelligence and knowledge and the book’s physical beauty, if not by emotion." - Robert Speer

"A teacher of Japanese shodo (calligraphy) emerges from a stroke with both agraphia and aphasia, severely limiting his ability to communicate and rendering his kanji characters indecipherable. Meanwhile, across San Francisco, his former mistress, Hanako, waitresses at a Japanese restaurant and struggles to hide her MS from her daughter, Tina, a grad student in neuroscience and the love child of her affair with the calligrapher. Calligraphy serves as a meta-metaphor throughout this book, which, much like a calligraphic kanji symbol, is deliberately composed stroke by stroke. Skipping back and forth in time, from 17th-century Japan to modern northern California, Shimoda (365 Views of Mt. Fuji) traces the history of the potent Daizen Inkstone, from its discovery in a mountain stream to its hiding place in present-day Berkeley. Like a poem composed in kanji symbols, the story's overall meaning only emerges from the interplay between its characters, who are themselves invested with symbolic, conflicting qualities. They include the rebellious shodo sensei Zenzen and his traditionally minded student Gozen; Hanako and her thoroughly American daughter, Tina; two neuroscience professors, one a theorist, the other a pragmatist; and Tina's boyfriends, one a charismatic, charitable Latino doctor and the other a humorless Caucasian. When Tina takes the stroke-afflicted Zenzen as a subject for her studies, she is, quite literally, attempting to resolve the ancient mind-body conflict. Illustrations of the sensei's poststroke calligraphy and its Zen koan-like interpretations punctuate important points in the narrative. Reading this novel, which encompasses so many mysterious contrasts, is like an exercise in contemplating a beautiful piece of calligraphy; Shimoda has penned a skillful meditation on both art and life." - Publishers Weekly

"This is a love story that spans three decades and both sides of the Pacific as well as a mystery that revolves around a legendary ink stone and the lineage of a renowned school of Japanese calligraphy, or shodo. Shimano, a Japanese shodo teacher and master of the Daizen school, has an affair with Hanako, one of his pupils and the wife of a construction magnate who banishes her to America when he discovers her infidelity. Shimano follows Hanako to San Francisco, taking with him the ink stone that is the symbol of his school's prestige. In the present time of the novel, Shimano is a shodo teacher in Berkeley, while Hanako continues to live in San Francisco, their lives never intersecting. When Shimano has a stroke and loses the ability to speak and write, one of his students takes over the administration of his school and discovers the Daizen ink stone hidden among some old letters. Thus unfolds a chain of events that will bring Shimano and Hanako together one last time. A third-generation Japanese American and cognitive scientist, Shimoda keeps the plot elements in perfect balance, and the marginalia provide some interesting information about shodo that add depth to the narrative. Recommended for all collections." - Philip Santo

"Shimoda, a third-generation Japanese-American, again tells his story with calligraphic marginalia and reveals scientific aspects of the plot in parallel italic paragraphs about neuroscience. Although the marginalia of 365 Views, Shimoda's debut novel, baffled some, many found it useful and entertaining. The marginalia here enlightens us about the story, although this isn't clear until the plot finally smoothes out into a tight knit. Kiichi Shimano, an aging calligraphy teacher who has founded his own Zenzen school (and his own Zen calligraphic style) in San Francisco, comfortingly saddened by a lost love affair, suffers a stroke that takes away his power of speech and rational thought. But we have literally watched him teach calligraphy (Zen means Nothing-"Try not to think," he says), and he still wields a surreal power of communication in the eloquence of his unthinking brushwork. The fourth treasure of the title is the Daizen Inkstone passed down through the centuries to winners of calligraphy competitions. Shimano has taken it from Kyoto and kept it himself. Other parallels tell of Shimano's early years as a teacher in Kyoto while we follow the trials of Berkeley student and neuroscientist Tina Suzuki, who finds the gifted but stricken Shimano a golden subject for neuronal research in her Brain and Behavior Studies. Further parallel to the mystery of Shimano's neurons is the story of Tina's mother, a single parent with MS who keeps a scandalous past under wraps from her daughter. Is her secret tied to calligraphy and lost love? Is Shimano a more intimate ideal test subject than Tina knows? Is healing ki (lifeforce) a scientific reality-and better than marijuana for MS? Eternal quintessence in art and science." - Kirkus Reviews

"Writers tend to seek outsider status, which may explain why so many from the less micromanaged West, such as Booker finalist David Mitchell (Number9Dream) and Pico Iyer (The Global Soul), find in Japan a dependably sacrosanct home away from home. "In countries as hospitable as America," Iyer told the Voice, "I have one foot inside the community, one foot out. But in Japan, where I always have both feet out, I find solace." But what of the half-Japanese writer, the foreigner whose native-looking features might blur the lines between insider and outsider?
"My experiences in Japan were dichotomous," admits novelist Todd Shimoda during an interview in San Francisco, the principal setting for his new novel, The Fourth Treasure. "As a foreigner in Japan who spoke little Japanese, I was an outsider, of course. But as a Japanese American who at least looked the part, I could pass as an insider. If I didn't say too much."
Shimoda is a third-generation Japanese American, but his easygoing demeanor and faint twang betray his Southwestern childhood. The 47-year-old author and his wife and collaborator Linda, a visual artist, lived in Shizuoka prefecture from 1986 to 1987. Shimoda's Western rationalism (he had worked as an engineer) gave way to what he calls "something a little deeper. I climbed Mount Fuji with one of my Japanese students. He didn't speak much English. We could feel what one another was thinking, relating to each other on a Japanese level, in silence."
Shimoda's first book, 1998's 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, takes place in Japan. Fuji is the story of a disenchanted salaryman—an outsider from Japan's corporate cliques who gets drawn into a familial web of madness in pursuit of aesthetic fulfillment. Critics praised Fujifor its ambitious scope, its intertwined stories and impressionistic, ukiyo-e-inspired illustrations. But reading it can be as unsettling as a high-speed Internet surf: There's a surplus of pleasures, but you finish feeling kind of battered.
The Fourth Treasure is more satisfying. It traces the borders of insider/outsider status through an unlikely admixture of shodo (Japanese calligraphy) and science, combining stories of love (lost and found) and mystery with a bildungsroman, sounding a literary lament in a muted key.
The interrelated narratives coalesce around Hanako and Tina Suzuki: the former an immigrant who left Japan and her marriage after an illicit affair in the '70s, seeking solace and anonymity in a San Francisco tempura restaurant, and the latter her illegitimate daughter. The action shifts from California to Kobe and Kyoto with ease, pursuing the mystery of Tina's unknown father while recounting the fate of a missing shodo inkstone (the eponymous "fourth treasure"), a centuries-old talisman that enables its owner to transcend pain through art.
Yet personal identities remain as intangible as cultural boundaries—a challenge for the novelist and the reader. Tina is Shimoda's clearest protagonist, but she is a cipher even to herself. "Tina is confused, not only ethnically, but at a deeper level: who she is and who she can be," says Shimoda. She doesn't know who her father is. She doesn't know any Japanese and hasn't been to Japan, though she's sleeping with an archetypal American Japanophile, an ESL teacher named Mr. Robert, who is about as sexy as a Western tourist in samurai garb. She drifts through her graduate studies in neuroscience until a Berkeley-based shodo sensei, Mr. Robert's teacher, has a debilitating stroke, becoming the subject of Tina's research.
The Fourth Treasure is designed to meld Shimoda's Japanese heritage with his penchant for so-called "postmodern" conceits. Notes from a shodo instruction manual and a neuroscience textbook, together with poetic-sounding snippets from the recesses of the sensei's dreams, run down the margins in delicate typeface. Kanji, Japanese characters, appear in the margins courtesy of Linda. But the trained (or native) eye will quickly note distinctive idiosyncrasies in an art form known for its rigid formality. The kanji are frequently lopsided and expressionistic, and grow more so with the sensei's demented mind.
"The calligraphy in the novel was intended to be stylized," Shimoda says now, "to show the effects of the sensei's living in America, as well as the wracking emotions he brought with him. Many of the links between neuroscience and shodo, as shown through the sensei's stroke-induced brain damage, worked themselves into the story."
Shimoda wants to join disparate worlds: Japan and America, art and science, age and youth. He acknowledges Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami as models, but he writes more like a careful, fact-juggling scientist with a searching imagination.
The author identifies most with a marginal figure in his novel, a private investigator named Kando, who follows Hanako from Japan to California at the behest of her crooked and powerful ex-husband. "His cool reaction to being confronted by thugs is one of resignation," explains Shimoda, "knowing that he crossed the insider-outsider line in Japan—and got caught." - Roland Kelts

"The novel is dead. Long live the novel! Last night, shortly after reading Todd Shimoda's unique and exuberant "The Fourth Treasure" and before beginning this review, I went out for a drink with some of my writing students. One young man, a survivor of the dot-com frenzy, said he'd heard the essence of that shimmering era summed up in a single remark: After hours of presentations by young dot-commers schmoozing with "old-style business," a suited veteran of industry pronounced his conclusion: "You're just a bunch of guys with ideas."
"Shimodaworks" is the name of the stunningly polished Web site where a browser can investigate and sample from past, current and forthcoming "projects" of author, consultant and engineering professor Shimoda and his artist-collaborator and wife, L.J.C. Shimoda. To term them a "couple of guys with ideas," though, would be to wildly understate the case. In addition to respective talents in the visual and storytelling arts, collectively the pair draws inspiration and connection from an array of fields that includes cybernetics, neurology, traditional Japanese scroll-painting, calligraphy and the Japanese language.
Each of these strands, bound together by the keen cross-cultural sensitivity of this nisei-generation American writer, plays a significant role in "The Fourth Treasure," a detective story that glides effortlessly between contemporary San Francisco and Kyoto, dips back into the mid-1970s and, with a fresh leap of imagination, returns to the classical Edo of the mid-17th century.
But the story itself is only the thickest strand of the novel as a whole, which is enriched by the artwork, which delivers a parallel unfolding of secrets. Calligraphy is real: in thick, black strokes and whorls on the page, far more than a metaphor. Calligraphy, or shodo, is the engine of this novel, the title of which derives from the four treasures, or necessities, of its practitioner: paper, ink, brush and inkstone.
The silent central figure of the tale, outwardly calm yet inwardly tormented, is an aging master calligrapher, a former star of that art in Japan. Self-exiled to Berkeley, he heads the obscure Zenzen (Nothing) School of Calligraphy. All he has brought with him from the illustrious academy in Kyoto is a stolen inkstone and an abraded heart.
"The Daizen Inkstone began its life as [a tiny part of] a mountain. At some point in its ancient history, the mountain began to disintegrate, as all objects do, as all people do. "Chipped in free fall, subsequently "smoothed and mellowed" by the force of a river, the stone is finally fished out by the wandering poet Jinmai: "'I think you would make an outstanding inkstone.' The stone, of course, had nothing to say." Nonetheless, tumbling down generations of calligrapher-poets, the accidental, perfect stone rose to being both a well of inspiration and a contested trophy.
Like other traditional art disciplines of Japan, shodo is ideally an all-consuming do, a discipline, a path for life. Ten thousand strokes for ten thousand days, the minimum prerequisite for mastery. Discipline, however, invites--in more sensitive individuals, it may even compel--transgression. Fittingly and hungrily, utterly nonjudgmental, "The Fourth Treasure" explores varieties of transgression in various contexts: adultery, dishonoring of parents, cheating on a lover, acceding to blackmail, acceding to bribery, handing out marijuana for medicinal cause and, not least, misappropriation of an MRI machine.
The front-stage protagonist of the story is Tina Suzuki, fatherless daughter of a self-denying immigrant-turned-restaurant waitress, Hanako Suzuki. Tina is a good girl, first-year Berkeley grad student in neuro. But after a long evening's work analyzing MRI results with a fellow grad student she fancies: "Tina smiled for a moment. 'I've been thinking of something kind of kinky. Have you ever wondered what your brain looks like when you're having an orgasm?'"
The fates of Tina, her self-sacrificing mother, the silent teacher and certain other players tie up as neatly as treasures bound in a furoshiki scarf. The confident reach of this text-plus-visual-aids is prodigious, exhilarating and provocative. If you read it, you may turn the last page and absorb the final hieroglyph only reluctantly.
Old-style novelists, move over? Maybe. But in this intriguing product of a new take on the Renaissance art workshop, a few traditional elements of fiction are much missed. The characters are sketchily drawn and without inward development. For all the dovetailing of a strong plot, the reader feels little emotional impact. And, ironically given the novel's subject and metaphor, there is little honor shown to the "ten thousand strokes" of the discipline of writing. The pervasive dispensing with the past perfect tense fosters confusion, and pronouns and modifying phrases are sometimes haphazardly assigned. Technical details? Perhaps. But in the case of language, essence dwells in style and syntax. A bold experiment, especially, needs the guidance of an old master." - Kai Maristed

"Few recent novels have caused me to think as much as TODD SHIMODA's THE FOURTH TREASURE. While undoubtedly intriguing, I haven't yet decided whether I think this is a "good book" or not. It's different, and there's not a lot to compare it against; I'm not even sure I know what "good" means in this context. I imagine I'll probably have to think about it for a while longer.
Author Shimoda, who is a professor of cognitive science as well as a writer, is skating on pretty thin ice here a lot of the time, and part of the thrill is wondering whether the ice'll crack and he'll fall in. The ice cracks in a few places, but he doesn't fall in.
We have come to accept that the substance of a work of literature -- the words -- is independent from its presentation, so that book -- the physical form -- is often used as a synonym for novel, i.e. the words, so much so that it now possible to source the "complete works" of a number of authors of the classics off the Internet: just the letters, no formatting. Paperbacks and hardcovers are identical except in heft.
TODD SHIMODA's THE FOURTH TREASURE takes us back to an earlier time, a much earlier time, when books were more than just words presented linearly, when the visual and even tactile context was crucial.
The Japanese (and Chinese) always knew this; the physical form of the words on paper, even the quality of the paper itself, was often as important as the words themselves.
THE FOURTH TREASURE communicates not just through the words on the page, but also through the beautiful and intriguing illustrations, both calligraphy and calligraphic imagery, that adorn the pages.
Perhaps it takes a cognitive scientist to remind us that the brain accepts information in many forms, and at many levels, simultaneously, and that information divorced from its context is much impoverished. Shimoda, as a scientist and writer, is clearly interested in the nature of consciousness and meaning. Tina, the neuroscience grad student protagonist, asks how mere synapses and neural pathways can give rise to meaning. The answer, which seems both scientific and traditionally Japanese at the same time, is that meaning is accumulated through use and context.
The four treasures alluded to in the title are the brush, the ink stick, the paper and the inkstone. The Daizen inkstone in the story -- a centuries-old inkstone --
has accumulated centuries of meaning. The inkstone itself, as a rock, has no meaning but for the accumulation of use, of being coveted, of being prized. And so it is with conscious experience; it is accumulated meaning.
Shimoda reminds us that books are also not just static objects, but that they acquire additional meaning through use (as anyone who makes use of a library will appreciate). Not prepared to wait for readers to add their own notes in the margin, or perhaps because that process would be too random, Shimoda has added his own marginalia, in the form of explanations of the origins and meaning of the calligraphy, scientific notes and comments from Tina's notebooks, as if the protagonist were annotating the book in which she is a character.
But, in addition to being an experiment in artistic fusion and a discourse on current developments in neuroscience, THE FOURTH TREASURE is also a novel about love and multicultural synthesis.
Tina is a first-year UC Berkeley grad student. Her mother Hanako, a Japanese immigrant, raised her alone by working as a waitress, and is now suffering from MS. Tina's somewhat odious japanophile boyfriend, Robert-san, is studying shodo, or calligraphy, from a Japanese sensei who suddenly has a stroke and suffers considerable brain damage as a result. The sensei's continued attempts at calligraphy yield what appears to be nonsense and simultaneously make him a valuable research subject for Tina's professors. The story stretches back into Japan, where Tina's mother and the sensei knew each other and back further to the origins of the inkstone. The story is populated with students and professors, a single mother, a gangster businessman, a private-eye and a piece of stone which is a much a character as any of them.
The story at times tiptoes on edge of the cliche without quite falling in -- there is a lot of bowing, oriental stoicism and manipulative gaijin ultimately bested by their more subtle Japanese opponents -- but for this and other reasons, the story provides tension, switching from the mundane to the sublime, from the problems of homework to those of art, from science to food, from Japan to California, from miso to coffee, from love to muscle spasms.
It is in many ways a haunting story, of love lost, of understanding gained. Some passages are beautiful, almost poetic, thrown in among the prose. And then there is actual poetry, short Japanese-style poems of a couple of lines, which illuminate the illustrations that illuminate the text.
I am completely out of depth when discussing Japanese art forms or poetry and so have no way of knowing whether the illustrator, L.J.C. Shimoda (the similarity in surname is no coincidence), has extended the traditional art of shodo calligraphy in ways that are considered proper.
But I'm not sure that I care. I had considered oriental calligraphy (as opposed to Western or Arabic calligraphy, which I had studied to at least some extent) to be a rather arcane art. I rather doubt I would ever actually read a book on shodo itself. By relating the art form to the story, and by insinuating explanations and examples into the annotations in the margins, THE FOURTH TREASURE succeeds in teaching a great deal and awakens, at least in me, a new interest and appreciation. Since author Shimoda does the same trick with several principles of neuroscience (something which I do know a little more about), and since he is a professor himself, one suspects a pedagogical purpose. It works, so who's complaining?
That being said, I have to wonder if either technique -- illuminations or marginalia -- will work if used more than rarely; part of the appeal is in its novelty; I don't know if it can be repeated too many times without becoming wearisome. There are good reasons why novels are almost never illustrated; the lack of visual images allows the reader to form his own. Perhaps books really are just words.
But THE FOURTH TREASURE sure is interesting, thought-provoking and well worth reading. And looking at. And maybe looking at again. I have little doubt that I'll pick the book up again in a few weeks to have another look at it." - Peter Gordon


Japan Times article

Asian Week Review

London Times review

Excerpt

Todd Shimoda: "Finding a Novel Aesthetic"

Todd Shimoda, 365 Views of Mt. Fuji: Algorithms of the Floating World , Stone Bridge Press, 1998.


"Curator Keizo Yukawa flees a dead-end job in Tokyo to head a new museum devoted to 365 paintings of Mt. Fuji by the genius Takenoko, who died 100 years ago. Takenoko's legacy of madness infects each member of the Ono family, who own the Views but do not get along. Yukawa's manipulation by the Onos and his fascination with an algorithmically controlled daughter lead to many strange happenings and his ultimate disintegration. Symbolizing the fragmentation of mind in modern Japan, this novel uses threadlike character "bytes" and hundreds of Hokusai-inspired illustrations to suggest the nonlinear world below the high-tech veneer."

"As a lover of books, I sometimes curse the computer for what it has done to the written word, and occasionally to those who practice the art of novel writing most adeptly. In the name of interactivity, we can now read thinly plotted "cybernovels" on-line, or purchase CD-ROMs, mixing and matching narratives (sometimes a life's work) with a mouse click, artificially altering linear stories to suit our whims. We can participate in corporate-subsidized, hypertext serials, judged by much-praised, well-compensated novelists on holiday. Ah, progressŠ Todd Shimoda, who won the John Updike-judged Amazon.com serial competition last year, has structured his new novel by applying the mix-and-match, CD-ROM strategy to the page. Shimoda is a good writer-the main narrative piece of 365 Views of Mt. Fuji is a spare but engaging story, fraught with meditations on madness, sex, art, and spirituality. The problem here is in the constant flow of asides that fill the novel's margins-"character bytes," they're called-only occasionally supplying vital plot information or setting description, more often proving disjointed and distracting. Between the "bytes," the text, and the over 400 fine but cramped illustrations that fill nearly every page, the reader experiences a kind of constant sensory overload, detracting from the book's central focus-the story. Then again, maybe I've gotten it all wrong. Maybe the experience of shifting one's eyes from text to margin to picture is the real point of Shimoda's book, making it more of an exercise than a novel. While the sense of formal experiment is admirable, 365 Views of Mt. Fuji truly does belong in an on-line format, out on some Web site, where interactivity is a suitable substitute for pleasurable reading." - Independent Publisher

"The layout of the book is designed to agitate, if not actually madden, the reader. Yukawa's story is paralleled, in marginal notes, by those of the other characters, forcing eye and attention into a constant, dizzying zigzag. The whole complicated tale is a metaphor for the author's view of modern Japanese society as an assemblage of incompatible elements and traditions that create psychological civil war in its citizens. If the novel's purpose is grim, its action is lively and the symbolism is provocative." - Phoebe-Lou Adams

Virtual gallery of the book


Todd Shimoda's home page