- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Harcourt; 1 edition (Nov 6 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0156032112
- ISBN-13: 978-0156032117
- Product Dimensions: 24 x 16 x 1.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
-
Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#115,394 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Hispanic
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Plascencia's mannered but moving debut begins with an allegory for art and the loss that drives it: a butcher guts a boy's cat; the boy constructs paper organs for the feline, who is revivified; the boy thus becomes the world's first origami surgeon. Though Plascencia's book sometimes seems to take the form of an autobiographical attempt to come to terms with a lost love, little of this experimental work—a mischievous mix of García Márquez magical realism and Tristram Shandy typographical tricks—is grounded in reality. Early on we meet a "Baby Nostradamus" and a Catholic saint disguised as a wrestler while following the enuretic Fernando de la Fe and his lime-addicted daughter from Mexico to California. Fernando—whose wife, tired of waking in pools of piss, has left him—settles east of L.A. in El Monte. He gathers a gang of carnation pickers to wage a quixotic war against the planet Saturn and, in a Borges-like discovery, Saturn turns out to be Salvador Plascencia. Over a dozen characters narrate the story while fighting like Lilliputians to emancipate themselves from Plascencia's tyrannical authorial control. Playful and cheeky, the book is also violent and macabre: masochists burn themselves; a man bleeds horribly after performing cunnilingus on a woman made of paper. Plascencia's virtuosic first novel is explosively unreal, but bares human truths with devastating accuracy. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
PRAISE FOR THE PEOPLE OF PAPER "Salvador Plascencia's surrealistic metanovel, styled a la Garca Mrquez, is a charming meditation on the relationship between reader, author, and story line, filled with mythic imagery . . . and unforgettable personalities . . . Readers will find it hard to turn away from The People of Paper. A." (Entertainment Weekly )
"A nervy new voice . . . Finally, beyond all the experimental devices, fairy-tale antics and fabulist inclination, Plascencia's novel is a story of lost love." (San Francisco Chronicle )
Plascencia's mannered but moving debut begins with an allegory for art and the loss that drives it: a butcher guts a boy's cat; the boy constructs paper organs for the feline, who is revivified; the boy thus becomes the world's first origami surgeon. Though Plascencia's book sometimes seems to take the form of an autobiographical attempt to come to terms with a lost love, little of this experimental work-a mischievous mix of Garcia Marquez magical realism and Tristram Shandy typographical tricks-is grounded in reality. Early on we meet a "Baby Nostradamus" and a Catholic saint disguised as a wrestler while following the enuretic Fernando de la Fe and his lime-addicted daughter from Mexico to California. Fernando-whose wife, tired of waking in pools of piss, has left him-settles east of L.A. in El Monte. He gathers a gang of carnation pickers to wage a quixotic war against the planet Saturn and, in a Borges-like discovery, Saturn turns out to be Salvador Plascencia. Over a dozen characters narrate the story while fighting like Lilliputians to emancipate themselves from Plascencia's tyrannical authorial control. Playful and cheeky, the book is also violent and macabre: masochists burn themselves; a man bleeds horribly after performing cunnilingus on a woman made of paper. Plascencia's virtuosic first novel is explosively unreal, but bares human truths with devastating accuracy. (Publishers Weekly )
"A nervy new voice . . . Finally, beyond all the experimental devices, fairy-tale antics and fabulist inclination, Plascencia's novel is a story of lost love." (San Francisco Chronicle )
Plascencia's mannered but moving debut begins with an allegory for art and the loss that drives it: a butcher guts a boy's cat; the boy constructs paper organs for the feline, who is revivified; the boy thus becomes the world's first origami surgeon. Though Plascencia's book sometimes seems to take the form of an autobiographical attempt to come to terms with a lost love, little of this experimental work-a mischievous mix of Garcia Marquez magical realism and Tristram Shandy typographical tricks-is grounded in reality. Early on we meet a "Baby Nostradamus" and a Catholic saint disguised as a wrestler while following the enuretic Fernando de la Fe and his lime-addicted daughter from Mexico to California. Fernando-whose wife, tired of waking in pools of piss, has left him-settles east of L.A. in El Monte. He gathers a gang of carnation pickers to wage a quixotic war against the planet Saturn and, in a Borges-like discovery, Saturn turns out to be Salvador Plascencia. Over a dozen characters narrate the story while fighting like Lilliputians to emancipate themselves from Plascencia's tyrannical authorial control. Playful and cheeky, the book is also violent and macabre: masochists burn themselves; a man bleeds horribly after performing cunnilingus on a woman made of paper. Plascencia's virtuosic first novel is explosively unreal, but bares human truths with devastating accuracy. (Publishers Weekly )
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.6 out of 5 stars (32 customer reviews)
25 of 30 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Startling Work of Fiction, Jun 30 2005
By Daniel Olivas - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The People Of Paper (Hardcover)
Salvador Plascencia's debut novel is a wonderfully strange, hallucinogenic and hypertextual blending of fiction and autobiography. The Prologue's first sentences thrust us into an almost familiar yet purely mythical world while introducing Plascencia's sly brand of humor: "She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets-rare exceptions granted for immaculate conceptions." What an astonishing, strange and deeply moving novel this is. In all his playfulness, Plascencia nonetheless grapples with troubling issues of free will, religious fidelity, ethnic identity, failed love and the creative process which he melds into a dreamscape that is impossible to forget. Plascencia-the God of his paper people-has given us a startling work of fiction that stretches not only the norms of storytelling, but also the bounds of our imagination. [The full review of this book first appeared in The Elegant Variation.]
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Novel Novel, Aug 1 2007
By Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The People of Paper (Paperback)
Federico de la Fe is grieving for his wife who left him because he wets the bed. And he is leading an insane, futile, and destructive war against Saturn. Who is not only the planet Saturn but the author, Salvador Plascencia. That's the plot, I suppose. The book is packed with character sketches, meditations on the creative process, mind-bending inventions, including mechanical turtles, origami surgery, papercuts in intimate parts of the body, and its recurring theme, the pain of love and loss.Author Plascencia is a fountain of creativity, but he is also repetitive and sometimes too clever. It is hard to really connect with the characters because the characters are too busy fighting a war with the author to develop themselves as three dimensional persons. They remain, mostly, people of paper.
The book is like a combination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce. It's intriguing, but hard to read, and hard to assimilate. It is a most novel novel. I recommend it but not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rare and astonishing, Aug 15 2005
By bentmax "bentmax" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The People Of Paper (Hardcover)
This inaugural book by Salvador Plascencia is mind bending, reality altering, wickedly witty, ruthlessly clever, disarmingly charming, extraordinarily inventive and irreverently humorous. I am sure I have forgotten a few adjectives as well. With remarkable characters, Plascencia moves the reader through his own reality, dreams, conjectures and thoughts of events that happened, might have happened and couldn't possibly have happened. His dialog runs stealthily from religion and sex to field workers, Hollywood starlets, broken romances, planetary movement, physical disabilities and war and revenge. It will blast you out of your seat and take you on the wildest literary ride imaginable. It is a rare, astonishing and totally satisfying book to consume.
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
