The Invented Part

May 1, 2017
Fresan’s massive novel is obsessed with the way writers cannibalize their lives for material. It’s principally the musings of an unnamed and tormented writer—variously referred to as the Boy, the Young Man, or the Lonely Man—who dreams of being transformed into particles of dark matter by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The novel devotes chunks of its considerable length to the story of the writer’s mentally unstable sister, Penelope, and her marriage to the well-to-do Maxmiliano Karma; blueprints for a book about the Fitzgeralds; and rambling considerations of Anton Chekov and Pink Floyd. A representative sequence has the writer’s emergency trip to a clinic interrupted by a cascade of story ideas, each of which is described and given a title such as “Another Girlfriend in a Coma.” Information overload is Fresan’s métier, so no single scene exists without ironic, metafictional commentary; characterization tends to be swallowed by the abundant digressions, which quote liberally from great novels of the past or deliver a freewheeling exegesis of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This feels like the work of a writer buried by his own imagination: a working out of real-life vexations and a list of influential antecedents. Though its audience is limited, Fresan’s work is prodigious, and the author’s learning is considerable.

Starred review from March 15, 2017
-Is Jell-O animal, vegetal, mineral, or interplanetary?- A tour de force from Argentinian writer Fresan, charting a course from confusion to confusion and back again.Think of it as a portrait of the artist as a young cultural omnivore grown old, under whose lens Heraclitus, Einstein, and Looney Tunes all have more or less equal footing. Fresan's long novel begins with what may be a subtle nod to Proust, save that instead of retreating to a quiet room The Boy, our protagonist's first emanation, is afoot and on the run, tearing around on street and sand, -running like that Roadrunner the Coyote can't stop chasing.- The Coyote runs because the Roadrunner does, too, and The Boy asks endless questions because it is in his nature to do so, even if he doesn't quite have the language to formulate all the things that are bothering him: why are fairy tales full of witches instead of fairies? Why do we have names for our fingers but not our toes? And so on. The questions do not end; they only become more complex and more confounding as numerous other writerly guises emerge to fit each of the seven parts of the book. In one, having been ravished and blogged by the leitmotif character he calls IKEA, -much more well-known and, consequently, more successful than he was,- he daydreams of having his life adapted and filmed by the ubiquitous James Franco; in another, he meditates on how it was that Lolita turned the eccentric writer Vladimir Nabokov -centric,- illustrating the power of art to shape life. Continuing in that vein, Fresan offers the utterly satisfying thought that no matter how miserable they were in their fictional lives, Emma Bovary and Ahab, among other characters, -die happy because, immortal, they're well written.- Studded with references to everyone from Dylan and the Beatles to Stanley Kubrick and F. Scott Fitzgerald, it adds up to a lively if sometimes-disjointed paean to creativity. An exemplary postmodern novel that is both literature and entertainment.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017

Argentine-born, Barcelona-based Fresan's second work to be translated into English (after Kensington Gardens), this novel is the first in a planned trilogy. It eschews traditional plot in favor of several long episodes, almost like separate novellas, in the life of the anonymous protagonist, a writer. The episodes range from his near-drowning experience as a boy to his imaginative disappearance as a disillusioned quinquagenarian, not coincidentally the author's age. Just as the narrator interposes lengthy digressions about F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, whose three-block structure this novel shares, and Pink Floyd, among others, Fresan also intersperses hundreds of other intertextual references drawn from cinema, literature, and pop music, all acknowledged in two and half pages of endpage notes. The book is about reading and literature ("the invented part"), a writer's inspiration, and how being an author is different from the act of writing itself, as it laments the demise of the book, a victim of such by-products of modern technology as ebooks, Twitter, and cellphones. VERDICT The metafictional premise and satire will appeal to fans of literary fiction, but for those unfamiliar with this genre, it will seem prolix and overly long.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

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