Don't Read in Airports

Allow me to expound and clarify: Don't read in airports at six in the morning before moving across the country or even during the ensuing flight while being chained down into painful lethargy by a nasty hangover with cephalalgic tendencies. Or if you must read in those conditions, pick up something light, something easy, a book that's tantamount to a soothing breeze blowing through your hair, a book about two people falling in and out and in and out of love by a beach and at the end someone expectedly dies - in short, a book so transparent and immaterial you'll forget you ever read it. 

Don't, on the other hand, try to read a potentially wondrous, indescribably beautiful and heart-rending book by an author who proves just how flexible fiction can be and how much can be accomplished with ingenuity and gusto between the covers of a book while at the same doing something completely different with the novel form. The book? The People of Paper. The author? Salvador Plascencia, of Greater Los Angeles. For whatever reason, when I first opened this book almost two years ago, despite the feeling that I should be loving this book, that I should be obsessed with this book, I read through it on that flight in a blur and upon finishing, my reaction was a nonplussed one. Reading it once again now, under much better circumstances conducive, I was indeed consumed with the book and offered it wavelets upon wavelets of apologies.A truly wonderful read, a joy, and an exciting moment for contemporary literature.

I'm loath to get into the book because I think it's something that you just have to read and experience on your own but I will provide two things: In the most recent issue of Poets & Writers they listed Plascencia as one of the top 50 most inspiring writers living today (joining the ranks of Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Dave Eggers, Anne Carson, John Ashberry, Toni Morrison,Joan didion, Thomas Pychon, CD Wright, among many laudable others which I'll post later in full) At 28, take that for what you will; and a quote from Salvador himself grabbed from an interview he gave to  BOMB magazine with Max Benavidez on the structure of his book, the somewhat comical state of publishing, and the necessity for the artist to do whatever is required for the story he or she is trying to tell: 

"As far as the physical appearance of the book goes: “design” is often taken to mean something that happens after the writing. And, without a doubt, the people at McSweeney’s are great designers in that sense, but the graphic and layout elements within the narrative are not just decorative. The columns, the blackouts, serve an integral narrative function. You can’t lay outThe People of Paper in a standard format. It doesn’t work. Harcourt, who is doing the paperback, had to use a larger trim size to make the book work. That was really exciting, that the physical object of the book had to stretch to accommodate the story.

What I find extremely interesting is the apprehension toward typography and design by many critics. You hear people say, sarcastically, Call me old-fashioned but I like my novels with words. The irony is, if you’re familiar with print culture and history, a book consisting of pure prose on a single column is a fairly recent development that has more to do with the standardization of printing presses and lazy publishers than literary tradition. There are limits to what prose can do, and sometimes it’s not a metaphor or lyricism that you need. Sometimes what the page needs is a darkened square. Lawrence Sterne taught us this in the mid-1700s."