Rodrigo Fresán's THE INVENTED PART (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)

Some books seize one with a handful of ideas she can't shake. It might be a direct quotation from the text that does it, or a particular image (more than a decade since I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for instance, I still think often of the comparison of a phone someone is waiting to hear ringing to a camouflaged creature lying in wait for prey on the sea floor). Sometimes it's something more complicated than that, as is most certainly the case with the reference-maniacal first volume of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes trilogy,The Invented Part. 

I can't tease out where it first occurred to me that, buried under the literary and pop cultural references in this novel (which, get ready for those; this guy is maybe the Robertson Davies of my generation) was a prolonged meditation on what the invention of writing has done to us humans and an attempt to decide whether it was as good a thing as writers and readers who eat sleep and breathe various forms of literature (yo) think it is.

Of course the ability to record our experiences, hard-won knowledge, and ideas has been a boon to us in that it has spared generation after generation from having to figure out a lot of basic stuff for itself. Science, medicine, engineering, architecture, what's edible and what isn't without various degrees of prep work and how best to do it -- a lot of vital practical survival-level stuff is transmitted that way. New research is only possible when old is done; we can't, for instance, come up with a vaccine for COVID-19 if we don't have a pretty good body of work on how to develop vaccines to draw on. This is a far better prospect than, say, waiting around for a bored semi-dilettante to notice that a small population of service workers has a mysterious immunity to a disease because of exposure to a similar one and rack his brains to figure out a way to harness the fruits of his obsession with comely young dairy maids.

As for the more common arguments expected of people like me as far as why the written word is simply the best, well, yes, written literature, poetry and prose, is a source of tremendous pleasure, a vehicle for communicating vital values like empathy and imagination, all that, but also... but also... For us later generations, it's also developed into a tremendous burden. Usually we celebrate this. As Rodrigo Fresán directly delights in quoting in The Invented Part, we love to say "so many books, so little time." Paradise is a kind of library, heaven is unlimited time to read, all that. But it creates a kind of anxiety, and it's maybe worse for creatives, who know pretty early in life (unless they're dolts) that the chances that any idea they're ever going to have is completely original to themselves are laughably slight; know also that it's far less embarrassing, once one has expressed an idea, to be prepared to have it compared to other iterations of that idea and to be aware of those iterations before some heckler throws a long-winded speech-barely-in-the-form-of-a-question that might be intended to express fellowship (hey, I love that thing your thing reminded me of, too!) but also tends to feel like intellectual one-upsmanship (what, you've not read/watched/ listened to this thing? But that means I know more about this than you do, even though I'm in the audience and you're sweating behind the podium. Loser.). It's good to know on which giants' shoulders we were first allowed to see farther. But boy, don't that create some anxiety! One will never have read every relevant thing, let alone all the things that don't at first seem relevant but some interlocutor is surely going to bring up someday.

This is of course why it's so vital for a functioning human to learn as soon as possible how to admit to imperfection, to say "I don't know" or "oops" or "really? Tell me more!" Mastering that, one has a decent chance of finding literature to be a pleasure again, which, let's be honest, a lot of academic programs feel designed to convince us it's not. I know it took me over a decade to return to reading for pleasure after my years at good old Balloc Reged Orc, to say nothing of wanting to write for something besides a piddling paycheck or a spot on a cool new band's guest list! Neglect this ability to acknowledge our limitations, and, well, just look at the goddamned White House these days. 'Nuff said.

The Invented Part, inasmuch as it's conventionally "about" anything, tells at many removes the story of a well-known "cult but not bestseller" writer of fiction. Not in a straightforward, genre fictional sequential manner, of course, no no. It's cut up into seven narratives that are scattered all along the timeline of the Writer's life. The book teases us with lots of mysteries including hey, where the heck has this guy gotten to? Is he dead? A fugitive? In hiding? But no, this is not a chase narrative. It's barely a narrative at all. It's narratives about narratives, maybe. A whole section of it is a tour of "The Writer's" but probably really Rodrigo Fresán's own biji** disguised, very thinly, as fiction -- a tour of his biji with invented parts added. Maybe all novels are, and Fresán is just letting the stitching show a bit more.

But what am I doing trying to describe this book when, in its seventh section, this book describes itself very well:

A book that would include, disappeared, the Greatest Desaparecido of All Time. A book about someone who disappears and then reappears in order to make everything disappear or change or start over;*** like someone crumpling a page into a ball and throwing it toward the circle of that waste basket at the foot of the desk and, did it make it or not?

ANYWAY...

Throughout this book of his, he, his Writer protagonist and various other characters who orbit the Writer (most of whom want to be Writers themselves) are struggling with that burden of so much accumulated culture that I've touched on above, culture which includes a lot of things like MFA programs and writers' workshops and conferences as well as all of the books and movies and symphonies and plays and sculptures and ballets and poetry slams and historical dioramas and taxidermy of extinct animals and... I'm exhausted just listing it all. Is there anything new left to make? There must be, because we still all have the urge to make it. Does it really matter if it's actually new, though? Can't it be ok to make something that's just a little bit new? Or even just to be a basic bitch? And then, do you actually want to be a creator or just to live the glamorous-looking life of one?

For the record, Fresán is a Creator, a Writer, a Goddamned Artist. His prose, ideas, characterization (particularly of the highly entertaining Karma family, a family I could only wish was the actual subject of a show some streaming service or another was suggesting to me called -- or did I just imagine it? - The Karma Family) are all fantastic but it's the structure that steals the show here.

I learned from the entertaining and often enlightening (I only learned of Fresán's existence from them, after all!) Two Month Review podcast that Fresán wrote The Invented Part's seven segments more or less simultaneously, which is perhaps the only way to achieve what he did, which is a book that feels like, if just the right language and orthogonal system could be invented to print it in, could have the first half of the book laid down in wet ink on first half's pages, and those pages pressed onto the blank second half's worth of pages to produce a perfect mirror image of the first half that would be the second half of the text. This thing is practically a giant palindrome, basically. But not in a gimmicky way. It actually feels natural.

But, while there's a near-drowning here, a house fire there, a giant green cow that decapitates and rapes horses (in that order) somewhere else, it's not a book crammed with incident. Observations galore, ditto riffs on major mid-20th century pop culture and a refreshingly aromantic hero. But plot? Not a lot.

This is, in other words, not a book that is going to appeal to everyone (though I've not done what plot there is justice at all. I mean, the Large Hadron Collider is involved. Our Writer tries to Doctor Manhattan his way out of ordinary life!), but it appeals to me, and I'm eager to dive soon into its sequels, The Dreamed Part and The Remembered Part. But... I hope one thing gets left behind in The Invented Part, you guys, I'm not going to lie, and that is...

Mr. Fresán is really, really down on ebooks you guys. I mean, really down on ebooks. Sometimes it feels like he's got a mini-rant about them every few pages. And, of course, I read this as an ebook because that's really my only option. My physical disabilities have gotten worse and I can only read a physical book for maybe ten minutes a day and I can only do that if I know for sure that I'm not going to need my hands/shoulders/elbows/neck for anything else for the rest of the day (and of course, last year, I also couldn't read most print in physical books because my rapid-onset super-dense cataracts meant I needed the largest print possible, which would also necessitate, in physical book form, the largest actual books possible, which I definitely could not manipulate). There are days when I can't even use my e-reader, no, not even propped up on a stand to vaguely swipe at with a pinky to turn pages. And I'm not alone in this, not by a long shot. So, to be rebuked every few pages, or at least every chapter section or so, for my "choice" of how to read a work is not fun, especially when the experience of reading this book is otherwise such a pleasure.

I don't think I ever want to know what he thinks of audio books, you guys. But I do want to know about the parts he's dreamed and remembered so, watch this space for more Fresániana soon, Little Buckaroos. I already have The Dreamed Part ready to go as an ebook...

But first, just for a petty act of symbolic vengeance on Fresán for his (possibly unintentional? At least I hope so?) ableism****, I'm fixing to re-read Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man and imagine Mr. Fresán as E.A. Smithe, or rather his clone that is owned by a public library.

And if I find out that Fresán also hates audio books, you'd better believe I'm getting the third book, The Remembered Part, in that format (if it exists). Assuming he doesn't lose me in the second (spoiler: I accidentally started reading the second book first, which yes that is a downside to ebooks because I've made this mistake before and, no, I don't think he's going to lose me).

*See also everybody from Zelda Fitzgerald (not herself really a character in The Invented Part but boy, her husband kind of is) to June Mansfield to "Shakespeare's Sister" of Virginia Woolf essay fame.
**Biji is a term in Chinese literature for a notebook somewhat artfully assembled over time, more than a scrapbook, not really a journal or diary, a gathering of quotations, observations, original lines that might turn into larger works later but might be just fine on their own. Some have become quite famous, national treasures, the originals in museums that sell spiffy new copies of them to be read or just to show off on a shelf. Some are working tools for writers and other creatives. I'd argue that the form has now probably mutated into the Bullet Journal phenomenon, though I doubt any of the original practitioners of the art would have much nice to say about incorporating calendars and task lists so thoroughly into a notebook. Anyway, there's a more formal and traditional explanation of the genre in the abstract for this paper.
***Which, get ready for the sixth segment, in which the Writer basically becomes Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua as interpreted by Robert Shea.
****Also maybe some classism; in one of the many anti-technology-but-I'm-not-a-Luddite rants, the Writer's ire spills over a little bit onto sound recording technology, too! "But with the gramophone many others -- who would've been hard pressed to hear their favorite Mozart or Beethoven piece more than once or twice in their lifetime -- renounced the ability to read scores and play an instrument." WHAT??? Privileged classes always had access to all of those thing -- concerts, music lessons, free time and energy to cultivate the skills taught in those lessons, but your working stiff out in the fields, you think he or she, even if a skilled "by ear" player of a fiddle or guitar who knew all the local folk songs by heart, encountered Mozart and Beethoven's stuff a whole lot, do you? Anyway, that's probably me being bitchy, but would I have been as sensitized to this kind of crap had I not already been pummeled repeatedly by the Writer's ebook opinions?