Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces
A Novel
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- £23.99
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- £23.99
Publisher Description
Selected as one of the San Francisco Chronicles’ 15 best books of 2021
From critically acclaimed author Maceo Montoya comes an inventive and adventurous satirical novel about a Mexican-American artist’s efforts to fulfill his vision: to paint masterful works of art. His plans include a move to Paris to join the ranks of his artistic hero, Gustave Courbet—except it’s 1943, and he’s stuck in the backwoods of New Mexico. Penniless and prone to epileptic fits, even his mother thinks he’s crazy.
Ernie Lobato has just inherited his deceased uncle’s manuscript and drawings. At the urging of his colleague, an activist and history buff (Lorraine Rios), Ernie sends the materials to a professor of Chicanx literature (Dr. Samuel Pizarro). Throughout the novel, Dr. Pizarro shares his insights and comments on the uncle’s legacy in a series of annotations to his text and illustrations.
As Ernie’s uncle battles a world that is unkind to “starving artists,” he runs into other tormented twentieth-century artists, writers, and activists with ambitions to match his own: a young itinerant preacher (Reies López Tijerina); the “greatest insane artist” (Martín Ramirez); and Oscar Zeta Acosta who is hellbent on self-destruction. Will the fortuitous encounters with these prophetic figures result in his own genius being recognized? Or will his
uncompromising nature consign him to what he fears most?
Told through a combination of words and images in the tradition of classic works such as Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland, Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces features fifty-one vivid black-and-white pen drawings. This complex and engaging story also doubles as literary criticism, commenting on how outsiders’ stories fit into the larger context of the Chicanx literary canon. A unique and multilayered story that embraces both contradiction and possibility, it also sheds new light on the current state of Chicanx literature while, at the same time, contributing to it.
Propulsive, humorous, and full of life, this candid novel will be loved not only by Beat fiction fans but by contemporary fiction lovers as well.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Montoya's delightful postmodern illustrated novel (after You Must Fight Them) masquerades as the memoir of an obscure Mexican American artist known as "the Chicano Forrest Gump." Discovered by the unnamed artist's nephew, an accountant named Ernie Lobato, the manuscript tells the story of a challenging artistic life in comically overheated episodes. Hilariously picayune footnotes are peppered throughout from Ernie and his colleague Lorraine Rios, who encouraged Ernie to send the book to Chicano movement scholar Samuel Pizarro after reading the artist's claim that he'd killed Oscar Zeta Acosta (Hunter S. Thompson's inspiration for Dr. Gonzo). The artist's 51 black-and-white pen drawings appear throughout what amounts to a more or less familiar bildungsroman template; there are the hardscrabble early years, family tragedy, a diehard sidekick who believes in his friend's art and doggedly supports him, a devoted muse and lover who abandons him, and a stint in an asylum. Through Pizarro's footnotes, Montoya also pokes fun at the disagreements among Mexican Americans over what to call themselves ("Habits of language are difficult to break and I must admit that the new ‘x' still causes me to stutter"). Both entertaining and provocative, this lampoons with a gentle touch.
