The Invented Part
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."—Jonathan Lethem
An aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically dramatic manner: traveling to the Hadron Collider, merging with the God particle, and transforming into an omnipresent deity—a meta-writer—capable of rewriting reality.
With biting humor and a propulsive, contagious style, amid the accelerated particles of his characteristic obsessions—the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the music of Pink Floyd and The Kinks, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the links between great art and the lives of the artists who create it—Fresán takes us on a whirlwind tour of writers and muses, madness and genius, friendships, broken families, and alternate realities, exploring themes of childhood, loss, memory, aging, and death.
Drawing inspiration from the scope of modern classics and the structural pyrotechnics of the postmodern masters, the Argentine once referred to as "a pop Borges" delivers a powerful defense of great literature, a celebration of reading and writing, of the invented parts—the stories we tell ourselves to give shape to our world.
Rodrigo Fresán is the author of nine books of fiction that together compose an expansive, interconnected fictional universe—a complex system of storylines, resonances, and self-reference that call to mind the works of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Roberto Bolaño.
Will Vanderhyden received fellowships from the NEA and Lannan Foundation to work on The Invented Part.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 m tier, 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.
