Breaking the Mold

Breaking the Mold Mike Daily FORGETFULNESS Michael Mejia FC2 http://fc2.org 236 pages; paper, $15.95 Mejia, Michael. Michael Mejia. No, not the "strength conditioning coach" Michael Mejia who co-wrote Scrawny to Brawny: The Complete Guide to Building Muscle the Natural Way (2005)—we're talking about the Sacramento-born creative writing teacher Michael Mejia whose debut novel Forgetfulness (Vergessenheit in German) was recently published by FC2. Michael Mejia, the archivist. FC2 author Lou Robinson (Napoleon's Mare, 1991) designed the cover for Forgetfulness; Tara Reeser engineered the book's design, which simultaneously floats text, epigrams, footnotes, boxed pronouncements, Morse code, marginalia, lists, and even screenplay-like scenes as in the three fictionalized chess matches between "Herr [Nikolai] Klyachko and Herr [Leon] Trotsky, both dressed in threadbare black." The first match—during which Trotsky says to his opponent, "Marx has been completely distorted"—ends in a draw. "So," Trotsky says as they play the second match, "it's the Proletariat that needs to seize power in Russia, to create instantaneously, as it were, the conditions for the Revolution." Klyachko seems to agree: "Triggering the worldwide Revolution." Trotsky later comments during the course of the match, "I haven't any interests here [in Vienna], Unfortunately, neither do Bauer and his group. There are no revolutionaries in Austria, my friend, and so the pastries rot. From the inside." To which Klyachko replies: "Was yours bad?" Detailfrom cover "I meant the Empire," Trotsky says, "a gigantic pastry shop, piled high with pretty cream and jam-filled things." "Now you're making me hungry again," Klyachko says. "Let's go get a sausage." "Can you pay?" Trotsky asks. "I was hoping you might," Klyachko says. "You've received nothing from our friend in Berlin ?" The narrator tells us "the game goes to Klyachko." The book's design simultaneously floats text, epigrams,footnotes, boxedpronouncements, Morse code, marginalia, lists, and even screenplay-like scenes. Their third match is punched into the narrative some forty pages later, and it ends in another draw. Mejia's deadpan dialogue between the two revolutionaries reads as if it were omnisciently recorded, transcribed, and translated. I admit that I was "stumped" by some of the political references surfacing in these scenarios—and throughout the book—yet Mejia has grounded his characters cinematically , using understated, studied humor and closely cropped descriptions. I find out from a friend, a layman (like myself ) who is a chess enthusiast (unlike myself), that one must be a very good player to force a draw. Evidently, Klyachko and Trotsky are good enough "players" in Mejia's eyes. Forgetfulness commences with an eye. An eyeball, to be exact. This scientifically rendered eye could be the author's: The circle at the center of the iris, the dark void known as the pupil, appears to be moving, but, in fact, the inside edges of the iris's striated membrane are contracting and relaxing, varying the magnitude of light information allowed to stream through the eye's lens and into the posterior chamber, to disperse through and illumine the thickjelly ofthe vitreous body, to bombard the retina's millions ofphotoreceptors. Or it could be the reader's. "All of this happens now," the narrator says. If the eye is Mejia's, he does a pretty sanitary job of selfless recording throughout the novel. If the eye is that of the reader, I think it's unlikely there will be millions of them. Even thousands. How about one thousand? That's five hundred readers. That sounds to me like a fairly realistic estimate given Forgetfulness's historical subject matter, the disjunctive narrative, and its overall learnedfeel—unless this book is made (or assimilated ) into a film documentary about the life and work of twelve-tone composer Anton von Webern (1883-1945), its focal figure. Why FC2 didn't issue Forgetfulness with an accompanying CD showcasing twelve-tone orchestral music (perhaps with passages read by the author) is a mystery. With such a CD, the text Mejia embroidered so seriously—and in some cases, seamlessly—might have had the sonic counterpart it so richly deserves. Break the mold, FC2. Break the mold. Webern could literally have been more amplified here...