Allegiance to the Real

Page 9 July–August 2008 Glick continued from previous page of consciousness, and a resistance to the absolute and/or oppositional pinning down of ideas, the first paragraph of the novel highlights the Derridean notion of narrative wandering: Let’s go, lets go. There are three taps on the floor, knock, knock, knock, the curtain rises: the noblest thing you can do is live for yourself. Really I thought it was to be a witness to our lives. (Originally I had written the noblest thing you can do is die for your beliefs—Really I thought it was to own a jaguar!) Did I write that? I hardly ever say what I feel, (but do try and write it) as we continue sipping champagne and having our meal of monkey brains…. This initial scene, in which Federigo watches the opening of a play he wrote, doubles as the book’s final scene. The first two words, “let’s go,” hold a triple meaning: an invitation to the reader to enter the book, an impatience for the play to begin, and an exhortation to the writer to put the story in motion. It leaps from the play to inner speech that second- and third-guesses accumulating acts of cognition. Adding to the uninterrupted multiplicity of consciousness, Federigo’s narrative play with misspellings, omissions, and word games is mirrored by a literal emphasis on play. Federigo is a playwright by trade. The main characters play instruments, and often Federigo’s most expansive revelations flow through their collective music making. During these musical sessions, Federigo uses the word “play” in place of “says”—“You Western artists have quite an ego, she [his friend Vishna] plays, you look at everything through the lens of the self, you talk nothing of the life itself…. We can only go to the garden, I play, if insurance companies will let it stay open.” Federigo treats a linguistic assertion as one would play a card—as a tentative contribution to a shifting, interactive collectivity that transcends the aloneness of existence and the provisional quality of meaning. Through the character of Skinflint, Federigo’s producer, who represents a public uninterested in playing with language, questioning narrative codes, or exploring deeper questions of existence, Apostrophe /Parenthesis defends itself against any resistance to the novel’s formal concerns. Nonetheless, the narrative sometimes comes across as a group of fascinating but ultimately disembodied talking heads. My occasional battle with the novel’s concurrently disjunctive and uninterrupted flow was exacerbated by the self-deprecating and neurotic Federigo. He doesn’t really work for money, has a “massive chest,” and, even if he amusingly refers to his penis as a codling, he receives the sexual attentions of most women he meets. Though I found myself annoyed by Federigo’s whining, the fact that play functions not only on a linguistic but on a corporeal and emotional level makes Apostrophe/Parenthesis fun, moving, and utterly worthwhile. Federigo and his cohorts may spend an inordinate amount of time posing and failing to solve existential questions, but these questions are deeply grounded and displayed in the exigencies of lived lives. As a result, his wife Isabel’s death and his surrogate child Maggie’s troubled passage into adulthood hold both emotional and intellectual value. Love and loss impose themselves on philosophy, or integrate themselves with philosophy. The book’s most poignant moments take place when the tragedy and joy of communal experience play with, overlap, and embody Federigo’s analytic whirl. Robert Glick is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Utah and fiction editor of the Amsterdam-based literary journal Versal. Allegiance to the Real Jacob eichert The revisionisT Miranda Mellis Illustrations by Derek White Calamari Press http://www.calamaripress.com 82 pages; paper, $12.00 Miranda Mellis’s The Revisionist is an experiment with the conventions of speculative fiction as social critique.At first, the dimension of engagement is metafictional. The book begins by questioning the reliability of its narrator: “My last assignment was to conduct surveillance of the weather and report that everything was fine.” If a central aim of metafiction is to insinuate that reality itself is constructed, then Mellis...