The Total Bummer Book Group: The People of Paper
The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
Wednesday, December 7th, 7pm at Longfellow Books
"Plascencia's mannered but moving debut begins with an allegory for art and the loss that drives it: a butcher guts a boy's cat; the boy constructs paper organs for the feline, who is revivified; the boy thus becomes the world's first origami surgeon. Though Plascencia's book sometimes seems to take the form of an autobiographical attempt to come to terms with a lost love, little of this experimental work-a mischievous mix of Garcia Marquez magical realism and Tristram Shandy typographical tricks-is grounded in reality. Early on we meet a "Baby Nostradamus" and a Catholic saint disguised as a wrestler while following the enuretic Fernando de la Fe and his lime-addicted daughter from Mexico to California. Fernando-whose wife, tired of waking in pools of piss, has left him-settles east of L.A. in El Monte. He gathers a gang of carnation pickers to wage a quixotic war against the planet Saturn and, in a Borges-like discovery, Saturn turns out to be Salvador Plascencia. Over a dozen characters narrate the story while fighting like Lilliputians to emancipate themselves from Plascencia's tyrannical authorial control. Playful and cheeky, the book is also violent and macabre: masochists burn themselves; a man bleeds horribly after performing cunnilingus on a woman made of paper. Plascencia's virtuosic first novel is explosively unreal, but bares human truths with devastating accuracy." - Publishers Weekly
The Total Bummer Book Club will be meeting at Longfellow Books on Wednesday, December 7th at 7:00 pm to discuss Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper. Come pick up your copy with the book group 20% discount and join us for an evening filled with fun, books and, as always, refreshments!
