Girl Imagined by Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple, who, in an unguarded moment, find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and ultimately, the culture of reproduction. Structured around twelve photographs, a single roll of film, Girl explores the nature of photography and the questions that nature raises about the notions of the simulated and the real, the media-ization of consciouness, originality, self construction, and the way we all continually fashion our faces into masks for the next shot. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. Its prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograpy, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The individual past, seemigly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future, and the body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces.
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"Trapped between reproductions and reality and partaking of the consolations and terrors of both, the central couple of Girl Imagined by Chance makes a snap decision that ends up establishing a second, private, unreal life for them. But, Olsen suggests, there is no clean distinction between life and imagination-some of one's most satisfying moments are those which are the least real to others. A marvelous book that quietly says more about reality and imagination than the much flashier hyperbooks currently in vogue." --Brian Evenson, author of Altman's Tongue
"Lance Olsen has composed a spare parable of representation and self, the loss of the real and the reality of loss. Girl Imagined by Chance is smart and moving and elegant, its seemingly offhand scenes as effortlessly poignant as a handful of old snapshots." --Shelley Jackson, author of Patchwork Girl
"Like the images scattered throughout its pages, Lance Olsen's extraordinary Girl Imagined by Chance is composed of a cunning series of multitonal cubist squares, rectangles, triangles, and quadrangles, shot through with bright white vertical and horizontal thrusts. Olsen's novel--for which David Markson, Roland Barthes, and Mary Shelley might stand as precursors--is both a treatise on sight and the haunting vagaries of perception and moving tale of the loss of a girl who has never quite been." --Laird Hunt
Book Description
Lance Olsen's sixth novel, Girl Imagined by Chance, is a formally innovative, intensely lyrical novel about the way fictions can take over our lives. It tells the story of an unnamed cyber-journalist and his photographer-wife, Reyla, who, childless and approaching middle age, abruptly move to a small Idaho town, abandoning Reyla's eighty-nine year old grandmother. Reeling from loneliness and shock, Grannam uses her remaining strength to pressure Reyla into bearing children, an option Reyla surgically eliminated years before. The phone calls become more persistent until Reyla, desperate with guilt, tells Grannam she's pregnant. Thus, Genia enters the world, a baby girl conceived only in imagination. However, to her creators' surprise, Genia proves as needy as every child. Soon they are scrambling to nurture and feed and protect their fiction and facing serious questions about the existential anxieties that compelled them to flee to Idaho in the first place.
At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. Its prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future, and the body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces. If Jean Baudrilard, Hélène Cixous, and Clarice Lispector had collaborated on a novel, Girl Imagined by Chance would be the result.
At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. Its prevailing metaphor and structural device, the photograph, examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The individual past, seemingly stable and fixed, turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future, and the body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces. If Jean Baudrilard, Hélène Cixous, and Clarice Lispector had collaborated on a novel, Girl Imagined by Chance would be the result.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Virtual reality was never handled with such humanity,
This review is from: Girl Imagined by Chance (Paperback)
Girl Imagined by Chance is a playful, ironic novel about an oddly taboo subject: being married, getting older, and not wanting to have children. It follows a couple as they abandon the climate-controlled, high-rise world of East coast software development for a lone cabin fifty miles west of nowhere, deep in the wilds of Idaho. The story is sewn together with a series of photographs, blurring reality and fiction as the characters find themselves creating a counterfeit daughter to comply with the expectations of their family and friends. The tone is sunny, but the themes are moving and often sad. I found it disturbing and comforting at the same time--a lot like real life. For anyone who's ever fought feelings of guilt for resisting a culture devoted to mall zombies and procreation, or for anyone who has unresolved issues with their own parents, this is an entertaining and satisfying read. (Warning: not for parents who actually enjoy changing poopy diapers.)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
SUCCESS OF OLSEN'S NOVEL NOT BY CHANCE,
By David Memmott (La Grande, OR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Girl Imagined by Chance (Paperback)
GIRL IMAGINED BY CHANCE was pure pleasure to read. I admired what Olsen accomplished with this novel. It is the culmination of a lot of right choices.His choice, for instance, of using photography and the social pressures on childless couples to have children as his primary tropes in exploring our culture of reproduction, as well as the nature of memory and reality is simply brilliant. His handling of second person p.o.v. is seamless, never awkward or clumsy. The sentence structures, the paragraph breaks, the repetitions echoing like refrains throughout are inspiring. The language is fresh and surprising, strong from beginning to end.It is intelligent and never predictable. I liked that Olsen went back to what I most loved about BURNT and LIVE FROM EARTH, blending autobiographical details of his life (here at Bear Creek in northern Idaho) and his various travels with the theme of how our lives are basically fictions. In GIRL, Olsen takes his fiction stylistically in a new direction and one can easily view this novel as the culmination of a progressive trilogy, just as TONGUING THE ZEITGEIST, TIME FAMINE and FREAKNEST comprise such a trilogy. The humor beautifully sustains the sense of not taking oneself too seriously, seeing the absurdity without letting it drag you into depression. This novel also helped me understand just what "critifiction" is, as it enfolds much information about photography into the narrative without it ever feeling like an "info dump." This is all made possible because of the "voice" of the novel and the enchantingly human portrait of the fictional Andi. I applaud Fiction Collective Two for publishing this work. They are a vanguard for cutting-edge fiction which may one day break down the artificial barriers keeping writers like Olsen out of the mainstream. C'mon, New York, it's time to reinvent yourself. There are writers out there who can be both intelligent and ENTERTAINING!
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Chuck Palahniuk?,
By Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Girl Imagined by Chance (Paperback)
It may have been Lance Olsen's words, but it was Chuck Palahniuk's voice. If you love Chuck P., can tolerate one sentence paragraphs and the always irritating second person narration, then I'm sure you'll like this.
Just a matter of taste. It wasn't my cup of tea.
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