Customer Reviews

The Lost Scrapbook

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

. . . to describe the incredible force and beauty of this book. It is almost impossible to believe that this is Dara's first novel, for the facility with which he interweaves superficially disparate but fundamentally similar vignettes into a cohesive whole is breathtaking. As you read, you can feel that you are in the hands of a master. The Lost Scrapbook (an apt title both because of the books collage style and because this amazing book has inexplicably been lost amid heaps of lesser works) combines the first-person narratives of artists, blue-collar workers, academics, mothers, possible lunatics, justified malcontents, and average joes, eventually becoming the voice of a community facing a terrible crisis, which brings the books to its gripping, gut-wrenching conclusion. And with this final narrative, of the battle of Isaura, MO and the Ozark Photography Corporation, Dara reveals that he is not only brilliantly talented, he is also brilliantly moral.

The Lost Scrapbook is a deeply-felt, deeply moving novel.

In a just universe, The Lost Scrapbook would dominate the wealth of hype currently afforded to lesser novels, or at least share the excitement over recent, comparable novels(and I've read them too) such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Delillo's Underworld, and Gaddis' A Frolic of His Own. But it seems that the world wants to ignore The Lost Scrapbook, the work of a vastly talented writer, whose interwoven, first person narratives not only evoke lucid characters, but often reveal meaning through what is omitted -- as in whole sets of dialogue -- rather than what is written. Film students discuss Piaget's theory of object constancy. One listens to the voices of factory workers, artists, cable repairmen, television interns, microbiologists, even an entire town, all quilted together into an elegant comment on humanity's permutative expansion, information-wise and, subsequently, disaster-wise. I held back on rating this a 10, if only to dare Dara to discover room for improvement. So avoid The Lost Scrapbook at your own peril. If there is such a thing as a millenial masterpiece, Dara has written that book with which to usher in the 21st century, not to signal the end of the 20th. Because of that, The Lost Scrapbook will not be forgotten, whatever the status of its availability or obscurity.

Don't worry yourself that this masterpiece'll be overlooked-- even in today's mess of praise for books that are as billboards for soulessness the good stuff eventually surfaces word-of-mouthwise. So let me be the 2nd to here sound the call to all literature thirsties ready for something more hurricane than novel: Build yourselves from this perfect thumping upon the ceiling of our world; read it in the prisons and on the beaches; read it wherever there is love and/or chemical dumping; read it bravely, whatever the cost may be.

Right now I'm only halfway through this novel, but that's only because I want to read it in snippets and prolong the reading, because so far as I can tell this is the author's only novel so far. I can only hope that the author doesn't pull a Gaddis and make us wait 20 years for his next novel, but even if he did, something tells me it would be worth the wait. A beautiful book.

Haven't had a chance to read it yet, so there's that.

I bought it because of the connection to Vollmann, who is a writer of outstanding prowess.

This is a reliable press. The cover is a bit lamentable, don't you agree?

5 stars because I bought it and I'll spank myself if it turns out to be a dud.