Customer Reviews

Part of the World

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

 

 

Part of the World is a fugue in both a musical and psychological sense. It is a canonical juggernaut of lyrical language--ever dissolving, devolving, shifting, then reconstituting itself into a new knowledge of reality. This language comes straight from a compulsive mind in a Quixotic state--ceaselessly harping on the everyday perturbations and peculiarities of our humdrum lives--our cars, apartments, health, finances. But if you relax your focus as if staring at some sort of holographic fractal, with each part containing the whole, the superficial meaning is purged, layer by layer, peeling back and revealing the subtext of what the mind is capable of under the burden of trauma and accountability.

"Robert Lopez has written a darkly hilarious exploration of the trickery of memory, the unreliability of personal history, and the strangeness, even uncanniness, of our daily transactions. As we follow Lopez's hapless narrator about the business of trying to navigate his homely part of the world, we are made to reconsider our own well-mapped relations, the unhygienic corners of our homes."
--Dawn Raffel

"Reading Part of the World by Robert Lopez felt to me like standing in front of one of those marvelous, mind-bending exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology that seem at first glance to be doing exactly nothing and at second glance to be dissolving and reconstituting reality as we thought we knew it. Literary pleasures like this are all too uncommon."
--Laird Hunt

"The prose found in Robert Lopez's new novel, Part of the World, is as flat as this piece of paper but as deep as the deepest well. The world this world is a part of is an affectless poetics planet caught in the black-hole gravity of a Stephen Dixon-esque free-falling narrative sink. Stranger than The Stranger, it is a relentless, droll, blinkless, book."
--Michael Martone

Although there were some interesting parts and some funny ones here and there, the book wasn't very entertaining. It hardly sustained my interest, which is such a shame for a book this short.
As for the narrative itself, it seemed to wander into nowhere and lacked a story which made the book further more difficult to relate to. He does play with some relatable memories and repeatable language, but if you cut out all the vignettes and phrases he repeats, you can cut the book to half what it is: a featherless, tasteless, meatless, hormone-injected, artificially pumped-up chicken of a novel.
I do not completely regret reading this book. However, I would not read it again or associate it positively with my other readings. All in all, not recommended.

Very droll, very flat affect and very musical in its rhythms and subtly varying repetitions. It's always great to come across a young writer who's talent is so much to one's personal taste that one vows to read, thenceforth, whatever of his makes it into print. Robert Lopez is definitely in that catagory for me.

Wow! A truly great read.

This stunning book succeeds on many levels--as an engrossing story about the ill-fated yet near emotionless narrator, a study of memory and the tricks the mind plays,--I don't even know where to begin the praise. A jigsaw-like story with the complete puzzle picture kept tantalizingly just beyond the reader's reach, the book throws the reader into the daily chronicles of Lopez's narrator's life. Chronicles propelled by the unreliable mind of the narrator -- a man unable to keep memories straight.

Part Of The World is a true tribute to the art of juggling. The non-linear movement of time and the constantly changing form of the narrator's memories create a delicate balancing act, which would've collapsed in the hands of a less talented writer. Lopez never loses track of his twisting narrative and ever changing memories, keeping all his balls in the air. It's a story you're not likely to forget and one that you will undoubtedly want to read again.

Although the book's "ending" does not provide a tidy little package complete with definitive answers, it packs an amazing pop when it does come, and will have you turning back to page 1 to read the book again with a wholly new perspective.

Part of the World is full of trickery and dark humor. Manic, mindbinding, musical--and always masterful.