The People of Paper [Paperback]

Salvador Plascencia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2006

THE PEOPLE OF PAPER is an astonishing debut novel about the anguish of lost love. Author Salvador Plascencia, a "once-in-a-generation talent" (George Saunders), weaves together the stories of a large cast of colorful characters, including: a disgruntled monk, a father and daughter, a gang of carnation pickers, and a woman made of paper.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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 García Márquez 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. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

PRAISE FOR THE PEOPLE OF PAPER

"Salvador Plascencia's surrealistic metanovel, styled a la García Márquez, is a charming meditation on the relationship between reader, author, and story line, filled with mythic imagery . . . and unforgettable personalities . . . Readers will find it hard to turn away from The People of Paper. A."--Entertainment Weekly

"A nervy new voice . . . Finally, beyond all the experimental devices, fairy-tale antics and fabulist inclination, Plascencia's novel is a story of lost love."--San Francisco Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (November 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156032112
• ISBN-13: 978-0156032117
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #34 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Hispanic

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Startling Work of Fiction, June 30, 2005

By 

Daniel Olivas (West Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The People of Paper (Hardcover)

Salvador Plascencia's debut novel is a wonderfully strange, hallucinogenic and hypertextual blending of fiction and autobiography. The Prologue's first sentences thrust us into an almost familiar yet purely mythical world while introducing Plascencia's sly brand of humor: "She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets-rare exceptions granted for immaculate conceptions." What an astonishing, strange and deeply moving novel this is. In all his playfulness, Plascencia nonetheless grapples with troubling issues of free will, religious fidelity, ethnic identity, failed love and the creative process which he melds into a dreamscape that is impossible to forget. Plascencia-the God of his paper people-has given us a startling work of fiction that stretches not only the norms of storytelling, but also the bounds of our imagination. [The full review of this book first appeared in The Elegant Variation.]

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Novel Novel, August 1, 2007

By 

Louis N. Gruber "Author of Jay" (Lexington, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The People of Paper (Paperback)

Federico de la Fe is grieving for his wife who left him because he wets the bed. And he is leading an insane, futile, and destructive war against Saturn. Who is not only the planet Saturn but the author, Salvador Plascencia. That's the plot, I suppose. The book is packed with character sketches, meditations on the creative process, mind-bending inventions, including mechanical turtles, origami surgery, papercuts in intimate parts of the body, and its recurring theme, the pain of love and loss.

Author Plascencia is a fountain of creativity, but he is also repetitive and sometimes too clever. It is hard to really connect with the characters because the characters are too busy fighting a war with the author to develop themselves as three dimensional persons. They remain, mostly, people of paper.

The book is like a combination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce. It's intriguing, but hard to read, and hard to assimilate. It is a most novel novel. I recommend it but not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 10 Stars = 5 Stars x 2 - Book Of The Year!!!!, September 25, 2005

By 

D. Sean Brickell (gorgeous Virginia Beach, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The People of Paper (Hardcover)

I give this book 10 Stars. The two reasons why are that I read it twice, the second time being as soon as I initially finished it, which I haven't done more than a handful of times in my life. The other reason is the book stops in the middle and starts again, thereby giving the reader two perfect books in one.

The only thing I'm certain of about this book is that Sr. Plascencia has presented something never done in literature before. I'm fully confident no one will honestly say this book is like anything read previously.

Of course, Sr. Plascencia also demonstrates a first-rate command of language, thematic structure that smoothly straddles so many genres it's barely containable by description, and unforgettable characters. That alone makes for great literature.

But there's more, and that's why this book is an instant classic -- a term I do not lightly toss for sake of impact and mean will be studied by scholars 100 years on.

This writer tells the truth, albeit in a fashion heretofore never ventured.

I'll not spoil the plot here. But I can offer no higher praise than to admit the second reading was more satisfying, and I'm confident the third will yield yet deeper appreciation.

If this book doesn't clean up every literary award this year, someone please explain why not.