Pigeon Post [Paperback]

Dumitru Tsepeneag (Author), Jane Kuntz (translator) (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 12, 2008

Here is a book about a man, supposedly a writer, who tries to write a novel, because he promised his readers he would. But he doesn't have anything to say. He keeps erasing what he writes, and rewriting it, without having the slightest idea where he's going with it. Soon enough he realizes that looking out of the window, sitting in front of his typewriter, describing anything and everything, is not enough to write a novel. His three friends, Edmond, Edgar, and Edouard, will aid him in his task . . .

Pigeon Post will be the second book Dalkey Archive has published by the Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag (after the critically acclaimed Vain Art of the Fugue), and we will be publishing more of his works in the years to come.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Romanian novelist writing in French (here newly translated into English) creates in this fragmentary, meandering work the charmingly sad tale of a solitary writer, Ed, as he attempts to make sense of his memories. From his Parisian apartment, Ed observes the comings and goings of pigeons and neighbors, such as the widow Maryse and her Pekinese, all the while relishing his solitude and sifting through the "raw material" of his sensations and memories. He resolves to write a novel by introducing anecdotes helter-skelter and enlisting the ideas of his three childhood friends named, suspiciously, Edmund, Edgar and Edward. From the responses and criticism of these trusty alter-egos, Ed constructs a kind of journal of spontaneous writing centered on his upbringing in Agen and a present flirtation with an older man who plays chess in a café for a living. Delighting in his gleeful prevarication, the narrator opens himself to witty self-scrutiny and invites the reader to participate in his inventive, surreal literary feast.
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Review

"[Vain Art of the Fugue] is a work of singular invention and joy, a successful experiment in every aspect of the novel, especially delight." --The Believer

"With his metaphors and traps, Dumitru Tsepeneag reminds me of a magician who pulls flowers, animals, and strange objects out of his hat. He lays comical stories over a poignant, and often grim, background." --Journal de Geneve

"[Tsepeneag] induces the sense that memory, time, and consciousness are both mutable and, ultimately, unknowable." --Elizabeth Hand, Village Voice

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; First English Translation edition (December 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564785165
• ISBN-13: 978-1564785169
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,099,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A deliciously complex subversion of our expectations, September 3, 2009

By 

Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pigeon Post (Paperback)

Pigeon Post, a novel by Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag, challenges our underlying assumptions about novels and their writers. Rejecting traditional narrative structure, Pigeon Post instead is made up of fragments ostensibly composed by an anxious writer, named Ed, struggling to write a novel. Bits of dialog and memories mingle with recipes for herbal teas, a story involving a chess master, and descriptions of scenes Ed glimpses from his apartment window. To enliven his novel-writing project, Ed turns to three longtime friends (Edward, Edgar, and Edmund) and solicits memories from them to add to his novel-in-progress. In this collaborative writing project, it's never clear what's real and what's imagined, what's part of Ed's novel and what's part of Ed's daily life. Indeed, it's quite likely Ed's three "helpers" are nothing more than facets of his own imagination, each with a distinct artistic vision for the novel. In an interview in June 2008, Tsepeneag likened Pigeon Post to "a creative writing workshop."

Slowly, out of the tangle of seemingly unrelated fragments, several cohesive story lines emerge, but they are never fully explored. Nor does Pigeon Post offer much in the way of thematic development (in that same interview, Tsepeneag admits to no more than "the shadow of a theme"). Early in the novel, in a passage where Ed describes his writing project, Tsepeneag signals what kind of reader he's hoping to reach:
"When all's said and done, I'm piecing together a puzzle that doesn't exist. In the insane hope that when I'm through, I'll manage to put forward a more or less consistent story. I'm counting a little on the reader here, on the kind that's capable of hanging in there to the end, or remaining active and alert like a detective in a dentist's waiting room."

Pigeon Post is frustrating and unsatisfying on many levels, mostly those related to our desire to read a good tale in an accessible form. Viewed as an experiment in structure and identity, however, this novel is a deliciously complex subversion of our expectations, right up to the elegant twist at the very end.