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.
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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.
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
"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
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.]
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
By bentmax
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This inaugural book by Salvador Plascencia is mind bending, reality altering, wickedly witty, ruthlessly clever, disarmingly charming, extraordinarily inventive and irreverently humorous. I am sure I have forgotten a few adjectives as well. With remarkable characters, Plascencia moves the reader through his own reality, dreams, conjectures and thoughts of events that happened, might have happened and couldn't possibly have happened. His dialog runs stealthily from religion and sex to field workers, Hollywood starlets, broken romances, planetary movement, physical disabilities and war and revenge. It will blast you out of your seat and take you on the wildest literary ride imaginable. It is a rare, astonishing and totally satisfying book to consume.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the strangest, most wonderful books ever!
The magical realism in this book is some of the finest ever. I sent copies of this book to a few friends to make sure I had plenty of people to discuss it with! Read more
Published 2 months ago by Lesley Vitel
5.0 out of 5 stars
the book is great!
I love Plascencia's metafictive writing style. His approach is so different from the traditional metafiction and so less, for lack of a better word, douchy. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Kelly M Kusumoto
5.0 out of 5 stars
My Favorite Book of All Time
A mental journey. Every page is a mystery until the story develops and it begins to come together like a puzzle you didn't know you were putting together. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Alesha Busard
4.0 out of 5 stars
Absorbing
Reading this reminded me a little of Murakami's The WindUp Bird Chronicles in terms of the surrealism. There was a time when people were made of paper. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Caroline Lim
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truly artful story
THE PEOPLE OF PAPER is not an easy book to describe. You can throw around terms like 'postmodern' and 'magical realism' to try to get a grip on it. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Liviania
5.0 out of 5 stars
Storytelling about storytelling
This, in some sense, is storytelling about storytelling, and the result is absolutely lovely--I can't say much more than that without feeling liking I'm giving too much away. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Kara
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unique and strangely familiar
I just received this book a few days ago I could not put it down. I will not give away any of the plot because I feel this would be spoiling a great literary work but I must say... Read more
Published 18 months ago by VeritasUnica
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant exercise in process and its effect on artist
Let me get this out of the way: no one should ever do this again. Or to put it another way: it can only be done once. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Mr. Silence
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE most interestinly written book I've ever read - AMAZING!
This book is like no other book I've ever read. This book will pull you in and play with your mind. I love it. If you are looking to read a very non-standard book, this is it. Read more
Published on April 14, 2011 by Ryan Roxx
5.0 out of 5 stars
such a strange but amazing book
this book was unique to say the least. it begins with monks making people out of paper. then about a guy who wets the bed so his wife leaves him and their daughter. Read more
Published on April 9, 2011 by apocalypse blonde
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