A couple of week’s ago, I read B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, a book in a box. All the chapters are broken up into little stapled sections and filed out of order. You can read it anyway you wish, but for the first and last part (which are marked first and last, if I remember right). The book is about the death of a friend of Johnson’s, semi fictionalised. It’s pretty good and I recommend it. I started reading Simon Groth’s Ephemeral City, another book in a box, this morning. This one is a collection and is, as an object, quite pretty. The first story was quite decent, so I’ve hopes for the rest of it.
I’m a big fan of books that alter the physicality of a book, though most are found outside adult fiction, and rest in design books and children’s books like popups. Most design experimentation in fiction takes place inside the book, from textual changes in novels like Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson, or House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, to use two popular examples. Bats of the Republic isn’t very good, sadly, but I quite like Danielewski’s novel. It’s the only novel of Danielewski’s I like, to be fair, as everything else he’s written has been awful. It’s sad, really.
I even tried the first volume of his 27 volume epic, The Familiar, One Rainy Day in May. I never could bring myself to buy the rest of the series after I abandoned it, and I wasn’t all that surprised when the publisher pulled the pin on the whole thing after five books. Still, he got a million dollar advance for it – which I suppose isn’t all that impressive if you think of it as an advance for 27 books, but he only wrote five, so it’s still decent. Still, you do sort of wonder what kind of madness gripped the people involved.
J.J. Abram and Doug Dorst gave us S., a book designed to look like a used library book, filled with notes, writing on the margins, and a dewey code on the spine and everything. It looks great, really. I came across a copy shortly after it was released and picked it up even though I don’t really like what Abram does. I told myself Dorst probably wrote most of it, anyhow, and I didn’t know anything about him. I wish I could say that I went and read the book shortly after, but I didn’t. I still have it on my shelf, a beautiful design object. One day I’ll read it, I promise.
I bought Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish because each chapter was written in a different colour. I was not, and still am not, a huge fan of Flanagan, though he does write nicely. I this case, I was moved by the design. It was probably a sucker move, I suppose. I often wish I liked Flanagan’s work more than I do, but I often just don’t like the way his narrative’s unfold, or the choices he makes. He writes nicely on a sentence level and Gould’s Book of Fish is pretty.
It sounds a bit like I don’t like any of these books that do something different with their design, doesn’t it? Mostly, I think, I’m disappointed that they don’t live up to the promise. Jeff VanderMeer’s second edition of City of Saints and Madmen, the one put out by Prime Books, did. Or at least, I think it did. It included a story on the cover and expanded the original four novellas into a larger, denser object of a book. The cover really did set up the textual density within. It’s probably still my favourite of VanderMeer’s books because of it, I think.
I am by no means an expert when it comes to books the break up the conventional design of a book, or twist the layout inside. I just like them and tend to buy them when I see them, though this doesn’t always work out for me. But I love Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and I’m a big fan of Italo Calvino’s novels, Irvine Welsh’s early books (I haven’t read any of his recent ones – in fact, I was surprised to hear he’s writing crime fiction now), and a lot of others. Oddly, I’ve never read Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a book that you can read in two different ways, one in a linear fashion, and the other following the order presented within the text. I should read it, though, because I love Cortázar. He wrote such amazing short fiction.
I always liked the idea of Percival Everett’s Telephone, a book there were three different editions of, and which you learned the difference of each by examining the position of the compass on the cover. Unfortunately, I found it largely impossible to source all three different editions online confidently and never bought it one or three. I suppose it was a lot easier if you could buy them in physical editions, if you were in America and could see the books in a store. The differences between the editions are neatly explained here, if you’re curious.
Simon Groth arranged the chapters of Ex Libris randomly and no two editions are alike, reportedly. There’s said to be 479,001,600 variations available, so you assume that the 479,001,6001st edition of Ex Libris will repeat, but I guess that’s a small price to pay if you have sold that many editions of a book. Groth is actually quite an interesting writer in terms of the physicality of a book, and the layout inside. As I mentioned earlier, he’s the author of the collection in a box, Ephemeral City, which is a beautiful object, and Hunted Down and Other Tales, which plays with layouts. You can buy all his work through his website.
I always found Alasdair Gray’s books to be textually quite interesting, as well, and James Kelman’s deliberate lack of punctuation and errors in his novels (it’s a gentle experiment with the page, and much less confronting than Gray, for example). I’m a huge fan of How Late it Was, How Late and can’t recommend that enough. But the list of these kind of books goes on, really. Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts, William S. Burrough’s Nova Trilogy and Naked Lunch, George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. The last I don’t really recommend, to be honest. I mean the form is kind of interesting, but the book is really light on content. Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra is better. It’s written in the form of an exam. Like I said, there’s lots of cool stuff out there all of it doing different things, all of waiting you.
Would you believe that this is not what I planned to write about today?
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)
I love Abrams S. for all its marginalias. I even added my own marginalias, notes and drawings etc. when reading it.