The review, posted on November 12, 2014, and long unnoticed by readers browsing the website, reads:
I didn't buy this book
As soon as I've read it, with bated breath, from
beginning to end, I understood that it is a piece of critical writing
deeply misunderstood by all readers, including myself. In a feat of
concision, the author liminally comments on the science of limnology the
way someone who does not swim might undertake an in-depth analysis of a
landlocked basin of water. He says, "I didn't buy this book" the way
the non-swimmer would say, "I never went to the lake." He gives the book
one star, which, better than five stars, is symbolic of the conceptual
darkness surrounding the book and hints at the impossibility of reading
it. "I didn't buy the book" means, we might speculate, that the book is
beyond his means (the reader-to-be is short of funds, or perhaps even
deeply in debt); or that there are no bookstores within reach, or yet,
the reviewer lives in an area so remote that postal service does not
offer home delivery, and because of his debt (see the first hypothesis)
he cannot afford a post office box; or that the reviewer stole the book,
and this is in fact a confession of his crime (and it is up to us, the
review readers, to solve the mystery, which is not who dunnit, but how
he dunnit); or that, wracked with guilt (see the theft hypothesis), he
is unable to read it, and manages only to circumnavigate its hardbound
perimeter, and at best uses the dust-jacket for warmth. It is possible
that the reviewer is himself a non-swimmer and that, in an attempt to
learn to move in a body of water with the help of only his own body, he
felt the need to reach out to a body of knowledge that would reveal the
secrets of the lake. However, despite all the information it might have
contained, the book turned out to be useless as a flotation device, and
sank. The reviewer survived. His book review is, in fact, a testimony to
his survival of the encounter with the book which he did not buy. Like
other reviewers of this review, I answered the question, "Was this
review helpful to you?" in the negative, because, despite all its
insights, I still can't swim.
In Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, there is a scene in which the angel Damiel (portrayed by Bruno Ganz) flies over the city listening to people's thoughts: a small snippet unlocks an entire life. The reader of Evan Dara's novel might feel a bit like that: inhabiting multiple consciousnesses one after another, although perhaps without all the intimate knowledge afforded to an angel. No, there is nothing supernatural about this novel. The reader is invited to lend an ear to the most quotidian -- and to the marvelous that resides within the quotidian.
Another metaphor that one could use to describe the narrative technique invented here -- and one perhaps more to the point since it is deployed within the novel -- is the metaphor of the radio. Imagine that, with every turn of the dial, you are tuning in to someone's voice: a conversation, a letter being read, an internal monologue, an interview on the air, a town hall meeting, a courtroom debate... All these voices are always on; you are tuning in at an arbitrary point, always in medias res. You are not a patient listener: sometimes you stick with the story for several pages, other times you can put up with just one paragraph. Sometimes you recognize a voice you have heard before. Sometimes the same person is mentioned by different acquaintances or friends, even though they may never speak directly.
The Lost Scrapbook could then be described as a transcript of that radio channel-swapping session. Like on the radio, you are also reaching out to different locations. Sometimes they are given (starting with Edwardsville -- that is Edwardsville, IL, first hinted at by a reference to Hoppe Park (p. 7) and then named directly), other times identified by some local marker (a unique succession of intersections in Springfield, MO (pp. 8ff); or state routes in western Tennessee... (p. 22)), and other times, omitted entirely.
The transition from one "radio station" (speaker, narrator) to the next is as fluid as on the radio, there is no break, no rhetorical transition. Full stop is the one punctuation mark absent from the book: there are dashes, commas, ellipses, spaces -- bigger or smaller, contracting and expanding -- semicolons, colons... Punctuation is not always used in the way you'd expect. Sometimes it is like the static you get on the radio when the signal is getting weak.
How can you tell that the radio dial has been given another turn (let's stick with this metaphor), since you are actually not in control of the knob?
