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?
