Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34664 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780156032117
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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)
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Review

About the Author

Customer Reviews

A Startling Work of Fiction
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.]

Rare and astonishing
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.

Anything after will be a let down
I also have not written a review for a book and have bought many on this site.

The "People of Paper" takes you into the mind of a lovesick author battling his own characters (literally) who in some ways represent his own psyche; thereby fighting himself. The author has created a work where your own imagination will not solely carry you through this brilliant and awe inspiring book, but the author creates and brings you into his world by using the page, using its space, in ways I have never seen, never thought of. It could have seemed pretentious but it comes off sincere, as if we couldn't think of this story to be fashioned otherwise.

As many have said, there is nothing quite like this fiction. I was astounded by the subtle, unique characters, the universe, the concept of Saturn, the war among ganglands in Southern California, and the manner in which the characters wish to be free from Salavdore, the omniscient narrator/author. It's an incredible journey, when completed, you feel a longing for the book, and connect as anyone has lost love, had a rebound, pontificating on the reasons for her/his departure.

Honestly, in many ways the small vinettes created to describe the adventures and thoughts of his characters reminds me of Vonnegut, just in universal theme and quick pace from plot line to plot line. It speaks in actions and moods unlike any novel I have read.

If there is one book to read this year and beyond, I cannot imagine a fictional work more appropriate. I tried my hand at a generic popular fiction book afterwards and almost longed for the fun, imaginative roller coaster ride of "The People of Paper."

A worthy investment and a gift for anyone looking for something new and refreshing!