El cuaderno perdido

by Evan Dara, José Luis Amores (Translator), Stephen J. Burn (Foreword)

Publicada originalmente en 1995 tras ser elegida vencedora en un premio literario presidido por William T. Vollmann, esta novela recibió una única reseña por parte de los medios convencionales en su primer año de vida, donde se la consideraba la mejor ópera prima desde "Los reconocimientos" de William Gaddis. A partir de entonces, la crítica especializada la ha aupado a los puestos más elevados del ranking de mejores novelas del siglo XX.

"El cuaderno perdido" narra la historia de la desintegración de una comunidad de la América moderna, y ofrece una visión de reconstitución. Plasmando la totalidad social de dicho conjunto de personas mediante la representación de sus distintas voces, la novela describe con una maestría extraordinaria la interconectada complejidad del capitalismo tardío.

Tanto por su estructura como por su veloz ritmo narrativo, "El cuaderno perdido" ha sido comparado con los dos estadios más populares de Internet: el post-primigenio de la fase 1.0, y el 2.0 de redes sociales como Twitter; con la peculiaridad de que ambas tecnologías no habían aparecido cuando el libro fue publicado. La novela —y los dos siguientes libros de Dara— es objeto continuo de análisis en ámbitos académicos y especializados —David Foster Wallace recomendaba la lectura de "El cuaderno perdido", junto con obra de autores de la talla de Jonathan Franzen, David Markson y Cormac McCarthy—, el libro no para de ganar lectores en su idioma original, las especulaciones sobre la identidad de Evan Dara son incesantes —¿Es Richard Powers Evan Dara?—, y todo lo que se dice de la obra de su autor como de este libro en particular hacen escandalosamente imposible no acabar leyendo la novela.

Esta edición en castellano incluye un prólogo escrito ex profeso por el académico de literatura norteamericana Stephen J. Burn, editor responsable de "Conversaciones con David Foster Wallace".

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, American, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America

510 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Evan Dara is an American postmodern novelist. In 1995, his first novel The Lost Scrapbook won the 12th Annual FC/2 Illinois State University National Fiction Competition judged by William T. Vollmann. Evan Dara currently lives in Paris.

Dara's second novel, The Easy Chain, was published by Aurora Publishers in 2008.

A third novel, Flee, was published by Aurora, Inc. in late summer 2013.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trash is all around us and our heads are full of trash. And we wish to be not distinguishable from anyone else and we wish to hide in multitudes and to be invisible…  

…So now I move about you, civilization, like an electron: amid your clamor and industry, your commonness and shared accords, I am a speck, whirling and circling, negatively charged; with no measurable existence save the statistical, I am everywhere, and therefore nowhere; I have now evaded notice for eight straight days…

And we live in the world of lies… Everyone wants us on one’s side so everyone is lying: politicians, journalists, writers, plutocrats, government, scientists, priests and advertisers… But do we need truth?

– And then all the ads, which are just shameless in their manipulativeness and stupidity and meanness, and all the posturing, and the sucking up, and the distorting – all of it, just all of it…; I mean, by now we’re all well-versed in the inadequacy of language, so to speak, but I never feel this so forcefully as when I try to come up with some means of verbalizing the utter, total, and appalled revulsion and sub-disgust I feel at what has become of our political process…; I mean, watching this every night on television, I would just begin to get sick, I started developing physical symptoms – tensions, chest pains, actual symptoms; and I would sit there, you know, I’d sit there and I’d be thinking: this can’t be it; this can’t be what it’s all about – I mean, all this unbearable shit –

The voices telling the tale are many but they all are interchangeable… Behind the voice, there is no individuality.
It is interesting to compare The Lost Scrapbook with the postmodern novels from the sixties of the last century – with Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth or with V. by Thomas Pynchon, for instance…
The protagonists of those books are on a quest to find one’s ego – to gain identity and individuality and become a hero… And they fail.
In The Lost Scrapbook there is no protagonist… Everyone wants to conform and lose one’s ego… And they succeed.

…come into the world of lies, of distortions and inessentialities; learn to feel inadequate, and to be ashamed of what you are; accept the power of others to form, to shape, to determine your preferences, your thoughts, your hidden enclaves; internalize the master myth, specifically in order to feel excluded from it; realize that you are a nothing – a cipher, a target, a marketing opportunity, a connable and dupable marketing opportunity, but ultimately a nothing, entirely a nothing; learn to hate yourself, while always remembering that the hater is a nothing…

Trashy generation: human beings are turned into sapient amoebae… They are capable of thinking but they choose not to.

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i need to read this again
i need to read this again
i need to read this again.

i can see it up there on my shelves, trapped between Songdogs: A Novel and Brightness Falls and in my "i should review all my favorite books, especially the ones it will be frustrating for people to track down," burst of energy, here we all are.

and i am wanting desperately to read this again.

this book should be among the seven wonders of the modern world. yes, we all love the chunnel - it is superfast and all, but this is a superfast chunnel of words. this book will make your mind come. it is astonishing.

but it is not for everyone, truly.

it is not a tidily told tale that will wrap up at the end. it is a book you have to both work with and work for. but it isn't complicated in the way that finnegan's wake is - i personally never got the sense that someone was deliberately trying to make me angry. it is more ambitious in the way that house of leaves is, or infinite jest. it sprawls, massively, like a panda bear on its back showing you its goods. but it isn't going to perform for you - you are going to be responsible for making a lot of the connections yourself. i found it way more satisfying than house of leaves, and pretty much the equal of IJ, although i have only read this one the one time. (i need to read this again.) it has a lot of that lynchean "why don't you tell me what this is about" attitude, which makes it both a taunt and a challenge, and leaves a rush of accomplishment singing through the veins.

reading this is like when you are young and stoned, and you are walking down the street, overhearing snippets of conversation, reading graffiti, hearing lyrics of songs coming from out of windows of cars going by and you start picking up on patterns, man, and how all of this surrounding noise relates to you - the center of the universe, naturally, and you start coming up with silent theories about what everything you are seeing and hearing is trying to tell you. only this time, it's all real. this is carefully balanced. this is like a game of memory, and these are echoes and reverberations throughout, like in sea came in at midnight. but this book is more disjointed, more of a mist of words you just happen to find yourself in. i have a pretty big aversion to clever for clever's sake, and this one never felt that way to me, it is simply clever. it is a book i discovered and read on my own, and the experience felt so life changing and necessary that it spooked me a little. i read it pretty much right when it came out, attracted by the title and premise alone, and it was only years later that i realized what a cult this book had surrounding it, and what mysteries lay cloaked around its authorship.

i need to read this again.
i should stop writing this and go read it, but i gotta read a couple of other books first...

but i vow to read this again before the end of the month. one of you people should track it down and read it with me.

come to my blog!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

A comparison to the books of the likes of Gaddis, Pynchon, McElroy, or DFW means one thing--that it is a book not like any of those books. And so is this Evan Dara book, The Lost Scrapbook. The indication intended by such a cursedly bold comparison means only that if you don’t want to read the same thing over again, but would like to read a novel, a new thing, a thing which takes the risk of failure because its design has not been vetted and proven by its forgoers, or because you might want to read a book which attempts to speak the truth, then please do turn your attention to this book whose status as self-published is an indictment against the book industry.

First person plural; but not in the ‘we.‘

“Evan Dara is an American writer living in France.” With this sentence-length complete biography we are released from any temptation to commit an intentional fallacy. We may add to our certainty regarding this freedom by indicating that Evan Dara’s proper pronoun will be “s/he.” And further, that speculations about Dara being perhaps another published author only indicates an insecurity about our reading in the freedom from a search for “the man in the book,” that ghost of an author who’s not dead, in the Foucauldian sense, of course; freedom from a trap which would have you believe that a novel is nothing more than the ‘expression,’ the squeezing out onto the page, of some bio-psychical entity mistaken for a human being. Nothing here to see but a novel, folks. Listen to it; do not seek your mythical “s/he” somewhere “behind” it or “in” it or whatever other prepositional metaphor you might dream up to satisfy your dissatisfaction with being confronted by a naked text; returning your gaze. And empathizing with you.

First person plural; but not in the ‘we.’

This is the voice of a community. Its unity is formed merely by the two covers of the physical object; but its split, its diversity, its antagonism is formulated on the pages, between the pages, with “--”, jumps and echos, discord. The lost scrapbook, a book which is lost, but too a collection of the lost, a collection which is already “we,” a “we” coming to speak and into a language. Listen. Because the American voice is Whitman’s voice, “I”; the first person singular of Holden Caulfield. Can Americans say “we” without lying? How does an American community sound when listened to, when heard? This is its unity, not falsely through a singularity of consciousness, but through a plurality of disjointedness, of never-having-been-one, but overridden already by a dependency upon the Father-Master corporation which provides us milk and against which we cannot speak because we have taken it into ourselves, we have become this community mediated by a legal fiction, it has created us; and then it will poison us. And our language, our political action, can it ever organize itself independently from this demon we’ve suckled upon? What is left is all of us, forced to evacuate because of what we have not done ourselves but which we demanded for 108 years be done in and through our name.

And so what we have, The Lost Scrapbook, is the Great American Novel, again. This one is not the American Everyman, because we have had damn near enough of that bogus mediocrity, but about the American Every Town. Here, the portrait which may be replicated repeatedly, but never by repetition, of what we have made for ourselves in our homes and in our towns; how we have given off on our desires, the original American Dream of self-determination and democracy, because its burden was better carried by Father-Master; how we’ve landed ourselves, and what the cost of clean-up is going to be. It will not become any lighter.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evan Dara’s highly ambitious, innovative and masterfully executed debut novel The Lost Scrapbook has a reputation as being woefully underexposed and underappreciated and this reviewer is here to pile onto that sentiment with several megatons of explosive praise. Quietly published in 1995, this savory feast of a book drew this reviewer’s associative tentacles towards such novelistic-brethren as post-’95 titles like Infinite Jest , The Pale King , A Naked Singularity and the somewhat elusive shared tonal and atmospheric sensibilities of a pre-’95 title like Magnetic Field(s) . The DFW connection lies mostly in the basic structure of deploying a lengthy set-up of seemingly disconnected vignettes while very mindfully laying out big uniting themes all along the way, laying the ground for a walloping series of epiphinal A-HA!s in the latter reaches of the page-count. The Naked Singularity connection lies in the fact that both books are largely underappreciated, extremely formidable and ambitious debuts, both authors have single line author bios{1} and both remain rather mysterious (Dara being far, far more mysterious, since not a single interview or anything beyond his two novels seems to validate that he even exists), and neither are afraid to delve into straight-up philosophical territory (though I think Dara restrains this tendency a little more so than De La Pava).
____________________________________________

{1} Evan Dara is an American writer living in France.

Sergio De La Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.
____________________________________________

Dara places a perfect quote from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the head of the book:

O let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body;

It’s perfect in that it captures the central theme of the book and the book’s structure which surely was sculpted with said theme in mind. Parts of the whole. Forest for the trees, trees for the forest. Synecdoche. Conceptual and ontological tapestry. All of this when applied to human individuals and human communities. Dara has described a single town in Missouri but also the big ol’ daunting portrait of Humanity as well and how people compose massive systems that breed unforeseen effects and byproducts and how each individual plays a role however large or small and that all of this has massive implications in every area of life that can possibly matter.

Characters are given their due while also given a certain level of interchangeability, of anonymity. The seamless, elliptical, fractured, collage-like (and completely and utterly period-less) flood of prose that composes this entire book tends to merge characters and scenes and dialogues together. There were times when I thought I was still reading about one distinct character while the narrative had already shifted to another totally distinct one. It makes for a very jarring and unusual reading experience. Amazingly crafted and imaginative vignettes just bleed and segue into one another for the entirety of this novel and reach a fevered pitch of flashcutting in the final hundred or so pages when the sum of the parts is most fully unveiled and the dramatic tensions rise to their apex.

It bears mentioning that Dara’s a true magician with words as well; deeply satisfying descriptive chops to match his muscular intellectual and moral flexing.

All fans of the sensitively and richly imagined Big Ideas Novel must check this out. It's the kind of highly-detailed and narratively-fractured moral drama and glimpse into both the banal and the deep-end that demands re-reading from the individual and more appreciation and recognition from the group.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't understand what all of the parts of the book have to do with the whole, but goddamn if this isn't the most fun I've ever had reading something that half the time I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pomo Promoters' Playbook for Getting Your Novel a Five Star Review from Tom LeClair and His Coterie

1. Use multiple pages of unattributed dialogue.

Tick.

2. Structure a monologue as unattributed dialogue.

Tick.

3. Create a fragmented effect.

Tick.

4. Change the identity of the narrator mid-sentence or at least mid-paragraph.

Tick.

5. Cite philosophers, psychoanalysts, linguists, and anarchists who have influenced post-modernism.

Tick (Nietzsche, Piaget, Chomsky).

6. Question the validity of the concept of truth.

Tick.

7. Deny the existence of cause and effect.

Tick.

8. Use mathematics and music as metaphors for life and creativity.

Tick.

All Right But For the Playbook

This playbook is supposed to be a list of literary characteristics that establish your credibility as an experimental novelist. However, in reality, they're little more than a private code that signals membership of a pomo coterie to other writers and readers.

Evan Dara uses them, but the real question is what he/she manages to achieve with them. Dara hints at an ability to write with some intelligence and fluidity, but all of the pomo traits contribute to a dubious fragmented effect. Readers end up as alienated as the characters.

Besides, the pomo tropes are frequently inconsistent with, and therefore undermine, the subject matter.

"They Had to Put Off the Infidels"

LeClair describes the novel as “eco-fiction". About half of it is concerned with environmental activism. A subterranean toxic incident has occurred (aging and defective pipes carrying dangerous chemicals have burst, and the chemicals have started to permeate the groundwater beneath the American city of Isaura), the community is starting to suffer the after-effects, and activists are now developing a strategy to reclaim a healthy environment and seek remediation and compensation. To do so, the individuals within the community have to overcome their individualism and social atomization. What is required is a collective effort, which counteracts the anarchistic separatism that had prevailed in the suburbs.

The detection and punishment of the damage done by the chemical company, Ozark, requires a belief in cause and effect, which seems to contradict one of the tenets of post-modernism. However, it's vital that the activists be able to prove that Ozark has caused the environmental damage. Naturally, Ozark and the authorities deny that there has been any damage or that Ozark is responsible. It immediately reverts to damage control mode, using the tactics and language of a public relations exercise. It also argues that, if the company collapses, people within the community will lose their jobs, retailers will close, and rates and taxes will cease to be paid to the local authorities:

“There would be no Isaura, period, without them.”

Ozark is a company which, like any other, prioritizes profit over doing the right thing:

"I mean, Ozark is a company, and they have to make money; it's as simple as that; what do these people expect?"

Political Radicalism ("Where are the New Crusaders?")

The individual activists in the community have to combat this misinformation, as we now have to disarm Trump and his habitual lies:

“...so you just trundle on, hoping that maybe we, as receivers of information, have biologically-given decoder circuits that let us compensate for corrupted data, so that despite all the distortions – inadvertent, inevitable, or otherwise – we somehow can get a sense of what's going on, and something genuine gets through...”

This assumes that there is some concept of truth, and that the subject, either individually or collectively with others, can ascertain it:

"I am terrified of unmeaning."

“We simply believe in the ideal of personal accountability...We think that there is still something left to the idea of someone being responsible for his own conduct.”

In contrast, a tobacco company in the novel argues that "The causal theory is just that: a theory.” It questions cause and effect, so that it can deny responsibility and liability. Big capital has got into bed with pomo relativism.

Evan Dara speaks of a regathering which will achieve a reclamation of the environment and the community:

"Where are the new crusaders? And tell me now of jackals and betrayals and Where you will die I will die and Where are the new crusaders? But by then the signals were faint, the sounds and the signals were flickering and faint, yes, the signals were flickering out, flickering into the amassing regathering, into the conclusive regathering where physics becomes math becomes psychology becomes biology, yes flickering and lost to the definitive regathering, the comforting regathering into continuity, into continuousness, into abundance, into that abundance that is silently and invisibly working on every variation, into full and unfolding abundance, into the extreme abundance of silence, yes into it’s opulent abundance, its sweet unity and opulence, this definitive regathering into willed abundance, into the sweet abundance of silence, of unity and silence, yes this definitive reclamation, this grand extreme regathering and reclamation into silence, for where else could this go but silence, yes silence: silence. Silen”

Like Thomas Pynchon before him/her, Evan Dara has to escape the clutches of post-modernism to reclaim and realise the willed abundance of his/her literary skills.

INTERVIEW:

DJ Ian:

Your novel is as much concerned with depression as the novels of David Foster Wallace, so much so that some critics have speculated that Evan Dara might have been a pseudonym used by him?

Evan Dara:

Perhaps, but in reality, I'm Even Darker.


EMPATHY AND RESPONSE:

He Said She Said

This is what it's like to be lost.

Mm...

Know You're Product

I think I am the product of the otherness thinking me.

Hm...

The Imperial Signifier

"You know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn’t help me at all."

Mmhm...

The Russia Hoax

"There was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country. Somebody has to get to the bottom of it."

Mmhm....

Thank Goodness

"Thank goodness we can fight back on Social Media."

Hm...

Finding the Truth

"When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable."

Mmhm...

"The Report is My Testimony"

"...if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so...

"...it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge...

"...while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Hm...

Freedom

"This cannot be the purpose of our putative freedom, to be able to engage in cruel deceptions with smiling faces, to conduct this inconceivable squandering of resources and effort and ingenuity solely for the purpose of hoodwinking the trusting, and producing uselessness, and nothing of what is so desperately needed..."

Mm...

The Felt Absence of Genuine Conjunction

"I really don't like critics as much as I respect people who get things done."

Hm...


METACOMMENTARY:

Metacomment 1

"...some sad narcissistic shimmy - which is the only thing you'll pay attention to..." (268)

Metacomment 2

"...style is sickness, and cleverness is the enemy of content..." (271)

Metacomment 3

"A JOYRIDE THROUGH THE BACK ALLEYS OF THE [POST-]MODERN MINDSCAPE...DEVASTATING!"

Metacomment 4

"All of a sudden, I must say, the fascination with the guy was just over, all the intrigue was gone, and he just seemed sad."

SOUNDTRACK:

The Beatles - "She Said, She Said"

https://youtu.be/rLzfo59AdEc

The Saints - "Know Your Product"

https://youtu.be/h9M3b9lh-7s

"Where's the professor? We need him now!"

[Chris Via]

Now here's a friendly little book that is notorious for being unknown and overlooked. If you've read it, you're likely the passenger of one of three channels: (1) You trust William T. Vollmann's judgement*; (2) you heard that the novel has been lumped in with the names Gaddis and Pynchon; or (3) your tastes coincide with those of Steven Moore. My own arrival is the result of a confluence of these channels, catalyzed by the Goodreads recommendation engine. While its affinities with the likes of Gaddis, Pynchon, et al. are not as prominent as I expected, Evan Dara's debut novel achieves that almost impossible echelon of sui generis for which I pine. That is, I've read The Recognitions and Gravity's Rainbow, but I can still say that The Lost Scrapbook is a unique experience that stands on its own.

First off, Evan Dara does not exist. This is a nom de plume that has been linked to several candidates, including Richard Powers. The book, which is published by Evan Dara's own publishing house, Aurora, offers this illuminating biographical note: "Evan Dara is an American writer living in France." A footnote in Steven Moore's biography of William Gaddis, William Gaddis: Expanded Edition (1989), reveals that Evan Dara has deliberately eschewed Gaddis's books (or, at least, J R) because Dara does not want to be influenced by Gaddis. So, like Pynchon, we know little to nothing about the real author. Which, I assert, works wonders for freeing us of dispositions that mar the text proper.

It can rightly be classified as a difficult novel. The difficulty here lies in the way it is structured and the fact that the framing story is delayed for a bulk of the text. Like scanning through radio channels, The Lost Scrapbook reads like a stream of different voices and concerns. This panoply of voices and perspectives is devoid of transitions, also as in radio scanning. I found myself getting a rush every time I pinpointed a lapse into a separate voice and situation, so cleverly rendered are these "breaks." And forget about the final episode of Joyce's Ulysses being the longest sentence in the English language--the first full stop (i.e. period) of this text comes on page 476! Once we pick up on the wraparound story--an ecological disaster that exposes the fault lines between a huge chemical company and a small American town--our footing is a little more sure. But, inevitably, to understand the purpose of the novel better we must question why Dara chose this form.

The text makes explicit the theme of its form. Before the story even begins, we have two quotes about honoring every man (Kierkegaard) and knitting together fragments to form a whole body (Shakespeare). Later on, we get a rumination on the concept of montage and scene-cuts in film and how this form is "much more dramatic than just a gradual... [ellipsis in the original]" and how it creates "its own language by crashing perceptions together through montage, fabricating a bridge... [again, ellipsis in the original]" (204). And this beautifully eloquent statement of intent comes on the heels of some of the best remarks on originality, uniqueness, and individuation I've ever read (190). This crashing of perceptions is interrupted only by an extended break that carries on for roughly 100 pages by an entity that we could anachronistically call a Danielewskian narcon.

And it's more than just formally inventive; the book has all the trappings of Tom LeClair's systext. It seeks to present a new view of the cosmos to the reader. We must set aside our prejudices and accept the world we are given. The writing is often poetic and striking ("wind-gusts corduroying the park's grass"; "guitars hanging like ducks in a Chinese grocery"; "a black drum set that was stacked like a ziggurat on the floor"; "there was a rustling throughout the auditorium, as if a finger had been drawn over taut saran"). There is much meta-commentary of the writing. The text is peppered with jokes (mostly Jewish) to alleviate the reader's consternation. My favorite moment of levity: "...and put us up in the Ambassador Hotel--separate rooms, of course--no embedding of these dependent clauses..." (287). There are several delicious 90s symbols, the Walkman and Waldenbooks being my favorites.

The book ends with Joycean truncation that will compel you to go back to the beginning. It practically begs to be re-read, and I cannot wait to do so with more context in mind than before. Some may ask why the need for the difficulty, or whether Dara is a good writer or just a maddening inventor obsessed with tinkering and subverting tradition. The fact is that he (or she) is a very strong writer: narration, dialogue, and storytelling are all present and of high quality. The authenticity of the voices are so perfectly captured that you will find your self believing these characters really exist. And the conflict between the Ozark corporation and the residents of Isaura will leave you as tense as the best thriller available. Still--you may ask--why this need to close off your book to the average reader? Well, in the words of one of the many characters: "...that's why all the fancy footwork of variation is necessary: we never actually get to what we're after, to where all the gropings, all the variation-searching, would no longer be necessary, to the point where there would no longer be music..." (41).

-------------------------
* As the front cover boasts, it was chosen by William T. Vollmann as the winner of FC2's National Fiction Competition.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Just...

WOW!!!

I went into this knowing almost nothing about it, and I’m so glad I did. I had no idea what all of the voices and stories would add up to; none whatsoever. I just let them wash over me and pull me along, enamored with the effortless flowing beauty of the language, struck by occasionally dizzying quick cuts, in utter awe of its form. And then all of a sudden, it all came together and absolutely fucking crushed me. I’m devastated and deeply moved and absolutely positively over the moon in love with this novel.

I’ve been putting off reading it for years, afraid it wouldn’t live up to the hype, but it has well and truly made a believer out of me. Evan Dara, whoever they are, has produced a truly striking, original, inventive and daring novel, and one with a hell of a lot of heart to boot.

The Lost Scrapbook is a masterpiece, and I mean that sincerely. Drop everything and read it right now.

Highest possible recommendation.

- - - - - -

(Thoughts upon a second read, March 2024)

Even better the second time around. Knowing how it ends doesn’t diminish the impact one bit. In fact, I think it actually made for a more emotionally impactful read. The first time was so dizzying and overwhelming; I couldn’t help but be in awe. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m in that sort of awe I tend to miss things. But therein lies the importance of rereading—you’re just never going to be able to take in a book like this and fully appreciate it on a single pass, because there really are no books like this. You’re contending with a literary singularity when you read The Lost Scrapbook, and repeated exposure will only make you appreciate more.

All this just to say: It’s an artistic achievement of immense proportions. I’ll be revisiting this book every few years until I die.

And now silence. Silen

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sprawling novel is told entirely in fragments, monologues and dialogues, one line to twenty pages, often by undisclosed speakers, usually without beginning or end. Their subjects vary widely -- as prefigured in the very first fragment of all, in which a student rejects a guidance or career counselor's demands that he narrow his vision to one ends, that he specialize -- as do their voices. But they tend to hover in the vicinity of a few themes, civic duty, the conveyance of messages upon willing or unwilling ears, and the toxic symbiosis of American industry and community. And certain recurring motifs: philosophical and psychological discussion, interviews, advertising, and the titular scrapbook. Eventually, after spinning out all these tenuously-connected threads, it most sets them aside in favor of a single chorus of voices in a single example township, driving its thematic resonances out into their furthest reach.

It's a mysterious book -- how do these parts relate? who, even, is the author of all of this? -- and an impressive one. But it's also the victim of its format: the fragments are just that and the picture they paint is inevitably, well, fragmentary. As exciting as it is when familiar bits appear again (Erwin! Centrifuges?!) it almost feels as if the observant reader is just being tossed arbitrarily repeating details to make him feel good about his observations, and to keep him reading further. As you might toss snacks when training an animal. (Okay, that's too harsh, but it felt like that at times, an empty gesture). Of course, I'm no stranger to authors who pull the reader in with ultimately insignificant devices. Pynchon does this all the time, for instance. But whereas Pynchon uses gripping adventure-story mechanisms, mysterious lost cities and airships and arch-villains, nothing here really creates all that much lasting intrigue or mystery. Even the scrapbook is barely mentioned and easily forgotten. And even the individual episodes, as fragments, rarely have any narrative momentum of their own. We come in partway and leave before they finish, privy only to a sequence of ideas that Dara wanted to convey somehow. Interesting ideas, often, but still disconnected ones. Telling a story in thematically-connected but discreet units simply does not have to be this way: in Steps, for instance, Jerzy Kosinski's fragments are typically complete and resonant in their own right, in addition to contributing to something more when read in sequence. And finally, there's something extremely undergraduate about the way the topics are grabbed at. There're a sequence of concepts pulled right out of psych 101 (interesting ones for sure, but familiar as entry-concepts), then some neat bits of music history and social science, a few appearances by Noam Chomsky, a denunciation of a Phillip Morris publicity (straw)man. All perhaps highlights of a voracious liberal arts education. By a brilliant student, for sure, as I certainly can't synthesize my liberal arts education like this, but I can still somewhat recognize the parts of one here. And so, also, a lot of this feels like a preaching to the choir. I totally agree with almost everything Dara seems to be trying to do or say here, but a lot of it isn't really news, I guess.

All of which is an awful lot of complaining about what's actually a pretty impressive and earnest and good book. The final chorus-of-voices, where we stick to one topic for quite a while, however fractured across hundreds of speakers, has a slow-building power, and finally captures its complex topic pretty well, in many of its very tangled and inextricable nuances. And this is undoubtedly the crux of the novel, so its success is the novel's really. And it does at least brush its fingers over many of the early threads. But it doesn't necessarily do more than brush its fingers over them, which makes all that space hard to justify. (Especially when a few seem like totally pointless, if amusing, style-games. Do the sex scenes really do much besides show that Dara can write one in addition to all else? I'm not sure.)

The obvious retort is that I'm just not getting it all. Which is undeniable. I'm a very imperfect reader and a very imperfect observer. But, as with a couple other pseudo-masterworks that I found impressive and admirable but not all that personally involving (Hopscotch is one I enjoyed ultimately a little less than The Lost Scrapbook despite being certain of its fitful brilliance, 2666 is one that I enjoyed a little more) I actually did try to put in some of the extra effort, to read close, to re-read closer, to look up and analyze and generally be an active reader. (some of the fruits of those efforts are a semi-complete fragment index listing of notable details and an attempt to catalog the characters, perhaps useful for remembering where random bits were referenced). So I think I did get a little more out of this than a cursory read would provide. And yeah, it's good. But still imperfect.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Workin' cacophony, strident yammering's emanating from all points unattributed dialogue set in mid-rural America with an all-too familiar coverup. The kind of stuff makes young 'principled' nutjobs go off an kill somebody or blow a hole init. Reagan area, walkmans, ect.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay wtf this novel is [nearly] perfect. A towering formal and moral labyrinth, almost doesn't feel right to call it sprawling because of how ruthlessly singular it circles back to its core concerns every time. But nonetheless it is a huge devouring monster of a book, giving the reader no quarter in how to approach it, only by diving in and being Consumed in real time along with it will you actually get a grasp on what it's about and what it's going for, it is a work that will only allow you any way into it if you accept that you're going to get flung thru the overwhelming vortex it creates. A symphony of dissonant voices and corrupted [both morally and structurally] perspectives gather and dissipate and regather in swells and peaks which eventually crescendo toward the climax of the book in which everything previously unsaid and ignored consumes everything in a hellish polemic inferno, including the readers' own complicity and any delusion they may have of them Not being partly responsible in powering the industrial evil that underlies everything we take for granted in the name of comfort. The more I think on it the more Dara may be my gold standard for being the most unequivocally "modern" author I've ever read tbh, theirs is a vision of dystopia not as some theoretical [and thus inevitably romanticized] sci-fi sprawl, but dystopia as Where We Are At Right Now, the alienation and distrust of one another that comes with it, and how not a single one of us lacks culpability in why we got here. We cling to any idea of normalcy and conformity no matter how entropic and chaotic the underlying flow of this all is, because we can't imagine something like the crisis in this book "happening here" and thus shaking the foundations of our ostensible stability- but crisis is happening here, it HAS BEEN happening here, and none of this has ever been stable because it was never designed to be, and the only choice we have now is to wake the fuck up to it. Astute and foreboding enough that it should be required reading for every literate person in the developed world, but the sad paradox is that the kind of specificity and impact of this novel's critique is only possible in a world so pathologically ill that something like it could never be anything more than obscure. A shame regardless, because even without the gut-twisting political and moralist punch it packs, it's either way a masterpiece of modern virtuosic fiction and deserves more attention and analysis.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging despite an almost complete lack of characters and plot. Though there is one. Maybe several hundred.

Yes, Dara requires a patient and faithful reader. But despite the challenging form, I felt the agglomerative force. The first two-thirds were bang-on, disparate voices skillfully interwoven. The final third, where there is a sustained topic, was a departure that I didn’t necessarily expect. This one will be with me for a while.

4.64 stars.

[Seth Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Content Advisory: The following is a frenzied, unedited brain dump from someone who’s under-caffeinated and sleep deprived.

“This cannot be the purpose of our putative freedom, to be able to engage in cruel deceptions with smiling faces, to conduct this inconceivable squandering of resources and effort and ingenuity solely for the purpose of hoodwinking the trusting, and producing uselessness, and nothing of what is so desperately needed – this cannot be what freedom was supposed to serve;”

Anyone minted in the 90’s ought to have a few hazy memories of flicking absently through TV channels late at night, not unlike to the manner in which this post will be scrolled past in a moment’s time. That singular sensory experience – snippets of contextless dialogue, cut away from as quickly as they arrived – is the closest comparison I can think of to reading The Lost Scrapbook. Yet contradictorily, this couldn’t be further from the reality of it. Because the brief moments of film you consume while channel surfing offer nothing cohesive if you were to observe them as a whole. Conversely, The Lost Scrapbook only delivers its impact when all its composite pieces are examined together. Sound complicated? Stay with me.

If I were to try and intuit an intent behind this work – a foolish exercise from the jump, given the author does not, by any conventional standard, exist – I suspect the penman behind the name ‘Dara’ was trying to capture what could best be described as a “communal consciousness”. He does this through the formal approach of constructing this novel entirely from fragments of unattributed dialogue. And I really do mean “fragments”, as he has no reservations against changing the narrator, subject of discussion, and setting mid-sentence… with no warning whatsoever.

While each of these fractured half-stories that litter the pages throughout are fascinating in their own right, they offer nothing in the way of a narrative through-line for the first two-thirds of the novel. It’s only at the eleventh hour that he finally allows something of a story to emerge. This is when his formal construction truly begins to depict a portrait of a community in crisis. The boundaries between the many narrators become blurred and the various shades of their individual suffering blend into a single point of focus (one which I will intentionally leave absent from this post so you can discover it for yourself).

I’m just coming off the tail end of my first reading of The Lost Scrapbook and find myself struggling to speak in anything other than broad generalisations. This is in part because the individual stories comprising the novel both demand and defy pointed interpretation. The scope of the work is sweeping, and immediately identifies itself as the sort of book that requires two, three, four readings before one could confidently wrap their head around it. But I can commit to a few certainties, the most notable being the brilliance of the prose. While edging into purple territory from time to time, Dara’s writing is absolutely exquisite, in the brutally overwritten but deeply evocative sort of way that one can come to expect from the usual heavy hitters of verbosity (Pynchon, Wallace, Gaddis, etc). There is an unrestrained and loud talent here that toils in obscurity; that strikes me as a supreme tragedy.

So please excuse me in advance if I try to sell you on it down the track.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was originally going to write this review in the maddeningly elliptical style of the book itself, but that process turned out to be way too involved. And the more I think about it, the less I feel like I have to say. Yes, it's really good. Some bits of writing are really stellar, the letters from Robin especially so. And the various episodes of the first three quarters of the book touch on some really interesting socio-existential stuff. But the book is really sort of two novels: that first three quarters is fugue-like and ethereal and interesting and pretty much all good except for that interminable triple-spaced nature walk. And then the last quarter is a more straightforward sort of story about, I guess, corporate negligence, told by essentially a Greek chorus of most of the characters from the other part. And that's mostly all good too, but the two sides don't exactly complement each other the way I expected them to.

That, and the punctuation. Dara completely eschews periods (except in one place) and replaces them with dashes, colons, or, most often, ellipses. And the idea that, grammatically, the book is one long sentence is cool, but it turns out that the different substitutes make the novel read way weirder, and at times really annoying. Certain colon-heavy passages were like listening to instructions, whereas parts with many ellipses made reading it feel like talking to a brilliant but elderly drunk uncle who ends each phrase by trailing off, and just when you think he's done talking, he starts up abruptly again. Which was not the effect Dara was going for, presumably.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought a lot of this from A Thousand Plateaus as I read:
"A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass...

Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order...

Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows)...

Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and … and …and…”This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation-all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic … )."

Or, even better, the whole of this:
http://interconnected.org/home/more/2...

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reread of this masterpiece and, I don’t often use that term. What an incredible work to read again and find even more hidden meanings in this book. Timely and relevant today and perhaps more so than when it was first released (1996?) (sorry, 1998!) I think I’ll do rereads of their other books this year/next year.

[Iryna Chernyshova · Rating 5 out of 5]

UPD. Пройшов майже місяць, а я ще згадую і думаю про цю книгу.

Що ти таке, Еван Дара?

(Взагалі-то дебютант-анонім, який одразу отримав літературну премію, створив своє видавництво і спілкується виключно в електронному форматі. Як він виглядає ніхто не знає. Та й Еван Дара це псевдоним. А раптом це Пінчон? Жарт. А може і ні. Але хтось дуже розумний, як усі ці високочолі випускники Ліги плющу або MIT);

Поліфонія голосів, майже хори-госпели, але з нудної канцелярщини, розповідь, де оповідач може раптом змінитися посеред абзацу і навіть на оповідачку, достатньо божевільні або просто побутові історії, екологічна катастрофа - все тут. Просто пливеш по тексту, хвиля за хвилею, до речі асоціацій з хвилями буде багато. І лісів.

Цікаво як він пише зараз, коли інтернета стало побільше. І я обов’язково це дізнаюся, колись.

https://note.com/genkishobou/n/n00c0b...

[Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

- Who could imagine such betrayal?

I never write reviews, but I feel compelled to write at least something for The Lost Scrapbook. I haven't been this shaken by the final pages of a novel since finishing The Tunnel back in 2015.

TLS can be described in many ways: a political work; "eco-fiction"; an elegy for a quiet American town. I'm inclined to skip the analytics and just call it a flat out remarkably written novel. The transitions between conversations are seamless. You may go a few paragraphs before realizing you're in the middle of an entirely different scene. To the readers that may find this off putting, trust me - one of the joys of this reading experience is going back and re-reading how Dara effortlessly flows between the townspeople of Isaura. It's a literary hat trick only a handful of authors in modern literature have been able to perform (*obligatoryGaddisshoutout*).

I'll avoid speaking to the actual plot of the novel. The best approach is to go into this cold. I will say that I loved the use of the book itself to tell this story, particularly the negative space between lines in the Walkman section (pg. 72). Rumblings around GR have lead to me believe Dara takes this to the extreme in his second novel, The Easy Chain. I am eager to verify these rumors.

I have no idea who Evan Dara really is. I don't care. The fact that this novel exists without known authorship means it belongs to all of us. For that we should be grateful.

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

What does it mean to be lost? Towards the beginning of this book, there was a scene where one of our many narrators tells of how he drove off of a highway and further and further into the wilderness. There, he gets out of the car and meets a mysterious man who takes him even further into the forest looking for John Cage-shaped fungus. At a certain point, the narrator realizes that the man was not moving in any methodical fashion, and that they were both completely lost. He musters up the courage to ask the man if he knows where they are.

...Certainly...

...We’re right here...

Which, strictly speaking, is the right answer, always the right answer. Wherever you are, there you are! What is it to be lost, except to be without referrent? Without an anchor to an earlier place? But if you didn’t care about that, and only cared about the here and now, then you could not be lost. It reminded me of the movie ‘Inception’ that I watched recently. In it, a character realizes that she is in a dream when she thinks about ‘how did I get here?’. Because in real life, you can always ask that question and there is always an answer. ‘I went to the supermarket after I got off work and after I bought the six pack of beer I hauled ass to Jason’s house because the traffic was already getting worse and I didn’t want to be late for band practice’ could be one such narrative answer to ‘how did I get here?’ But in a dream, often you are just in the middle of band practice without any of the messy leading-up-to-it parts.

Likewise, this novel seems to be composed of many ‘middles’. It’s a book without beginning or end, just an infinity of in-betweens. Are we lost? If the character who got lost in the forest realized that he was lost, it was only because he didn’t know where he was in relation to his Toyota. Just knowing where that one car is stuck makes all the difference between having an entire past life, or being helplessly lost in the world. Just one car is the difference between being lost and knowing exactly where you stand. And phrased in this way, knowing where you are doesn’t sound like a thing that one should be too confident about, as it is only an illusion of narrative, an illusion of ‘how I got here’ that we continue to build in our heads day in day out. Like a little counter we increment every second of our egotistical existence. A thread that is easily lost.

---

That would have been my 5-star review of this book if it had ended around page 300. The book was a dizzying pastiche of scenes, a collage of visceral experiences that you can’t quite put your finger on. The scenes seemed to revolve around ideas and philosophy rather than plot (Piaget, Chomsky, object permanence, being lost, how the mind works, etc.) And these ideas were presented in a way that didn’t make them seem heavy at all, it was very grounded in real world experiences and believable voices in the heads of different narrators. It was something I had not seen done before in this way, a truly abstract kind of novel of ideas made up of very concrete relatable pieces without being didactic or easily summarizable.

Unfortunately, the book becomes quite simplistic. The pastiche method fragments even further until all you hear are snippets of single paragraphs or single lines forming a kind of Robert Altman-esque collective voice, all somehow relating to the contamination of water in a town called Isaura by a corporation called Ozark. Because it was telling everybody’s story, I didn’t feel like I could relate to any one person’s story, and I suddenly found myself standing outside of the book looking in... a completely different experience than the first half of the book when I really felt in it.

Also, the whole plotline had the bad taste of PC-ness that was way too clean, way too easy. Recently I decided to give the TV show Mad Men a try, since everybody was talking about it. But every scene seemed to be about how a.) women were treated badly back then b.) men were sexist pigs and c.) everybody smoked everywhere *wink* *wink* get it? OK I get it! Now can we say something of substance, something that isn’t blatantly obvious? This constant winking is tiring and manipulative, and I felt the same way with the last half of this book. It seemed so one-tracked in its portrayal of Ozark (and in its expectation of how I should feel about Ozark) that it was boring and predictable.

It’s frustrating to read a book that I’d give 5 stars to the first half and 1 star to the last half. But Evan Dara shows he can write, he is clearly talented. So I’ll be reading more of his stuff, hoping he gets it right next time.

[Mariano Hortal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/el-cuaderno...

El cuaderno perdido de Evan Dara. Colmena narrativa

Hoy en día se habla muchísimo de los editores, raro es el día en que no sale a la palestra la labor de Jaume Vallcorba (1949-2014) o del archiconocido Jorge Herralde, verdadero paradigma utilizado recurrentemente por la prensa dedicada a estos menesteres. A veces a su lado aparecen los “wannabes” esos aspirantes, más jóvenes, normalmente emparentados con editoriales más pequeñas, independientes en su mayoría.
José Luís Amores, el fundador, editor y traductor de la mayoría de los libros que aparecen en la colección de la pequeña Pálido Fuego , no suele aparecer en estas entrevistas y clasificaciones; él no se puede permitir la publicidad y los “amiguismos” que se gastan otros para llegar ahí, no voy a señalar aquí ninguno porque ya tienen bastante publicidad por sí mismos; sin embargo , tras tres años de ardua lucha contra los elementos: esos gigantes editoriales que copan el mercado con novedades insustanciales en un ochenta a noventa por ciento, podemos afirmar sin temor a equivocarnos que su catálogo, sus dieciocho títulos, constituyen una rara avis por la calidad que atesoran además de estar muy bien traducidos y editados, un trabajo artesanal, de mucho esfuerzo, de un cierto secretismo en cuanto al anunciar las novedades; privacidad necesaria para que sus libros no sean fagocitados por un mercado editorial controlado por dos inmensos colosos.
Como bien indica José Luís en esta publicación donde comenta cómo lo conoció y lo pudo publicar, El cuaderno perdido de Evan Dara supone un paradigma de todo lo que significa su editorial; libros arriesgados de gran calidad y, él es muy consciente, con un público objetivo alejado de los grandes números (excepto casos puntuales como la famosa Casa de hojas de Danielewski de la que ya hablé por aquí .
Cosas como que el crítico Stephen J. Burn haya realizado la introducción a esta publicación en español de la obra de Dara demuestran el cuidado con el que edita la obra de un tipo tan esquivo como Pynchon y Ferrante, que no duda en renegar de todo el negocio montado a través de la literatura pero que cede ante propuestas tan interesantes como estas: tan alejadas del mainstream. Volviendo a Burn, es muy interesante comprobar cómo realiza la comparación de Dara con otros autores contemporáneos presentándonos características estilísticas como ese narrador colmena muy lejos de una narración individualizada:
“Con independencia de las diversas actividades capaces de coadyuvar al logro de presencia literaria en Estados Unidos, también es cierto que El cuaderno perdido (y la narrativa de Dara en general) es más difícil de equiparar con las expectativas comerciales de una novela convencional. Sea cual sea la cultura no literaria que salpique una novela de Franzen, Powers o Wallace, y sean cuales sean las excursiones estilísticas que tengan lugar en sus libros, en justicia cabe caracterizar cada novela de estos como un relato entrelazado con varias incursiones narrativas más o menos lineales sobre personajes individualizados y entretejidas en una estructura narrativa alterna. Por otro lado, El cuaderno perdido es una detonación más audaz y más radical del sistema de creencias subyacente en el corazón del género novelesco; detonación que comienza con su rechazo de la soberanía de la escena individualizada, discontinua, y que acaba con la reformulación de la soberanía del individuo por encima de sus distinciones de género.”
No solo subraya diferencias sino las similitudes con autores anteriores, el norteamericano no es un renovador, pero utiliza parte de lo vigente para desarrollar un estilo propio; para lectores de Gaddis, es empezar el libro y recordar muy vivamente Jota Erre; lo bueno del autor es que utiliza distintas estrategias para que no resulte repetitivo:
“Como antecesores del estilo radical de Dara a nivel técnico cabría señalar a Manuel Puig, Ronal Firbank y –quiá el más obvio- William Gaddis. Desde su segunda novela, JR (1975), en adelante, Gaddis transformó progresivamente su obra en un collage de diferentes textos y voces, apoyándose en la energía narrativa del diálogo para hacer avanzar el libro. Llevando la impersonalidad modernista a un nuevo nivel, durante largos tramos este diálogo se presenta sin las acostumbradas señales de posición de la novela realista –los “él dijo” o “ella dijo”-, lo cual proporciona a Gaddis una técnica extraordinariamente económica donde las mismas peroratas llevan implícitas sus propias acotaciones (gestos, relaciones espaciales, atuendo) tradicionalmente ofrecidas por un narrador esforzado.”
Este flujo continuo, nos cuenta Burn, se produce de una manera continua, sin transiciones diferenciadas y palpables entre los cambios de narradores, sientes que ha cambiado pero puede haberse pasado el cambio:
“Del mismo modo, las escenas individuales ya no están diferenciadas, si bien, en lo que tal vez sea el desarrollo más revolucionario de Dara, los cambios entre voces (y ubicaciones) tienen lugar con poca o ninguna fanfarria. El producto final es sorprendentemente legible, con un constante intercambio de voces que crea la sensación de un flujo veloz, en lugar del staccato de intermitencias de los habituales capítulos alternados. Sin embargo el libro no es una mera demostración formal asombrosa; de hecho, en un momento dado Dara parece avisarnos contra semejante conclusión, cuando un personaje se queja de que el “ingenio es enemigo del contenido (296).” Lo que convierte la novela en algo más que una representación de virtuosismo técnico es que el rechazo de Dara a adherirse a una figura exclusiva o trama única está íntimamente relacionado con la temática central del libro.”
Con esto llegamos a la idea dominante del libro:
“Esta visión de interconexión –“de conjunto, de un solo organismo respirando al unísono” (448)- posee una clara e importante dimensión ecológica, elaborada por muchas de las voces del libro. Aunque también se asienta en el hecho de que la cosa más cercana a un personaje unificador y recurrente en la novela es (en un movimiento reflejo del decreto estadounidense 1818 que define una empresa como un ser artificial) la empresa que parece representar la mayor de las amenazas para los diversos personajes y su entorno.”
Una colmena que actúa como un único ser y que adquiere dimensiones ecológicas (evidente según lees) que se vuelven épicas aplicadas a todos los aspectos extrapolables de la vida; se vuelve un texto de gran riqueza por el manejo de diferentes imágenes que nos van acercando al verdadero significado; como dice el prologuista, nuestro marco de referencia establecido muta a lo largo de la narración volviéndose cada vez más completo:
“Sin embargo, la auténtica riqueza de El cuaderno perdido estriba en que sus implicaciones y goces no acaban ahí. Si las cualidades de la narración cubista de Dara empujan al lector a pensar en la identidad en términos de yuxtaposición, donde el yo es redefinido como nodo individual inmerso en una red infinita, entonces las cualidades del pensamiento de los personajes de Dara empujan al lector a experimental el libro en estéreo: esto es, la plenitud intelectual del diálogo devuelve constantemente analogías para los propios procesos del libro que nos animan constantemente a modificar el marco de referencia que utilizamos para comprender el libro, y lo sitúa casi en contextos por momentos más alejados de los literario.”
La gran esperanza de Burn es palpable en el siguiente párrafo:
“Si los destinos contemporáneos de los libros de Melville y Dara nos enseñan algo es que la narrativa innovadora que plantea preguntas complejas acerca de los costes del imperio americano ha de ascender a menudo una empinada ladera para obtener mayor reconocimiento. Es de suponer que Dara ya era consciente de ello –a fin de cuentas, uno de los temas del libro es una extensa crítica de la frívola cultura publicitaria que abunda “en el adoctrinamiento de la fraudulencia” (254)- pero quizá esa traducción acabe ayudando a El cuaderno perdido a abrirse camino hasta un público cada vez más cansado de “reputaciones fabricadas”.
En efecto, forma y fondo se unen para ofrecer una experiencia lectora tan grata en lo formal como en el mensaje que transmite.
A estas alturas traía un montón de textos del fantástico libro… y me doy cuenta que he dado tanta información con el prólogo que me centraré en tres o cuatro párrafos de ejemplo y os dejo que lo descubráis.
Estos dos siguientes textos son muy representativos del estilo que usa el autor: el primero utiliza la imagen de la película para resaltar lo enriquecedor que sería disponer de la misma sin acabar, elaborando continuas versiones de dicha historia; emparenta directamente con el postmodernismo y su teoría de la recepción, reinterpretar una misma historia según las opiniones de aquellos que la reciben; no debemos olvidar que el autor cada vez que utiliza una imagen, esa imagen es directamente aplicable a lo que él está mostrándonos en el libro:
“[…] de hecho, mientras estaba allí sentado, escuchando a todas aquellas voces pintar el silencioso salón, la situación me recordó un poco a una película que había visto; se titulaba Rashomon, y cuando terminó, por algún motivo, lloré; recuerdo que no quería que la película acabase que no se resolviera de ninguna forma; yo quería que la película simplemente continuara, que continuara elaborando más versiones de su historia, que continuara elaborando más personajes para que así estos pudieran añadir sus opiniones sobre el relato; de manera que me sentó fatal que la película sintiera la necesidad de llegar a una conclusión y se encendiesen las luces; me recuerdo camino de casa mordiéndome el puño, tratando de evitar llorar por la agitación;”
Tal es el caso del segundo texto, en el que utiliza una metáfora musical a través de una de sus estrategias, el vibrato (variaciones de frecuencia de una misma nota que realizan los cantantes para mantener notas en el tiempo) se convierte en una ruptura de lo establecido como es la variación de narradores dentro del libro de Dara:
“[…] y, dicho sea de paso, nosotros lo percibimos, sabemos instintivamente que hay más que lo que la monocultura musical occidental permite: considérese, por ejemplo, la forma más directa, más analógica con que expresamos emoción en la música: mediante el vibrato; y qué es el vibrato sino una ruptura de las rígidas divisiones entre tonos, una salida temporal de nuestra desgarrada segmentación musical: evocamos nuestros sentimientos más profundos e intensos retorciendo tonos entre el espectro lineal de la escala occidental, mediante la eliminación de su cualidad divisiva; ubicamos lo más humano entre medias, donde ya no estamos cuantificados, constreñidos…”
En el siguiente momento asistimos a su constatación de la necesidad de romper con sus formas narrativas, nuevamente extrapola lo literario con la propia narración:
“[…] … comprendí que había que acabar con mis estrategias fracasadas y compensaciones desesperadas.. que tenía que dejarlas atrás de una vez por todas… pues mis tendencias habían adquirido, advertí, la capacidad de perpetuarse a sí mismas, una fuerza de carácter narrativo, cuya autodeterminación irresistible, imparable, conducía cada vez más a la decepción… y por eso advertí que debía romper con mi narrativa, destrozar por completo esta serie de códigos que siempre traicionan su contenido…[…]”
Al final todo se convierte en una sucesión de voces que se alternan en pequeños diálogos, voces que sucesivamente conforman la destrucción de una sociedad que no puede hacer frente a un desastre ecológico abismal (curioso, en este momento recuerdo a la última premio Nobel Alexeievich y su Voces de Chernóbil, donde se cuida más el fondo que la forma utilizada pero, sin embargo, el fin resulta idéntico):
“-No disponemos de las herramientas adecuadas, ni siquiera de la experiencia científica apropiada, para evaluar estos problemas, le vi decir…
-Seguramente los científicos desconocen hasta el efecto a corto plazo que entre la mitad y un tercio de estas sustancias halladas en el suministro de agua residencial tienen en animales de laboratorio, oí en el Canal 9….
-Sin esta base de conocimiento, evaluar el efecto inmediato sobre las personas es casi imposible, vi…
-Menos conocimiento aún tenemos acerca de qué podría hacer cada una de estas sustancias químicas en un período de tiempo prolongado, oí en la KETC…
-Albert Butsen, funcionario del Departamento de Conservación Medioambiental de Misuri encargado de supervisar el cumplimiento por parte de Ozark de las normativas estatales medioambientales, declinó hacer comentarios sobre el anuncio de la APM, a la espera de su análisis por parte de los funcionarios estatales, condales y municipales, vi…
En este caos colmenar surgen voces individuales donde Dara muestra las imágenes más poéticas para mostrar las situaciones más dramáticas, más patéticas, sin embargo se convierten en pequeñas luces entre tanta sombra:
“-Estaba sentada en la rinconera de la cocina, salpicada por las últimas luces del día, filtradas por las copas de los matorrales del exterior; me había tomado un momento de calma para saborear un té aromático; abrazada por esta opulenta quietud, alargué el brazo y con las yemas de los dedos rocé los bordes de la mesa; y en seguida me descubrí estimulada por su solidez y su corpulencia rectangular la excelente y precisa homogeneidad de su oscura madera lacada, su lisura perfecta y su gravidez soportada por las cuatro patas y la consideración con que habían sido redondeados sus cantos; era, pensé tan manifiesta, y aun así expresaba su intensa presencia mediante atributos exquisitamente desprovistos de imposición; de hecho, era este juego de presencia pura y exquisita falta de imposición lo que confería a la mesa su valor; y volví a alargar una mano, deslizándola por una de las astilladas patas de la mesa, cuando mi hija, Jaquie, se acercó sigilosa –venía de jugar en el cuarto de estar-, me puso la mano en la rodilla y me dijo que debería tener otro niño…”
Mi consejo final: Leedlo. Hay pocas obras como esta.
Los textos provienen de la traducción del inglés de José Luís Amores de El cuaderno perdido de Evan Dara para la editorial Pálido Fuego.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 4 out of 5]

As if this book isn't weird enough, I had an unusual thing happen with the physical copy to add a layer of meta-ness to everything.

This is very much a novel in the crazypants post-modern mold -- multiple narrators that switch mid-sentence, jumps in time and setting, different narrative structures, the whole works -- and I was starting to really get into it, finally getting over the initial coldness and ready to dive all the way in, when suddenly I turned the page and read a section I could've sworn I read 70-80 pages back. I kept reading, thinking, OK, this wouldn't be entirely unexpected -- in this kind of a book, maybe this is intentional and things will start to diverge in a meaningful way. I read 5 more pages that were exactly the same ones I had read before. Then I noticed the page numbers were off, and finally came to the realization that this was a printing error. For some reason, 60 pages of the story was replaced with 60 identical pages from previously in the novel.

I wasn't sure how to proceed. When I found the pages that picked up after the repeated pages, it was obvious I was missing something. So I went to the library in the hopes of reading the missing pages there -- but this is a very small press book, and they didn't have it. Neither did the bookstore.

I started panicking. I couldn't possibly continue without those 60 pages.

About 10 days went by. I haven't gone that long without reading a book in forever. I started to wonder if I would ever read a book again. I thought, this is it! I will just retire from reading, stuck in the middle of this hard-to-find book. What's the point of going on?!

So I pulled out a desperate (and possibly illegal?) method. I Googled a sentence in the last page before the missing chunk, and found a few pages archived on Google Books. Success!!!! But then after about 10 pages, disaster! Google Books only shows so many pages in a preview -- you can't just read an entire book on there. I was torn. And moreover, my reading experience was severely suffering -- reading segments online (which I hate doing in the first place) was really killing the book's momentum.

So then I Googled the last sentence of the page before the Google preview ended, which led to another Google preview -- but this time the preview started where the new sentence started. 10 additional pages! I had found a way to cheat the system.

Reluctant to read in this way, I literally copied and pasted the 10 page segments into Microsoft Paint (since you can't copy the text in a Google Preview). This meticulous copy/paste and resizing process took quite a while, but I finally was able to print out the remaining 50 pages. Reading a novel on a loose sheet of paper was pretty weird as well, but eventually I got to the end, and was able to go back to the faulty paperback edition I had been neglecting this entire time.

Thankfully there were no more printing errors, and I made it to the end without any further need for any more extreme measures. And it's a good book! Maybe even a great one. I honestly have no idea, because the whole process from beginning to end took a really long time, and was interrupted by some really weird stuff. So I'll have to read this again some day. Although I threw away the paper pages of the missing text, so I'd have to find another copy if I wanted to read it again.

But what if all editions have this printing error?? Or even worse -- what if it isn't an error? Is Evan Dara just fucking with me? Is this some kind of commentary that I totally missed?

I'm losing it. I hate you, Evan Dara.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first three-quarters of this book is one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever read. What makes it special, besides Dara’s intelligence, is its unique rhythm. The work consists of not-clearly-related monologues and dialogues that pass one into the other without any transition, often without it being clear where the break is. That Dara could not only conceive this structure, but also make it work and sustain it — without plot or character, only voices — for over 300 pages is remarkable.

And then he suddenly changes the rhythm, has some characters and a sort of plot, and the voices relate to one another. Repetition is added as a principal structural element. This last quarter isn’t bad, but it’s not nearly as good, and it becomes increasingly tiresome. I skimmed the last couple dozen pages.

I don’t know that I’ve read an experimental work that is so starkly naturalistic. For me, this could be a negative, but Dara’s intelligence and the novel’s rhythm prevent the naturalism from making the writing dull.

Despite some faults, this is a novel I can't recommend too highly for anyone who is looking for a unique reading experience.

[Gabe Cweigenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can we talk about the fireflies?

How about Chomsky?

I don’t have too much to say about this book. Maybe I’m still letting my thoughts gather.

What I mainly want to focus on is the relationship Chomsky has to the book. I guess you could say he’s one of the recurring characters. So In the fifties Chomsky introduced his concept of Universal Grammar. A Dara quote is sufficient for understanding Chomsky’s thesis:

“The Subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience...” (241)

In other words, even if someone speaks to us in severely broken English, we can still understand it. We understand more than we have experienced. That’s how universal grammar works.

And now for something completely different:

Let us talk about the fireflies.

They’re introduced at the beginning of the book and then they’re not talked about again. But they are. My claim is that fireflies are the central metaphor of the book, and that this metaphor runs through the entire 476 pages. Specifically, the light that they produce represents a human voice.

I’m having trouble putting this claim to words.
Dara does a better job through the voice of Chomsky: “We must recognize that our comprehension of nontrivial phenomena is extremely limited... We understand only Fragments of reality, and we can be sure that every interesting and significant theory is at best only partially true...”

So when you go to read this book, consider yourself in a swarm of fireflies. All the voices that you read represent the light from an individual firefly. You can see the light of that firefly, but that is all. In other words, you get to hear the voice of specific people, but that it’s all. They are not characters, they are voices. They are light. They are fragments of the truth.

Where Chomsky’s universal grammar comes into play is through the understanding of every voice. And through all those voices coming together to express universal disapproval for the shady workings of a large corporation. For capitalism trumping humanism.


Remember: Only truth in fragments. As you read this book, let the voices wash over you, knowing that there is something there. They have something to offer, and it is truth. Like the light from a firefly in the dark.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lost Scrapbook is Evan Dara's phenomenal first novel. It's a book that annoys some readers since it takes over 300 pages to get to the point. It's a series of scenes and conversations, the beginnings and endings of which bleed into one another: impressions of various individuals and relationships in the fictional Missouri town of Isaura. The book has no chapters, and the narrative only breaks in two places. (With two or three blank pages in both places, strangely.) If you stick with it, there's a point about 2/3 to 3/4 the way through where the disjointed scenes begin slowly to connect. You don't really notice it happening, which is cool, but it dawns on you that many of the people you heard from during the first part of the book are now talking about the same problem. And the photographic film company that essentially owns the town (a la Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY) is denying any responsibility. For financial reasons much of the town is ready to accept any- and everything the company says, turning against town "activists" who distrust the company. But after a while the truth grows undeniable...

(I have a personal page devoted to this book.)

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Le oí decir…»

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jurgen thrashed after a speck of light that then blinked into nothingness, while Dave sped his net down on a perfect void that soon became a living scintilla; for these hunters, it seemed, presence and absence were, in a way, irrelevant, or at least folded into a larger continuity; Dave and Jurgen clearly understood that there was more to these mites than merely visual existence; it was both an admirable commitment to process and a reassuring act of faith….
-I wonder, though, if we haven't got it wrong, Jurgen said: I mean, I wonder if maybe these guys' natural condition isn't to be lit up-if their ground state isn't actually when they're glowing;
- Hm, said Dave: so what they're actually doing is turning off their lights—
- Right: momentarily going under;
- Flashing darkness—
- Projecting their inner voids—
- Their repeating, periodic depressions.…
- Or maybe—
- Or maybe, despite what it looks like, maybe they really are glowing constantly, Jurgen said: but, through some malign unknown mechanism, their everlasting light is periodically swallowed up by un-understood atmospheric forces;
- So then they're being occluded—
- Rudely occluded—
- Denied their God-given right to shine...

[Facundo Melillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

12. Porque así como el cuerpo es uno, y tiene muchos miembros, pero todos los miembros del cuerpo, siendo muchos, son un solo cuerpo, así también Cristo.

14. Además, el cuerpo no es un solo miembro, sino muchos.

Corintios 12:12-27

¿Cómo empezar a escribir sobre este libro? Si las palabras no me alcanzan. Dara es un escritor único que remite a otros pero se sabe solo a él mismo. Hay ecos de Pynchon, DeLillo, Manuel Puig, William Gaddis, Beckett y a su vez a algo que es único en su clase. Si hay un contendiente oculto para "The Great American Novel" este libro es seguro el más prominente. Aunque, para mi, la gran novela americana no es una obra, sino un conjunto de obras que perduraron a través del tiempo siendo un retrato de la sociedad de su época, de sus ideales, así como libros que quedaron estampados en el tiempo por su calidad. El cuaderno perdido de Evan Dara es uno de estos libros.
A diferencia de lo que haría con otros muchos escritores, no indagué en la biografía de Dara, porque sencillamente se desconoce. Dara es una incógnita, y creo que la inexistencia de su imagen pública da lugar a que uno se centre siempre en la obra y no en el escritor. Quizás ni exista, eso es lo de menos. El libro es excelente por si mismo.
Ahora, la pregunta que dan la mayoría de las personas al preguntarte sobre un libro es "¿de qué trata?" y me parece una pregunta muy amplia, puesto que abarca una descripción de la trama, complejidad del texto si lo hubiera y temas tratados. Podemos decir que es un libro clave sobre la crítica al capitalismo moderno, a la era del consumismo. A su vez, es también un discurso sobre la identidad colectiva, sobre lo que es realmente el ser en su conjunto. Detalle no menor que en la novela realmente no existan personajes demasiados identificables, sino que toda la narración se construye a partir de diálogos aparentemente inconexos de personas que pueden (o no) volver a aparecer en la trama. Esta técnica recuerda a William Gaddis en su novela JR o al argentino Manuel Puig, pero se siente como algo distinto. Algo original, que ya ha sido explorado pero a su vez esta es su mayor expresión hasta el momento.
Hay discusiones sobre Noam Chomsky y su papel en la sociedad norteamericana moderna, sobre la música, el ecologismo, los medios de comunicación, la propaganda, el rol moral de las empresas en la era capitalista.
Estas son algunos comentarios bastante mal redactados sobre una obra que me fascinó y hasta considero imprescindible. Probablemente corrija bastante esta reseña, pero espero que alguien se haya interesado tanto como yo en este autor.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read a novel like this. It's less a coherent narrative than an encyclopedic, heart-searing exploration of the isolation and fragmentation of industrial modernity. And it might be easy to cast Dara in the same, snobbish mold as DeLillo and Roth, as the scope and intellectual performance of The Lost Scrapbook has, at times, this same kind of virtuosity and its allusions to John Cage, Noam Chomsky, and musicology presume a *lot* of contextual knowledge on the reader's part. But the difference is that Dara's novel is one with heart--even, at times, a wise and weathered sentimentalism--that hopes to turn from the deconstructed and recycled literary and culture rubble of the late 20th century and begin to scry cautious affinities between things, rather than divisions.

In this way, it was the perfect novel for Obama's election and 2008, especially since the book's environmental justice argument couldn't come at a better time.

This is one of two novels that has made me cry. Read it and wonder indignantly why Dara's been virtually ignored since the 80s.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se parece a reproducir una grabadora con conversaciones de personas de las que nada sabemos o a escuchar la radio yendo de un lado a otro del dial. Los personajes entran y salen sin avisos ni acotaciones. Literatura oral en la que perderse, no es para los que se marean sin mapas. Hay ruido y furia y, como en Faulkner, una "explicación" final, pero quizá sea ese, al menos para mí, el punto más débil y tópico. Para los que se aventuran en el cómo se dice tanto o más que en el qué se dice es un imprescindible.