Personae

by Sergio de la Pava

Las misteriosas circunstancias que rodean la muerte de un hombre muy viejo, recién acaecida en un minúsculo apartamento de Manhattan, exigen la presencia de Helen Tame, una brillante detective obsesionada con la verdad. Pronto la mujer descubre en el lugar una caja y dentro de ella diversos textos, una serie de creaciones y apuntes heterogéneos de Antonio Arce, el escritor que acaba de morir, y se sienta a leerlos.

El resultado (de la lectura, de su investigación) es este poderoso libro, una novela peculiar en la que se va a la caza de una muerte, sí, pero más que nada de la vida, de sus grandes preguntas, del arte, del amor, de la libertad creativa.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Philosophy, Literary Fiction, Literature, United States, American

230 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2011

About the author

Sergio de la Pava is the author of A Naked Singularity.
Sergio de la Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.

In August, 2013, Sergio won PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for his debut fiction, A Naked Singularity.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

The following Review should be in no way construed as an endorsement of Self Published Authors (correctly reduced to the acronym “SPA”) ;.



“Sergio de la Pava’s Strange Personae” by Diego Báez ; Today, Monday November 4, 2013 :: Gapers Block, a web publication established in 2003 Chicago Illinois ::

“On September 30th of this year, the University of Chicago Press published Personae, the ambitiously genre-blending, polyvocal second novel by Sergio de la Pava, author of last year's award-winning, 698-page surprise hit A Naked Singularity. Initially self-published, ANS became the first novel the U. of C. Press has reissued in the entirety of its prestigious 100+ year history. And so, this second novel's publication strikes at least one curious Chicagoan as significant, since UCP had all but sworn off altogether risky indie fiction reprints.”
http://gapersblock.com/bookclub/2013/...

I, “N.R.”, endorse the above linked review. Sure, “Sorrentino did it better”, but the thing is that we need more Than Which Sorrentino Does Better.


And I (still “N.R.”) endorse the following too ::

“Personae by Sergio de la Pava” by J.W. MCormack in Bookforum a few days ago November #1 2013C.E.

“‘The ensuing is the report of one Detective Helen Tame. I am Helen Tame, the ensuing is my report, and it is not true that this second sentence adds nothing to the first.’ So begins Personae, the second novel by Sergio De La Pava. Whereas the famous sleuths of golden-age television and airport mystery novels were preeminently concerned with justice, Detective Tame's obsession with "Truth in its multifarious instantiations," and her infatuation with this capital-T subject goes well beyond the letter of the law. Tame's report, concerning the apparent murder of a 111-year-old Colombian writer named Antonio Arce, "ensues" for all of ten pages. After that, we may as well say goodbye to conventional plot and mystery for the duration of the novel. The remainder of the book consists of the following exhibits, clippings, and curios: .......” http://www.bookforum.com/review/12440


And I am even willing to endorse the following ::

“Refracted In All Its Minutiae: An Interview With Sergio De La Pave” w/ Darran Anderson in The Quietus October THE 20th of this very same year :::::::: “Darran Anderson speaks to the author of the initially-self-published (and now PEN award-winning) novel A Naked Singularity about the book's philosophical, literary and political origins and whether there's a hope for us after all.” http://thequietus.com/articles/13644-...


This one’s really short :: http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/revi...



I am undecided yet about endorsing the following............_______________
This review is enclosed in spoiler brackets. I strongly object to this circumstance. I have no sympathy with spoiler anxiety and thusly am not able to project what may count as spoiler. In difficult novels nothing can be spoiled. Let, therefore, these tags count as my framing device.

Personae, Sergio de la Pava’s second novel, is not A Naked Singularity. ANS was a rambunctious raucous romp through Novel Land, pure pleasure, unnecessarily but thankfully bloated; smart, clever, witty, and sassy; constrained and disciplined only as to its form but not its content. Personae is a sophisticated failure. Or it is a classically-understood experimental little novel.

The ensuing is the report of one Detective Helen Tame. I am Helen Tame, the ensuing is my report, and it is not true that this second sentence adds nothing to the first.

Thusly begins our book. You have been warned, apparently. My intention today is to describe this book, perhaps not evaluate it. That may need to await further readings. My hope is to provide some orientation, assist in calibrating expectations so that we might accurately judge the book by its intentions, by its form and not its execution. My question: Is there a gap between the intention of the book and the instantiation of that intention? Is there a gap between what it wants to be and what it is? Is it true that my reading of Personae adds nothing to it?

Personae is a white cake box, tied with string, and containing four artifacts of an author’s work: one a deteriorated, marbled notebook; one a TV Guide (the one with John Forsythe on its cover) with its margins filled with writing; one a roll of brown paper towels; and a collection white pages, binder-clipped. Let us examine its ten-fold contents, assuming the white cake box as metaphor for its framing device.

I. We meet our wunderkind heroine, Detective Helen Tame. At the scene of a murder she discovers our cake box.
II. One third of the text of Detective Tame’s introduction to her article on Bach, Gould, and the Goldberg Variations.
III. Aphorisms of our Writer taken from the deteriorated, aging notebook.
IV. The contents of the margins of the TV Guide, a beautiful short story entitled “The Ocean,” the story of a professor floating upon the waves, desiring to read the writing in the sand.
V. The second third of Detective Tame’s Introduction.
VI. The play Personae, an homage to Beckett and Sartre. It begins in the vein of use-mention jokes à la Monty Python and Abbott & Costello’s “Baseball,” but turns into . . . a terrorizing existentialist apocalypse.
VII. An intricate description of Detective Tame’s extraordinary epistemological capabilities.
VIII. The remainder of Detective Tame’s Introduction.
IX. Two obituaries.
X. A novella entitled ENERGEIAS: or Why Today the Sun May Not Rise in the East, Set in the West, being the story of a Columbian immigrant falling in love as an elderly man in NYC, his attempt to seek revenge upon murderous guerillas in the jungles of Columbia, and the birth of his daughter. Beautiful.

Thus, this cake box of a novel. Does it work? Not on its own, as with any novel.

If there is a coherent criticism of modernist and postmodernist literary works which is insightful and incisive, it is this: they provide their own interpretative apparatus, point to their own preferred mode of explication, offer clues to their own understanding. These do not need to be brought to it from outside. These clues, in addition to the cake box: “Detective”; Glenn Gould (who recorded twice Bach’s keyboard masterpiece The Goldberg Variations, itself repeating its aria of the first section in the final section); found, unfinished, unpublished literary manuscripts; “TV Guide”; writing upon sand and accompanying sand castles; an Introduction to an academic article, but not the article itself; obituaries. This list is not a repetition of the above numbered list which would add nothing to our understanding of this review or the novel which it parallels.

The task for us is to read the three main portions of the novel Personae--the short story “The Ocean,” the play Personae, and the novella ENERGEIAS--together. How do these three found objects relate to each other? Not narratively. May I suggest that they be read in parallel? Perhaps we layer them, treating each of the three as transparent layers of a cake, one above the other as it were, with the reader looking down upon them from above such that we see first the story and through it the play and through both the novella. Rather than forcing a narrative relationship between the three, we read them in parallel, or simultaneously. Both music and literature are forced, by virtue of their medium, into a linearity; but both battle against this constitutive constraint. Music reaches for fugue and harmony. What can a text do to press itself outside of the one-after-the-other of the word on the page? Finnegans Wake is perhaps the greatest achievement of simultaneity in all the history of letters. Women and Men develops its own literary version of the euphonious fugue. I believe that de la Pava, too, has attempted an equally simultaneous alternative to one-after-the-otherness. Unprecedented? Probably not.

Does it all “work”? Let us caution that question with the qualification of Joseph McElroy: “But good advice is hard to take, and even the not-so-good emphasized a more rational view of what was possible or (in the closet-commercial piety of the phrase) what worked.” Whether Personae works will depend, in part, on the imaginative capacity of its reader to perceive, imagine, project, and create a whole out of this cake box, or be satisfied with its several, individual pieces. There are some crumbs in this box, too. As much as I despise the reviewer that would have a novel be “better edited,” it is possible that Personae could do with some remolding. Those cake crumbs--the aphorism chapter above all--would be more at home in a bloated 700 page tome than in a slim 200 page novella. The shorter form requires a tighter control; the framing narrative could well be expanded and made more rigorous. The reshaping would clear away some of the ambiguity surrounding the intention of the novel, not to weave its disparate parts more tightly, but to more clearly delineate what is intentional, what is intentionally ambiguous and what is irrelevant. And the prose, being not a comma-free style, could be improved with a few dozen more of those little strokes. All being hazards in a self-published novel. And does it work? Yes, in the end. Yes.

And finally, my readerly concession. Will you enjoy this book? Yes, if you navigate well. There has been some criticism of A Naked Singularity having been written in a single voice. I’m not sympathetic with that thought. But in Personae, in its three major constitutive elements, we have three clearly demarcated styles with three distinct novelistic voices. And it is these three texts which will be read and enjoyed as independent entities by the average reader who does not tend to go for everything “experimental.” It is a shame, though. These three texts, if taken out of the whole to which they want to belong, fall out as well-formed but unimpressive exercises. It is the effort of reading Personae as a whole which provides the literary and narrative pleasure.


____________
Personae is still unread. For further insight into this inventive novel, please see the following internet reviews:

From with hidden noise:
http://withhiddennoise.net/2011/05/22...

Certain things immediately remind the reader of Sergio De La Pava’s second published novel of his first book: again, it’s published by Xlibris; the covers are even more garish than A Naked Singularity; again, those covers are entirely devoid of blurbs. I don’t know that there’s necessarily any reason for those three things as there might have been with De La Pava’s first book, as that attracted much more attention and praise than one would expect from a self-published book. Now these details more clearly signify the author’s choice to stay outside the mainstream, a decision that seems entirely reasonable when the stream is as murky as it currently is. What De La Pava’s doing with Personae, however, is decidedly different from A Naked Singularity. Sticking to the externals, this is a notably smaller book: 216 pages, and flipping through one notices that the middle hundred are taken up by a play. De La Pava isn’t repeating himself here, for better or worse.

From Known Unknowns:
http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/201...

Personae begins in the mode of a crime novel. We are told that the book comprises the police report of one Helen Tame, who we quickly learn is no ordinary detective. As a former world-class concert pianist, who has a nigh-supernatural ability to turn virtually invisible (a feat she accomplishes due to a mastery of arcane physical properties of light and acoustics), Tame only works unusual cases that have not been solved through normal means.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

More ink than this slip of a novel deserves has been spilled by Hattie Heidegger himself and can be read via that hyperlink. This sampler of the de la Pavaian prose was impressive and despite the organisational failure and unfortunate ennui that arrives during the overlong brains-in-a-vat playlet and the opaque wispiness of various sections and the contrived and wince-inducing tone as the novel hobbles towards its faux-profound climax, Personae is an otherwise promising postbox of postmodern pastiches (herein find Markson, Gaddis, Danielewski, Coover, Wallace—not Sorrentino) with hints of an original voice straining to emerge (one hopes not a voice that sounds like Marcus, Butler, or other Great Opaquists of the era). The novel reads like a little bicep-flexing exercise before de la Pava drops his second tome from on high while still not living in Brooklyn and resembling a nerdier Benicio del Toro. Here’s to the future.

For N.R.

MARKSON, GADDIS, DANIELEWSKI, COOVER, AND WALLACE DID IT BETTER.
MARKSON, GADDIS, DANIELEWSKI, COOVER, AND WALLACE DID IT BETTER.
MARKSON, GADDIS, DANIELEWSKI, COOVER, AND WALLACE DID IT BETTER.
MARKSON, GADDIS, DANIELEWSKI, COOVER, AND WALLACE DID IT BETTER.
MARKSON, GADDIS, DANIELEWSKI, COOVER, AND WALLACE DID IT BETTER.
x 100

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I don't think I can talk intelligently about Personae, but here are some scattered thoughts about it:

-I think it was Nathan who said a book as short as this needs to be tight--hermetically sealed, even. This is just as messy as A Naked Singularity, possibly in certain ways even more so. The disparate parts certainly don't come together quite as well.

-The play, whose name I'd change to Six Characters in Search of an Idea, is nauseating in places. E.g. from a cue on the very first page: "A gun is prominently displayed in a glass case in the corner below a sign indicating it is for emergency use only." Really? A gun? What could be more cliché than poking fun at a cliché? What could be more of a bummer than unironically resorting to that cliché because you've got no other clear idea for a resolution? I get that it's a tribute to Beckett, but it falls dramatically short. Hah!

-Why number the paragraphs near the end? Is there some sort of code I should be catching on to? Well, that's cool, but by the time the numbered paragraphs come into play de la Pava's lost so much credit with me that I really don't much care.

-To me, all the short stuff fails, as does the play. I had no interest in the minutiae of translating 100 Years of Solitude, though a non-fiction book devoted to it could be interesting. "The Ocean" had basically no effect on me, though I couldn't explain why. Same with the Glenn Gould stuff, probably because I'm very unfamiliar with classical music (though this fact ruined neither Europe Central nor The Gold Bug Variations for me).

-Not to say there's not good stuff in this book. Anything with Helen Tame is satisfying reading; same goes for any mention of Manuel and Arce, particularly the goofy love story that tangentially involves Nicole. But none of the good stuff is expanded to the length of the play, which itself is a tremendous eyesore.

-It's possible that I failed this book. That de la Pava is way smarter than I can pick up on. Given the heights A Naked Singularity achieved, I could probably be convinced that this is true. But for now, I've got better stuff to spend my time on.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

That was fun, but A Novel it didn't quite make. There's an 111-year-old corpse whose ad hoc texts comprise three substantial sections, and a 40-year-old musical savant turned preternatural detective who may or may not be writing her dying hallucinations. Plot? Schmot. And that's fine. The varied parts possess their own raison d'etre, which are loosely tethered by a skein of mortality, memory, literature, and doing the right thing. The prose, you know, predominates, especially when deadpanning the generically gritty, snarky, convoluted banter of detective novels/shows. The titular modern-absurdist-play-within-a-postmodern-novel goes on a little too long, its cleverness blunted by tedium. Overall, de la Pava reiterates a commitment to wittily (yet non-ironically!) delve into the tried-again-failed-again issues in art and literature precisely inasmuch as these are the quintessence of real individuals' search for meaning.

https://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/...

[Aravindakshan Narasimhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first from this writer and not the last!

Apart from that amateurish play about some superficial philosophic rambling, I felt the work was really good.

Sadly the play occupies (an unwelcomed, in the whole stream of things) considerable space! Even in its worn out tale, the denouement some how was good.

The rest of the work is what shows the true talent of the writer. And I enjoyed those bits and pieces.

Now I should get to A Naked Singularity..... Soon!


P.S: I am reading about Bach's Goldberg variations twice in a matter of weeks, from two different writers.

[Mariano Hortal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Es inconcebible que este libro esté publicado. La traducción realizada por el propio autor convierte el texto en una amalgama de palabras sin sentido ni concierto. Es prácticamente ilegible. Y la culpa no creo que haya sido solamente del propio autor sino que parte de ella hay que repartirla con la editorial que permite que este engendro salga a la venta y engañe a los lectores que disfrutamos con gozo de su excepcional primer libro. Una verdadera pena. Dinero malgastado.

[Chris Via]

So much to say, so little time to say it. Hopefully I can circle back to this review after Lost Empress. I’m sure this book was a much more profitable experience than everyone else’s on the plane (an abundance of the Patterson-Clinton collaboration).

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm giving this 2 stars because there are moments of talent scattered about, and also it's Christmas. Although this is the author's 2nd novel it reads more like a piece of juvenilia exhumed for a quick follow-up to his debut novel, which was apparently well-received. I've got no desire to read it, as this work merely ticks off a series of postmodern cliches (appropriating genre detective fiction; discovered notebooks; unexplained deaths and lost lives; name-dropping sophomoric discursions on classical music and philosophy - all the stale tricks to be learned about from a junior lecturer or a quick skim through "Either/Or" and Pynchon, the source texts for so much bad postmodern fiction). In this example the CSI inserts are used in an utterly perfunctory way, with no humour or characterisation achieved or any interesting sentences. The whole work is uniformly written in tortuous and unamusing contortions that do not repay the effort of unwinding them to find the triteness within. Worst of all is the lengthy philosophical drama at the centre of the book, the sort of thing a 15 year old would produce after discovering Beckett's "Endgame". I'm happy to admit I skipped Act 2 and I also hurried over the equally lifeless dialogue on the nature of God in the melodramatic concluding short story. I also think Sergio and his proof-reader should confer on whether he intended to misuse "your"/"you're" on page 49, or if "corporal" should have been "corporeal" on page 169, or the correct positioning of apostrophes at the top of page 200. Also some of the ecstatic reviews quoted at the front of this edition look bogus, but if so then that's the most inventive part of the whole book and I applaud their inclusion. More of that please, and less writing for seminars.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really loved de la Pava’s debut, A Naked Singularity, and while I don’t love Personae as a follow-up, I do appreciate its boldness and think it proves that this author isn’t a one trick pony. My main issue with this one is that I don’t think all of its parts come together in a way that really satisfied me, and while I enjoyed most of it in the moment, I found myself a bit lost at how I was supposed to connect the dots when it came to an end. An interesting experiment, rather than a great book.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much to admire here, but the whole thing is nearly derailed in the middle by an awful play that serves no purpose whatsoever...ah well.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

27FEB11. I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS BOOK!! A Naked Singularity was so surprisingly good, so unrelentingly engaging, that when I heard the other day that De La Pava was publishing Personae this spring, I thought it was too good to be true. (Still sort of do!)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
27NOV17. Just finished my third or fourth...fourth I think trip through this carnival. Comments forthcoming...

[FULL DISCLOSURE: In March of 2011 I was paid by SDLP to copy-edit a draft of this book. It remains the only time I’ve ever been paid for writing-related work, and was an absolute thrill and pleasure to get to do; I’ve honestly never felt so guilty taking someone’s money.]

04DEC17.I’ve waited a very long time to comment here because, after falling deeply in love with A Naked Singularity, and after a nerdy and logorrheic fan letter resulted in my getting the Personae gig mentioned above, I was initially somewhat disappointed with Personae (“this ends just as it’s hitting its stride; what’s with this play? etc.”) and so kept mum. Over the years though, while I still wish there was WAY more Helen Tame (see below) and while I still have yet to grasp much of the philosophy in (and of) the core play, I have grown to love the rest, and enormously.

I've always found it helpful to think of Personae less as a novel and more as a directed story collection featuring a WONDERFUL character, the aforenamed Det./Dr. Helen Tame, and the object of her investigation, undiscovered—and now quite unalive—literary dynamo Antonio Acre. But only twenty-seven of this book’s pages are by or about Tame, and dammit I want more. She evokes Sherlock Holmes in most of the cool ways (social misfit; summoned by the local cops for really tough cases; a stratospheric self-confidence that’s by turns attractive and repellent), and is her own brand of cool otherwise (quirky metaphysical stuff for which I shoot the author a mischievous grin.)

I can't resist giving you a little taste. Here's Det. Tame conversing with a young police officer who is over-explaining his observations at the crime scene.

    “Stop talking,” I say and he does. I am putting on gloves I designed years ago and staring at a clean spot on the carpet. “You can go now,” I say but he hesitates. “That means leave in Etiquette.”
    “Just that, well, they didn’t really say what to do after calling you. In other words, does calling you obviate the need to call CSU? Do I fill out a report?”
    “Likely.”
    “Nothing about what constitutes proper procedure from here on out you know? So I’m at a bit of a loss.”
    “Here’s why. You weren’t given further procedure because this is the end of the line for you. Once you call me and, more importantly, I come, then I alone make the determination of what constitutes, as you say, proper procedure from this point forward. Make sense?”
    “Yes.”
    “And I am repeating my invitation to you to join your partner in the hall, then the street, then your RMP to continue providing service and protection.”
    “Accepted.”
    “Well done.”
    “With permission to add that when I started I told myself that to the extent I made errors they would be errors of commission and not omission.”
    He had made the relevant O a little too long during which I diagnosed ambition and felt remorse. “You did well officer,” I say. “It is blood and in highly suggestive locations, good work.” I then take him by the elbow like a child, a quite involuntary sin of condescension that requires I atone by asking who his sergeant is then indicating I will deposit positive impressions there, and take him to the hall where I close the door before the partner can even form the intent to speak.
    Now I’m tired. Even minimal social niceties exhaust me and the commitment to future such interactions doesn’t help..."

Helen Tame. Quite fun to read and read about. You should do both posthaste!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For the curious, a rough inventory followed by a formal TOC.
The ten chapters in this 215 page book (which begins on page nine) can be sorted into three categories:

• Five chapters by or about Helen Tame and/or her investigation of Acre and his work (as mentioned, twenty-seven pages.)
- Chapter I, Tame's eight-page report on the crime scene she’s examining.
- Chapters II, V & VIII, each a two-page excerpt of Tame's introduction to her scholarly article on the musical connection between JS Bach and Glenn Gould.
- Chapter VII, a thirteen-page piece on Helen's relationship with the local police, her auspicious beginning in police work, her drive to solve, etc.

• Four chapters by Antonio Acre (172 pages)
- Chapter III, Tame's twelve page reproduction of Acre’s notebooks: scattershot thoughts, scenes and other snippets.
- Chapter IV, “The Ocean,” a seven-page story (scribbled by Acre in the margins of a mid-1980's TV Guide) about a man's impulsive, wistful visit to the seaside.
- Chapter VI, a 100 page play titled “Personae” which by size alone dominates both the Acre work and Personae the novel. (Were I better versed in high-caliber philosophy—particularly that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I sense—I might understand more, but am not and thus don’t. It’s OK though; the novel’s remaining hundredish pages are well worth the purchase price and disappoint only in their brevity. And in the event the play is simply intended—or best read—as a word feast, then dig in because it sure is that!)
- Chapter X, a forty-nine page testament* called “Energeias” (Greek: energy) which comprises twenty-two sections of varying length and seeming interrelatedness. (*20 of the 22 sections have numbered paragraphs, as if for verse citing.)

• One chapter, IX, comprises a couple newspaper articles regarding first Acre then Tame (seven pages.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Table of Contents.
9    I. Our Heroine and Her Work

17    II. 1st of 3 Excerpts of Dr. Helen Tame’s Introduction to Her Article: BACH, GOULD, AND ACONSPIRATORIAL SILENCE

19    III. In Which Painstakingly Restored Aphorisms Are Aired After Dormant Decades

31    IV. An Octogenarian Beginner Begins After Wondering If Beginner’s Luck Even Applies

38    V. 2nd of 3 Excerpts of Dr. Helen Tame’s Introduction to Her Article: BACH, GOULD, AND ACONSPIRATORIAL SILENCE

40    VI. Players At Play On The Stage That Is The World

144    VII. Another Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

157    VIII. Final Excerpt of Dr. Helen Tame’s Introduction to Her Article: BACH, GOULD, AND ACONSPIRATORIAL SILENCE

159    IX. What’s Left to Echo

166    X. How Some Things Can Function as Postscript Without Intent
ENERGIAS: or Why Today the Sun May Not Rise in the East, Set in the West

[Betty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vreemd boekje. Tegelijk heel grappig (zowel de vertelstem van de vrouwelijke, licht autistische politierechercheur als het toneelstuk-in-een-roman Personae) als filosofisch (de conversatie tussen een man vol wraak en een duivelachtige figuur). Maar ook postmodern verwarrend en soms zelfs vervelend. In deze tijden valt er nog maar weinig te lachen in de literatuur en daarom toch drie sterren! Ik las zijn eerste en ik lees zijn volgende zeker ook.

[Larry Ggggggggggggggggggggggggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really have a lot of fun reading sergio de la pavas stuff my favorite part in this here anthology was the play

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdfAE...

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellence requires risk. One has to swing for the fences to drive in a home run. Sometimes that swing is a miss. It's disappointing, but still makes you wonder about what could have been.

DLP appears to be an author who is often occupied by the nature of perfection and the associated bits (introspection, sacrifice, isolation, will, et al.). Such topics cannot be addressed but by swinging hard, willfully ignorant of the risks, led by his own vision and not by the hypothetical--even probable--interpretations and perceptions of others.

So what's there to say about Personae? It doesn't lend itself to an "all things considered" statement. It is, at times, stupendous and aggravating, frequently perplexing yet charming. DLP mulls the nature of good and evil, independence and fate, Truth, excellence, insight, love, etc. Weighty stuff for so few pages.

The rating results largely from "Energeias," the final chapter/section, which is mesmerizing and at times jaw-droppingly poignant. But I'm probably a sap for clever sentiment combined with confrontations of El Diablo.

The play could contain greatness, but I've yet to realize it, and will probably let it stay unrealized. Though the later sections help illuminate it some, I'm not especially interested in circling back and pondering it over. I'm leaning toward the conclusion that it takes away more from the book than it adds.

Jeeze this review isn't even half-lucid. Will revise late. (read: should and may revise, but laziness may overrule.)

[Roberto · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh no.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a weird fucking book. Wait can I swear on Goodreads?

[Chrissy · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Sergio de la Pava's massively impressive debut novel A Naked Singularity in the rear view, I climbed tentatively into his second novel not knowing what to expect-- he set the bar very high, after all, and I was worried that the expectation of something as great would hinder my enjoyment.

What he's crafted in Personae is something very, very different from A Naked Singularity. It may not reach the high bar set by its predecessor, but that is owed more to the fact that it hardly tries to. One thing to be said about de la Pava is that he is not afraid of exploring, of trying new approaches to literature and seeing how they pay off. Some of them undoubtedly do, while others fall flat, and there is a bit of both outcomes in this work. Regardless, there is a joy in watching him play as an author. He touts an easy mastery with words and grammatical structure, poetic without seeming pretentious and diverse without the stiffness of some thesaurus-reliant authors.

In Personae, he holds close to narrative expectation for just long enough to trip the reader up when he pulls the rug out from under them. Incidentally, this isn't very far into the novel at all. The reader then spends the better part of 200 pages wondering where it is all going and if that's "all there is"? In an awe-inspiring display of his talent, however, de la Pava manages to pull every last string together in the final chapter. Against all building expectation, the end result is satisfying and emotionally powerful, revealing a meta-structure that works in the background like a skeleton to hold the pieces together (unlike some experimental fiction that flaunts its meaning like a sequinned waistcoat). I'm not sure every reader will stick it through to the end, or indeed appreciate the whole once it is revealed. The suddenness with which he shifts gears was a delight to me, but I could easily see it leaving some otherwise interested readers behind. Personally, I am looking forward to whatever he plays with next.

[Derrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

On Personae and post-postmodernists:

I particularly loved the play in the middle; it was strange and funny.

The ‘weak’ part of the novel, for me, was the talk with Death near the end of the novel. It started it out with an heir of mystery that quickly devolved into mostly uninteresting dialogue about religion and such.

I think there is a cohesion between what may seem like random bits for a novel than many give this work credit for. . . And all of them are good on their own, imo. . .

I’ve even seen some odd observations by others that imply if these ‘parts’ were apart of a larger work, they would be better? I don’t understand this general trend towards the idea that smaller novels need to be extremely ‘tight,’ while longer works get a pass to be more ‘loose.’ Shrugging off substantial bad chunks of a big novel as ‘okay bc the rest of the book and the total experience makes it worth it’ screams sunk time/cost fallacy: ‘I read Infinite Jest all the way through, and it is mostly good for the last 2/3rds, so it is okay that the first 1/3 is actively, pretty bad’ sort of stuff. . .Same for Europe Central by Vollmann. Though, I DNF’ed that one. So I don’t know if it got any better.

I think Jonathan Franzen was onto something with that article about big complicated books. . . The Corrections is better than any work by any of these mentioned authors. . .


I lump de la Pava in with Vollmann, Powers, and Wallace. Post-postmodernist dudes? I think Wallace and de la Pava are the better part of this group because they are funny. It makes me cut them slack for their occasionally overly-complicated sentences. Wallace stands atop of this group by the fact that he at least sometimes seemed aware of what makes good prose on a sentence level. Overall, I prefer the OG’s of the postmodern novel, when I want it.


I like de la Pava though, as he is a public defender, he often has great specific observations about the criminal justice system that he work through in his fiction. . .

Moving onto Lost Empress, before I get to the ARC of Every Arc Bends Its Radian

[Giedra · Rating 1 out of 5]

How did this even get published? As far as I can tell, Sergio de la Pava wrote a few random pieces, including a (terrifically dull) play in the absurdist style, and when none of them really worked he just created a frame around them in which the works are discovered by a not-very-interesting detective investigating the death of the fictional author of the works, and then he called the mish-mash a novel. There were occasional nice turns of phrase and true-to-life observations….but not enough to redeem the work….at least for me. WORST BOOK CLUB BOOK EVER. (Worse than Cleopatra!) Eagerly awaiting the book club discussion, since bad books—or books which elicit mixed opinions—almost always lead lead to better discussions than universally liked books.

[Ron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very hard to know what to say about what this book is about. For me, the various fragments never cohered into anything that seemed to make sense. The most interesting parts were the obituaries of the old writer and the rather young, 40-ish- "detective" who examines the crime scene, discovers, I think, some manuscripts, which are the other fragments we see. The play was endless and pointless, the last story interesting but never connected together in my mind (the South American revenge seeking guy, and the coffee shop owner smitten with a customer).
I'll remember that I have to be more selective in what I get excited about from New Yorker book reviews. I have to try to crack the D. Keith Mano novel before I try to approach A Naked Singularity.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Paul Astor had written "Waiting for Godot," it might turn out something like Personae.

I loved de la Pava's A Naked Singularity but this one didn't quite work for me. It is missing the maximalism and the bravery of his first novel, although it is still quite poignant in places, particularly towards the end. Sadly, I think it tries too hard to be experimental and clever and not quite hard enough to really say anything new or in a new way.

I'm still going to read everything de la Pava writes because, like Pynchon, even his failures have a certain beauty and strength to them.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

While certainly shorter than his debut novel (which you should all go out and read), and appearing to be a bit of a pastiche, Personae has a lot of great sections and nothing that drags either. While I can see why some people have rated it less highly, and perhaps it's all been done before, in the end I loved reading it, and found something great on almost every page. So even though it's kind of profoundly depressing, I've got to give it 5 stars just for making me happy. :)

[David Musgraves · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting follow up to Naked Singularity, the author has replaced maximalism with more fugue-like, poetic verses.
Mashes together philosophy and magical realism in the styles of Marquez, David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), and something like House of Leaves, with an Ionesco/Beckett play sitting right in the middle.
Personally, I prefer the maximalism, but this is a great second novel.

[Garrett Peace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite sure what to make of this one. A Naked Singularity is one of my favorite books, and this is not much like that one. I knew that going in, but what De La Pava is doing here is more interesting in theory than in execution, I think, and he’s covering stylistic ground that’s already been covered by writers who have done it better. Kind of a let-down.

[Twhite · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps the mistake was to read naked singularity first. This is noway near as, whats the right word, complete and enjoyable as naked singualrity.

[Hernán M. Sanabria · Rating 1 out of 5]

"El inglés es más rico que el español, así es, y yo quiero antes que nada ser rico".

Personae... lata de novela, lata de drama, lata de obra posmoderna.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never able to get into the fragmentary nature of the book. Moving on!

[Renee Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t finish, I quit for my sanity

[Cristina Gutiérrez Valencia · Rating 2 out of 5]

La traducción al español (o lo que sea esto) es un disparate. No puedo valorar (ni terminar, la verdad) la novela sino lo que estoy leyendo.