The Invented Part

Trilogía las partes #1

by Rodrigo Fresán, Will Vanderhyden (Translator)

“A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."—Jonathan Lethem

An aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically dramatic manner: traveling to the Hadron Collider, merging with the God particle, and transforming into an omnipresent deity—a meta-writer—capable of rewriting reality.

With biting humor and a propulsive, contagious style, amid the accelerated particles of his characteristic obsessions—the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the music of Pink Floyd and The Kinks, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the links between great art and the lives of the artists who create it—Fresán takes us on a whirlwind tour of writers and muses, madness and genius, friendships, broken families, and alternate realities, exploring themes of childhood, loss, memory, aging, and death.

Drawing inspiration from the scope of modern classics and the structural pyrotechnics of the postmodern masters, the Argentine once referred to as “a pop Borges” delivers a powerful defense of great literature, a celebration of reading and writing, of the invented parts—the stories we tell ourselves to give shape to our world.

Rodrigo Fresán is the author of nine books of fiction that together compose an expansive, interconnected fictional universe—a complex system of storylines, resonances, and self-reference that call to mind the works of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Roberto Bolaño.

Will Vanderhyden received fellowships from the NEA and Lannan Foundation to work on The Invented Part.

Genres: Fiction, Latin American, Contemporary, 21st Century, Literature, Books About Books, Spanish Literature

552 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Rodrigo Fresán nació en Buenos Aires en 1963 y vive en Barcelona desde 1999. Es autor de los libros Historia argentina, Vidas de santos, Trabajos manuales, Esperanto, La velocidad de las cosas, Mantra, Jardines de Kensington, El fondo del cielo y La parte inventada.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Invented Part is a writing about writing, a prose about prose, a fiction about fiction…

The concentric eccentric waves indicating the exact point in the pond where the rock we threw from here, from the eccentric present, just sank. And another childish but timeless question, also unanswerable: why, whenever we’re standing on the shore, do we feel that irrepressible and reflexive urge to throw a rock into the water? A mystery. A sneaking suspicion, yes. The rock is the cause and its waves the effect: what gets told based on what happened, the story before and behind History.
The rock is the invented part that, subsequently, comes to form part of the truth.

There is hardly a page without a reference to some author or book… The narration is a very tortuous trail with a lot of deviations and digressions… Deviations into the history of rock music and digressions into the world of cinema…

That movie in which an old and confessional Salieri softly sings his infamy with Mozart melodies, amid shit-smeared walls and histrionic lunatics, too many of whom – this always struck him as quite curious – believe they are Napoleon and none of whom believe they are Don Quixote. Or maybe nothing interests a madman less than madness, because, just as he thought, for the madman, madness is perfectly reasonable.

The stream of consciousness slowly turns into mind-wandering and magical realism gradually becomes magic madness…

All you have to do is take a look and compare today’s vampires with yesterday’s vampires, the conspiracies of now with the conspiracies of then, the sex here with the sex there. And, ah, those young adult books that sell so well and end up being the hope of the industry, consumed voraciously by young adult readers who, with time, I suppose, grow up, and stop reading or, with luck, are pre-programmed to swallow the latest bestseller. Or, maybe, who knows, become Peter Pan readers – eighty-year-olds reading young adult books, dystopias and romances, jumping from here to there. The same books as before. Books for readers who don’t want to grow up, happy to live trapped in the loop of adolescent stories that begin and end in themselves and that don’t build bridges or open doors to other territories. And I remember that magic moment when I leapt from the island of Captain Grant’s Children to the island of the children in The Lord of the Flies. And, then, the discovery of the limitless horizon and of infinite space.

Dwelling in the invented world is perfect but reality tends to complicate everything.

[Glenn Russell]

"Today's electrocuted readers, accustomed to reading quickly and briefly on small screens. And, yes, goodbye to all of them, at least for as long as this book lasts and might last. Unplug from external inputs to nourish yourselves exclusively on internal electricity."

The above quote is taken from the opening paragraph of this magnificent, exuberant 550-pager by Argentine author Rodrigo Fresán, a novel for lovers of books and reading, a novel about writing and writers and a plethora of other provocative topics for readers to linger over and luxuriate in.

As by way of a sampler, here's a few juicy bits from the first pages, the narrator, a writer, reflecting back to the time when he was The Boy in his boyhood:

"The same way he'd feel later on, holding any one of his many favorite novels. Eyes open wide, one of those books that, with time's rapid passing, time's running, charges you the entrance fee of learning everything all over again: a brand new game with rules and - you've been warned - a breathing all its own, a rhythm you have to absorb and follow if your goal is to climb up on the shore of the last page."

"And The Boy is already not all that rational and already thinks like one of those antique windup tin toys. Like his favorite toy."

"The Boy will learn how to neutralize and ignore the call of that abyss: opening a book, plunging inside, the freest of falls, closing the cover on reality, behind him now not in front and opening his eyes. And he'll always marvel at the fact that whenever he picks up a book for the first time - he's been told that the same thing happens to other people with firearms - he'll always be surprised by the fact that, no matter the number of pages and type of binding, he thought it'd be lighter or heavier, but never like this. And then it'll seem logical and narratively appropriate that each book feel unique and different and special."

"The laugh of someone who has come back from the dead and lived to tell the tale, to write it down, and then, alter it, improve it, add the invented part. The invented part that is not, not ever, the deceitful part, but the part that actually makes something that merely happened into something as it should have happened. Something (everything to come, the rest of his life, will spring from that there and then, from that exact moment) more authentic and valuable and pure than the simple and banal and often unsubtle and sloppy truth."

The Invented Part makes for a fun read - literary fiction that's actually highly enjoyable. But it doesn't stop there - to add a sweet icing to our reading pleasure, when we finish The Invented Part, we can look forward to two more books in the series: The Dreamed Part and soon (I hope) to be translated The Remembered Part, all published by Open Letter, translator par excellence Will Vanderhyden.

I must admit I face a dilemma as a reviewer sitting down to review The Invented Part. I could easily continue with author quotes. enough eminently quotable lines to go on for pages, but I'm obliged to make overarching observations about such things as what the book's about, the writing, the author's themes.

Here goes: we have The Boy becoming The Writer becoming The Lonely Man. There's also The Young Man and The Young Woman making a documentary about The Writer along with a tangent on The Writer's Mad Sister. The writing itself is nothing short of spectacular – James Joyce and Marcel Proust have nothing on Rodrigo Fresán. The novel covers the three most important themes of human existence: Eros and Thanatos and Grafi - love and death and writing.

Now the juice – juicy Invented Part quotes, a flock of fabulous Fresán. I'll sprinkle in my own brief commentary.

A Fresán definition: "liferary - a life made of books, a life made of lives. Yes: the library like an organism, alive and in constant expansion, surviving owners and users alike."

I think here of not only a public library or a university library but one's personal library. Can you envision your personal library as a living, pulsing organism made up of a phalanx of lives - all those authors, all those fictional characters, a bit like Hesse's Magic Theater, as many doors as you like.


Rodrigo Fresán at home in his personal library

"A library without precise limits, where you never find the book you are looking for, but always find the book you should be looking for."

I remember those times in libraries where I walked out with an unexpected treasure. One of life's beauties: the glorious experience of browsing many books on multiple shelves.

"He'd become a writer because it was the closest thing to being a reader."

I'd go even further: I switched from writing microfiction to writing book reviews since, for me, reviewing gets me even closer to reading books.

"To put it another way: it's one of those moments in which literature, the act itself of making literature, reveals things that life does not and will never be able to make sense of on its own."

I hear echoes from philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer and John Dewey when they speak of the clarity afforded by the aesthetic experience. For a literary writer, the fresh air, the lucidity, the insights into all facets of life when they press further and further into their story.

"The problem is that literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared."

The narrator is quoting Philip Roth here but he surrounds this quote with observing how reading a book on a screen always contains the lure of hopping around the internet, much different than sitting in solitude with a real book where you make a firm time commitment to read without interruption.

"On screens - big and small screens - where our lives are no longer projected because our lives, now, more all the time, are screens.
To be or not to be a screen, that is the question."

Ha! According to the narrator, we no longer project ourselves onto our personal internet profile; we ARE our internet profile. With a touch of black humor, one can hear the current generation proclaim: Who cares when my physical body gives out and I die? I will live on as my internet profile.

The Writer on the type of book he would like to write: "A book like one of Edward Hopper's clean and well-lit rooms, but with a Jackson Pollock waiting to come out of the closet."

The above is one of dozens of descriptions The Writer writes down about the book he would like to put in our hands - a book that will eventually make a deep impression on our hearts and minds.

"Writers are people who, inexactly, always prefer to look away, toward another part - the invented part."

Want a more exact reason why Rodrigo chose to title his novel The Invented Part? Read it to find out!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been in an egregious reading slump recently, and this remarkable novel, as Jonathan Lethem blurbs, “[brought] a blast of oxygen into the room.” I would like to shower several thesauruses of superlatives and superduperlatives on this astonishing and breathtaking novel from an Argentinian marathon runner, however, this’d eat up time that could be spent reading the actual novel, so no. A 545-page (large A5 size pages, small-ish font) maximalist masterwork (part of a trilogy, thank Ganesh) with the incredible frenetic pace and encyclopedic scope of DFW (epigraphed on p.x), an impressive sprawling stream of low-to-high musical and literary references, essays, interpretations, and freewheeling opinions. An ur-meta novel that attempts the insane feat of encapsulating the whole world of writing and writers in a sweeping swooning style that is packed with hilarious, lyrical, thoughtful reflection and satire, and a rapturous repository for the author’s passions and obsessions. And more, and more, and more, and more. If the second and third novels are up to this calibre, Fresan’s trilogy will etch itself in the hallowed pantheon of the everlasting encyclopedic classics.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much as I would like to rate this book 4 stars, I cannot. It was too clever, too deep, too fluid, too geometric, too weird. I devoured portions of it, and felt myself drowning during other portions. It took me quite a while to finish. I had to rent it from the library 4 times, and finally bought it.

Fresan's writing is unlike anything else I've read. At times he reads as polished as Bolano, and other times he examines minute concepts from multiple dimensions at once, and in a way entirely his own. I was reminded of Javier Marias, but Marias would never indulge in this kind of well-rounded discussion of modern culture. Marias is a great writer, but the subject matter he chooses is limited compared to the wide territory Fresan covers. The flow of the narrative caused my mind to manufacture its own momentum, to galavant over terrain it rarely traversed. I rarely lose sleep over books, but I had to keep flipping the light back on, picking this one back up, and reading just a few more pages. Like Marquez, there is hardly anywhere to stop a reading session. You are always, perpetually in the middle of an endless paragraph, usually lost in a sentence you think you should restart. Therefore, it encourages you continually, goads you forward, and maddens you all the while.
The ideas come at you like stars after someone has engaged hyperdrive.

Remarkably, it is only part one. The Dreaming Part will be hitting retailers soon.
It is an incredibly long, intricate, dense construction of pop culture references, random characters engaged in unlikely meditative, encyclopedic monologues, and there is an extreme over-reliance on similes. So, it is not hard to believe that the author went on with this mode, or that he is sitting in his room right now, adding to the stream of thoughts and impressions, and that he will continue to do so for all eternity, into the afterlife, inexhaustible. The purpose of the thing is the style. The pleasure of it comes from the impressive accumulation. Fresan does what László Krasznahorkai does, but does it more superbly, without boring you on every page. It is an exhausting read, but you will chuckle and grin through most of it.

What might have started as a gimmicky stream of writerly rap sessions morphed into scene and setting, travelled through minds peopled by celebrated personalities, literary memorabilia, trivia, movieland, and rose to unexpected heights, attaining the breadth of great literature, all the while perplexing with its vicissitudes, defying your ludicrous attempts at judging his blustery sentences. This is a book to experience, and one to revisit. And the book goes on living, even after you have finished it...

[Chad Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

The publishing house I run--Open Letter--will be publishing the English translation of this book in the spring of 2017. It will be followed by publications of The Bottom of the Sky and Mantra.

That out of the way . . . read this book! Damn, Fresan is incredible. This book is right within the Open Letter aesthetic, a book about the creation of a book, one that intends to let you in on "the invented part" the what happens in a writer to make them a writer. It links back to Macedonio Fernandez--one of the few authors *not* mentioned in here. (Burroughs and Fitzgerald are the most prominent, but the novel is loaded with allusions and meditations on great artists and works of art, including Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

Can't wait for Will Vanderhyden to finish his next translation!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Really. If you are even slightly tempted by a title offered by this Open Letter Press outfit ; please don't hesitate as long as I have. You will (more than likely) be delighted in a manner slightly above (and likely far above) the average manner of delightedness you experience in your novel adventures. Yes, you. (Unless of course you don't go for that kind of thing at all in which case I'm sure no doubt your spidey=senses will have already kept you well informed). But this. This. Is a book for readers by readers of readers (and some writerly stuff thrown in too). Even if you like me don't (or haven't) really ever go(ne) for the Fitzgerald stuff, which is to this like Jay Gat is to Daisy Buchanan's Daughter, you'll still be thoroughly delighted by the readerly experience offered herein. And even if you think prog=rock is as bloated as punk is stupid, if you've ever been a musical fan of any sort, the Pink Floyd fan meltdown herein will (should?) also delight you (instead of for instance the Wish You Were Here Fanboy thing imagine like a TG24 fanboy meltdown). And if you love anti=cell/smart phone rants you'll love the one in here ;; and but if you hate anti-tech meltdown=rants you'll love the fact that the rant herein is depicted as an indictment of a sad oldman/writer. And if you love sci=fi in your fiction but don't much find interest in sci=fiction, you'll love the particle accelerator bit. There's some Bob Dylan dancing in here too, a bit lyrical I found that one. So that's what it's all about. And muchmuch more. "The Invented Part" ; you, dear reader of novels, know is always the best part. And this one right here will be the best damn pop=culture soaked novel you'll read this year. btba? Damn=straight.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

and writing is nothing but a solitary dance—a minuet where it's your turn to curtsey and also your turn to bow—whose art lies in executing a delicate and subtle choreography, knowing when to surrender and when to resist.

if that is indeed the case, then rodrigo fresán makes a compelling argument for being considered the george balanchine of modern lit. the invented part (la parte inventada), fresán's second work to be translated into english (after kensington gardens ), is an altogether deft and dexterous performance, dazzling and delighting with a litany of literary grande jetés and tour en l'air. the spanish author's late friend roberto bolaño (who wrote lovingly of fresán throughout between parentheses), in his incomparable 2666, spoke of "the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown." the invented part, the first in a planned trilogy (the second volume, la parte soñada [the dreamed part], was released in spanish earlier this year and is likely due for a stateside release in 2019), is certainly that: a rollicking, meandering, and, quite frequently, astonishingly ambitious work.

from the 16 epigraphs that open the book through its 550 pages of how-the-fuck-could-a-mere-mortal-possibly-compose-something-this-magnificent, the invented part spans the scope of our hypertechnical age, sending up and taking down so much of our contemporary world. fresán masterfully weaves so many pop culture threads (most notably f. scott fitzgerald, pink floyd, bob dylan, and 2001: a space odyssey) into his metafictional foray that it quite nearly exposes the thin line between reality and fiction to be an engulfing chasm. with its acerbic humor, acrimonious critique, vivacious storytelling, and ridiculously imaginative plot, the invented part is a roaring good time. unforeseeable, yet so quickly indispensable.

read this book. and then tell everyone you know to read it, too.

it's not that he's happy. it's something else. it's beyond happiness—you have to pass through happiness and come out the other side to know what it is the boy feels now—something that has no name. it's the raw material that happiness, among other things, is made of. it's that raw and primal happiness that, over the years, proves irretrievable, and its memory—like a happy bison on a cro-magnon cave wall—is all that's left of it. a souvenir which we superimpose, in vain, the whole succession of happinesses—diluted and convoluted with preservatives more artificial than natural—that will or won't come, or that we'll pass by or won't know how to see, or that won't ever even make it out of their caves. happinesses that are false, in every case, like copies and imitations, like the postcards we resignedly pick up upon leaving the museum. reproductions, falsifications. believing that if you try hard enough, if you stare at them without blinking, the act of thinking about being happy can, for a while, convince us that we are happy.

with several more fresán titles due out from open letter in the coming years, the colossality of fresán's talent ought to become more widely apparent and deservedly appreciated by english-speaking audiences.

and, if you're late to the party, be sure to check out the inaugural season of three percent's "two month review" weekly podcast and the translator's interview with the author.

*translated from the spanish by nea fellowship recipient will vanderhyden (labbé's navidad & matanza and loquela, as well as forthcoming fresáns)

[Héctor Genta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il romanzo ai tempi di Internet.

L'Epoca del Grande Disordine (sociale, politico, individuale) ha finalmente trovato il suo degno cantore, o se non altro una delle voci in grado di rappresentarla.
La parte inventata è un libro sorprendente, che incarna alla perfezione la confusione dei nostri tempi e Rodrigo Fresán è un moderno epigono di Macedonio Fernández, nonostante il suo riferimento letterario sia soprattutto nordamericano (e da questo punto di vista l'influenza di John Barth sembra quella preponderante).
La parte inventata è un libro che rappresenta l'evoluzione del romanzo ai tempi di Internet, nonostante l'autore non faccia altro che denigrare e-reader e cultura prêt-à-porter e l'umanità del ventesimo secolo in genere e la scrittura di Fresán ricorda la navigazione in rete, quello che succede quando cercando una notizia si finisce per googlare da un argomento ad un altro. C'è un tema di fondo sul quale si innestano un sacco di divagazioni, ognuna delle quali è il potenziale germe da cui potrebbero nascere altre mille storie.
In una sorta di delirio allucinatorio ci si muove tra meta-letterario (molto, molto meta…) ed ipertestuale, con un alternarsi di cultura pop ed "alta" tra richiami musicali (Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, i Kinks), filmografici (2001, Odissea nello spazio) e letterari (Burroughs, Updike e soprattutto F.S. Fitzgerald); un delirio dove tutto è metafora e una narrazione nella quale si intersecano digressioni continue e generi letterari diversi, biji, ricordi, interviste, wikipedia...
Impossibile riuscire a seguire tutte le linee della storia: c'è, come detto, la critica ad una società egocentrica, autoreferenziale e superficiale che va di corsa e non sembra più aver tempo per l'approfondimento e la riflessione, c'è una riflessione sui legami e sulla loro rottura, ma soprattutto sulla scrittura, sul ruolo dello scrittore e della letteratura che dovrebbero privilegiare la parte inventata su quella reale.
"La parte inventata che non è, mai, la parte disonesta, anzi, è la parte che trasforma davvero qualcosa che è semplicemente accaduto in qualcosa così come doveva accadere. Qualcosa (tutto quel che verrà, il resto della sua vita, sorgerà da lì e da allora, proprio da questo esatto momento) di molto più autentico e pregiato e puro della semplice e volgare e spesso così poco spiritosa e approssimativa verità."

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a vindication of non-writerliness. “I wanted to be a writer,” we’ve said, but of course we can’t write a word until we’ve read everything and gone somewhere (expensive) where we’ll be taught what to do and not do so we don’t make fools of ourselves in a more or less permanent, public form. Oh, and get credentials, some hot alphabet soup to drip off the end of Our Name. But once we’ve read everything, then we will know what to write, and people will be glad to read it, and we will make money. We will be paid to write what we think and it will have an impact. We will address issues and solve problems and creatively soar with the mighty pen; poets, philosophers, even politicians will silently weep at our words. Until then, we just have to keep reading.

Read, review, repeat. No writing involved. Even this bit of dribble is agonizing. It’s not “the right thing,” what I want to say, which in shortest terms—you’ll appreciate—is “this book of Books is magnificent and you should read it at once without requiring any more convincing or justification and if you are not duly impressed then I am not sure we have anything else to discuss.” (I, too, despise such unhelpful outbursts. Alas.) Few books achieve that. I can’t even fault this one for its “My Dear Reader” flattery because it does not idealize us as we are (or rely on interpassive and revolting gimmicks like “vote here on what YOU want in my next book!!!!!!!!!”) but admonishes us to be better, to expend the necessary labor on actualizing a complex relationship to Logos as has been the (problematic) raison d’etre of culture since time immemorial. I can’t fault its “don’t you love me yet?!” cleverness and humor because it doesn’t jockey to be LIKED PINNED SUBSCRIBED SHARED RATED TAGGED TRENDING but instead makes every page into an undeserved and endangered reprieve from the steadily encroaching death that awaits us all in The End, exhorting us not to kill time chiseling a good looking corpse as a monument to vanity but to live and read as if the quintessence of experience possible only in literature actually matters.

It is incontestably one of the most important books of our stupid goddamn time and place, long since glutted with stupid goddamn unimportant books and, much much worse, a generalized impervious indifference to what literature means, demands, and promises: “not a mere recounting but something that counts.” The Book—as an idea, an object, an experience—has lost the fight as the Enlightenment dream of universal literacy is washed out in the hi-res glare of innumerable screens. Yeah yeah yeah, we know. Nostalgia is as impotent as compromise is futile: there’s no going back, there’s no winning the hearts and minds of the masses. (And for the record, the petty personal choices of the masses represent the smallest portion of blame.) So what is to be done, besides clutching The Writer’s swan song like the last life preserver on a sinking ship? I don’t know yet, but if there is an answer it is on these shelves.

(And them Acknowledgements be like…)

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful, surprising find!

It's not uncommon for me to divide my reading time among a number of books, of varying genres, ideally each book receiving roughly equal attention. Occasionally, though, one book grabs me by the brain-parts – and elsewhere – and will not let go, demanding to be read to the exclusion of the others. Resistance is futile.

The Invented Part was that book. Really. This bugger really had me by the... well, you know.

At the outset, I had my misgivings, I'll be honest – I'd read that it was full of pop-and-not-so-pop-cultural references – music, TV, movies, literature: Pink Floyd, the Kinks, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, Kubrick, Dylan, F Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway... so many more [and it is]. And in the wrong hands an overuse of name-dropping like that can sink a novel, turn it into lightweight escapist schlock [a popular book comes to mind]. But Fresán knows what he's doing. Wish You Were Here and Tender Is The Night are in expert, reverent hands.

With metafictional commentary galore, author Fresán gives us a nearly indescribable tale about writing, about reading, about the origin of ideas, the genius of Ray Davies, and enough asides and extended digressions to choke a horse [no horses were harmed during this writing]. Enough said. Read it for yourself. It's a joy, a wonder, a loving embrace of the writing craft and the reading life. And to think this is merely the first volume of Fresán's trilogy: The Dreamed Part has been translated and is available [and on my shelf]. Not sure when volume three will be translated.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a letter to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, dated December 31st, 1935, Gerald Murphy concludes, more in the voice of Dick Diver than Gerald Murphy:

“I know now that what you said in ‘Tender Is the Night’ is true. Only the invented parts of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.”

Will Vanderhyden's translation, The Invented Part of Rodrigo Fresán's La parte inventada won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.

Overall, I can admire what the author is trying to achieve, and it is certainly an impressive translation feat, but it wasn't a book that I personally enjoyed, indeed reading it was something of a slog and, in particular, it fails the 'would I read the sequel' (written but yet to be translated) acid test.

It begins, strongly and playfully:

How to begin.

Or better: How to begin?

(Adding the question mark that—nothing happens by chance—has the shape of a fish or meat hook. A sharp and pointy curve that skewers both the reader and the read. Pulling them, dragging them up from the clear and calm bottom to the cloudy and restless surface. Or sending them flying through the air to land just inside the beach of these parentheses. Parentheses that more than one person will judge or criticize as orthographically and aesthetically unnecessary but that, in the uncertainty of the beginning, are oh so similar to hands coming together in an act of prayer, asking for a fair voyage just now underway. We read: “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate;” we hear: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” And good luck to all, wishes you this voice—halfway down the road of life, lost in a dark woods, because it wandered off the right path—that the gag of the parentheses renders unknown. And yet—like with certain unforgettable songs, whose melodies impose themselves over the title and even over the signature lines of the chorus, what’s it called? how’d it go?—this voice also recalls that of someone whose name isn’t easy to identify or recognize. And, yes, if possible, avoid this kind of paragraph from here onward because, they say, it scares away many of today’s readers. Today’s electrocuted readers, accustomed to reading quickly and briefly on small screens. And, yes, goodbye to all of them, at least for as long as this book lasts and might last. Unplug from external inputs to nourish yourselves exclusively on internal electricity. And—warning! warning!—at least in the beginning and to begin with, that’s the idea here, the idea from here onward. Consider yourselves warned.)

Or better still: To begin like this?

At the heart of the book, it is a novel about writers and writing, particularly Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a story part inspired by Gerald and Sara Murphy (see this New Yorker story, large parts of which are drawn on in the novel https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/19...). In particular, a letter from Gerald (the prototype for the Dick Diver character) to Fitzgerald, written after the Murphy's older son died suddenly of spinal meningitis, and quoted at the start of my review gives rise to this novel's title and one of its recurrent themes.

However, The Invented Part is about so much more besides, and to this reader the 'more' unfortunately detracted from the core.

In many respect, this is a novel that acknowledges, proudly, its 'faults', but also one that highlights the type of reader that it suggests would not appreciate the book, a reader for the Kindle/smartphone age (a particular obsession of the narrator):

A reader who moves his increasingly deformed thumb increasingly quickly to, later, bring it in to his mouth. And suck it. Like a sleepy newborn waiting to be told a story. And that that story, please, be brief and simple and fun and no long sentences and parentheticals and parentheses, right?

There is plenty of digression in the text, which generally is a literary approach I admire (indeed as a 'grownup' but not a writer, I think like that most of the time not just when feeling childish):

But there's still plenty of time to worry about these issues and, you'll ask, what was the purpose or reason for opening the door to let such a digression come out and play. Easy but not simple, because that is how grownups think (jumping from one point to another, like drawing/connecting dots) when they feel particularly childish and allow themselves to be carried off by guts of ideas, like loose pages swept away by a storm. Better: that is how (and there are people who take drugs for years to try, without achieving it, to think like that for a while) more or less grown up writers think twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year, to infinity and beyond. So wanting to think like that for a little while, because if the effect is too prolonged, the whole thing loses its charm.

But some of the digressions - e.g. a rather tagged on Rushdiesque story of the Karma family, in-laws of the sister of the writer around whom the book revolves - are more than just digressions; this particular 'digression' lasted 108 pages and was where my interest started to wane after a promising first 100 pages.

For my taste there was also a little too much of an unstructured brain-dump of information:

But everything I'm telling you, if you're so intrigued, you could've found out in a matters of seconds via Google ... Why didn't you just do that?

And the Lonely Man doesn't have the strength to tell him that, if that'd been the case, they'd never have had the conversation.

Albeit the organic nature of the work is key to Fresán's project. From an interview between translator and author (http://rochester.edu/College/translat...

Will Vanderhyden: Most of your books change over time, meaning subsequent editions are published with corrections, changes, and entirely new content. Like for instance, in the case of The Invented Part, you added some 60 pages of new material to the book as I was translating it. This tendency of yours to continuously rewrite, to add, reminds me, again, of Borges and his quintessentially postmodern ideas about the impossibility of an authentic or definitive original, about how all writing is rewriting, about how literature is alive and cyclically shifting with every reading, rewrite, translation, never fixed and never finished . . . Where does this impulse of yours come from? And, while we are it: can we call your novels novels?

Rodrigo Fresán: Let’s say that it’s hard for me to let go of my books (though it gets easier all the time: material fatigue as time goes by . . . ) When it comes to what I do, the truth is I don’t think much about genres and formats. I prefer to imagine that each one of my books is a different room in the same house that I am discovering as I move through it. Someday, I hope, I’ll climb up to the basement or descend to the attic.

On the subject matter, the heavy focus on pop culture, rather to the detriment of literature left me rather cold, particularly the repeated references to Pink Floyd, The Kinks and (worst of all, since it reminds one of the terrible Nobel Prize call) Bob Dylan:

How was he going to transmit all this, all these echoes and heartbeats, all this melancholic passion? With the charged and adolescent prose, packed with titles and names and styles and dates, of rock journalists - because all rock listeners are kind of rock journalists - in which he thought about Pink Floyd? Impossible. Useless. Idiotic. Not recommended.

Although the author does, to be fair, make a literary connection (interview at https://bombmagazine.org/articles/rod...

Fran G. Matute: You’re not just a Dylan fan, but his work has been important in your writing.

Rodrigo Fresán: Beyond the character, his work has influenced me a great deal on a technical, narrative level. I have learned so much from Dylan’s serpentine verses, certain inflections of his voice, the use of ellipsis in his songs, that way he has of telling or not telling things.

Still not worth a Nobel Prize in Literature though I'm afraid.

And the lists, a feature of the novel that rather annoyed me but is clearly key to his style. At one point the narrator, when discussing how foreign literature is often received in translation, makes the very valid observation that:

Sometimes there are even discussions that establish absurd connections and comparisons - convinced to the point of fanaticism, insisting on impossible chronological influences of something written there on something written here.

So in that spirit, I will claim Fresán is clearly a disciple of the David Walliams's approach to literature: if in need of some extra material simply write a list:

Blocked in his writing, the Young Man writes writers. A cast of proper nouns that he makes strange and sets in motion, marching them from here to there - like the lead soldiers of his childhood - pitting them against each other in eternal battles. Duels without the first blood of sharp knifefighters. Intrigues in ruined palaces. Men and women. Young and old.

A few examples.

The DJ Tomas Pincho (who found success in the US recording Iron Martin, a rap-dub-clunk version of the national and telluric poem about a fleeing gaucho).
....
The list is enormous - the names and faces get mixed up and confused more than once - and it keeps on growing.

Tomas Pincho a deliberately obvious nod to Thomas Pynchon, who alongside David Foster Wallace is the clear English speaking peer for this sort of work.

As for the translation, given the complexity of the text, and the multiple sources on which Fresán draws, Vanderhyden has done a magnificent job. This rather modest ('...luckily...') answer as to how he managed the translation, rather explains what an achievement it was: http://conversationalreading.com/six-...

WV: Well, luckily, I’m pretty familiar with a lot of Fresán’s references. The writers who come up most in The Invented Part—Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Burroughs, Cheever, the Brontë sisters, etc.—are writers I’ve read quite a bit. I grew up listening to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Bob Dylan. So I didn’t have to translate an entire culture of references like some translators have to. That made navigating the overload simpler.

I’m also familiar with writers writing in English who Fresán is stylistically and formally in conversation with (writers like Wallace, Gaddis, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Dennis Johnson). And I think that can be really helpful for a translator in terms of finding the right register in a translation.

That’s not to say it was easy. I still had to do a lot of research and I developed a knack for tracking down quotes that were originally written in English but that Fresán had translated into Spanish. A search engine well utilized is an incredible tool for a translator.

It also helps that Fresán provides an extensive acknowledgments section at the end of the book, listing many of the references that enter the book and/or informed his own research.

Still, some quotes and details were tricky to pin down. For example, there was one Nabokov quote I was never able to find. Something that he had supposedly translated from a Paris Review interview. In the end, I couldn’t track it down, and Fresán told me to just make it Nabokovian, remarking that Nabokov might appreciate such a forgery, and reminding me that, when it comes down to it, it’s all fiction.

Overall, an impressive achievement by author and translator and one for fans of pop culture and of Pynchon/Foster-Wallace - unfortunately I'm neither.

[Come Musica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se dovessi riassumere questo romanzo di oltre settecento pagine in tre parole direi: "È tanta roba!"

La sensazione costante che ho avuto sin dall'inizio e durante tutta la lettura, fino alla fine, è stata quella di entrare in un castello, di cui non si poteva conoscere a priori la planimetria e di essere condotta, pagina dopo pagina, in una stanza che corrispondeva a uno dei grandi romanzi della storia (contemporanea e non) oppure a uno dei pilastri della musica rock oppure a uno delle colonne del cinema.

La parte inventata è il primo volume di una trilogia scritta da Rodrigo Fresán ed è un scritto sulla scrittura, una prosa sulla prosa, una finzione sulla finzione, ma non basta, perché è tanto altro ancora.
È un continuo navigare nei mari della letteratura passando da Herman Melville (con Moby Dick) a Francis Scott Fitzgerald, passando per Hemingway, Philip Roth, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Omero (la protagonista però è Penelope), Stevenson, le sorelle Brontë, Tolkien (con il Signore degli anelli che diventa la Signora degli anelli), Harold Brodkey, Bram Stoker.
E dalla letteratura si passa alla musica rock con Bob Dylan, i Pink Floyd, Joan Baez, alla musica classica, per approdare poi al cinema con Odissea 2001, Patch Adams e tanto altro ancora.

"E ciò che vediamo ora è qualcosa di più o meno simile a questo:

( ( (( ((( (((( () )))) ))) )) ) )

L’artefatto in questione e le vibrazioni che emette. Le eccentriche onde concentriche che segnalano l’esatto punto dello stagno nel quale è appena affondata la pietra che abbiamo lanciato da qui, dall’eccentrico presente."

In questo libro ci si orienta se si è letto, ascoltato e visto tanto: e allora si sorride ogni volta che si incappa in una scena/personaggio/musica/libro noti.

Un libro che si interroga su cosa significhi scrivere bene: "«Scrivere bene è come nuotare sott’acqua e trattenere il fiato», ha scritto Francis Scott Fitzgerald. E leggendo questa frase alla fine di un volume di lettere dell’autore di Tender Is the Night alla figlia Frances «Scottie» Fitzgerald (c’è qualcosa di più tremendo di un padre che mette il suo stesso nome, solo con una leggera modifica ortografica ma non sonora, alla propria figlia?), lui non può fare a meno di ricordare che ha imparato a scrivere (a scrivere molto bene per la sua età) molto prima di quando ha imparato a nuotare (a nuotare molto male per la sua età)."

Un libro che offre tantissimi spunti di riflessione (ci sono anche pagine in cui si parla di virus che intaccano l'apparato respiratorio) e che se letto tutto d'un fiato non stordisce, anzi.

"Atterrato, pura energia particolare e accelerata, sua e nient’altro che sua, dopo molto tempo passato a fluttuare o ad annegare, non si è mai sentito così alto sul livello non del mare ma del punto in cui il fiume sbocca nel mare. O forse sì. Ma è passato così tanto tempo (le parentesi sono il passato) che è come se fosse la prima volta, forse anche l’ultima volta, ma a questo è meglio non pensare.
È tornato a casa – l’odissea continua – per poter uscire di nuovo.
«Domani comincio», si promette.
«E così che finisce», si dice."

Nota a margine: mi fa sorridere il fatto che sia incappata per la terza volta di seguito nella fine del mondo coincidente con lo scoccare della mezzanotte del primo gennaio del 2000 (cfr. Oltre Orwell e La valle dei banditi).

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t have a ton to say about The Invented Part aside from, DAMN! I loved everything about this book. It was smart. Funny. Witty. Right up my alley and references everything I love about books and art and film. Read the other reviews about this book as they are more erudite than mine. It’s a book lover’s book. And there’s 2 more!!! I gotta go start The Dreamed Part. Can’t wai……

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to begin.

Or better: How to begin?

This is how Fresán begins the first volume of his ‘Trilogía las partes’ (‘The Parts Trilogy’) : ‘The Invented Part’; and that’s exactly how I feel about attempting to write this review. How, or indeed where, to begin?

Perhaps start with the fact that it completely blew my mind? Good place. But it feels near impossible to convey into words just how friggin’ wonderful this book is. It’s a book for readers, writers, literary fans, books lovers and book hoarders. It’s a literary festival, and I can literally hear fireworks. It’s like crawling into a writer’s brain, one that’s constantly firing off all cylinders, staying there for a week and having a damn good rummage around.

Fresán’s technical skill and writing style is truly outstanding. Every single word was an absolute joy to read. Not one sentence is left to chance, and every page is meticulously crafted. Fresán’s skill as a wordsmith is absolutely up there with Gaddis, Gass and Pynchon. He is the modern postmodernist.

But what is the book actually about? Ha! Good question. I don’t think it’s a cop out to say that every reader is gonna have a different experience with this one. It’s essentially about a writer, ‘The Writer’, at different stages of his life (or different versions of that same writer), writing the book we’re reading. But just writing that statement oversimplifies and misses out many things. Fresán, in a few places, references Russian stacking dolls, and that’s kind of how the book unfolds. There’s an almost Inception-like story within a story within a story going on. It’s like one version of The Writer looking down upon another version of The Writer, who’s looking down upon another version, looking down upon another version, who’s also looking down upon another version, again with that other version looking down upon another version … oft! Hopefully you get the idea.

Towards the end Fresán writes about the art of writing and states that the ideal novel structure should be ‘beginning/middle/end/blow them away’, and that’s exactly what he does. The last 100 pages are possibly my favourite conclusion to a novel, ever. How he ties everything up is simply sublime.

There are many, many references to other writers and novels littered throughout, and I think each volume of the trilogy focuses on different favourites of Fresán’s. The main ones here are F. Scott Fitzgerald, in particular his novel ‘Tender is the Night’, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and William S Burroughs. There are also many music and pop culture references worth noting, which fans of Pink Floyd, The Kinks and The Beatles will certainly appreciate. 2001: A Space Odyssey, both Arthur C Clarke and Kubrick versions are also heavily referenced, particularly Hal.

One theme I particularly enjoyed, The Writer’s rants on the state of modern readers, reading on screens and the impact of mobile reading devices. How fantastic that we can all now take a library of well over 1000 books with us everywhere we go, that we’ll never read.

I could go on and on… I haven’t even mentioned Mr Trip, the wind-up tin man. But it’s Sunday morning and I have other books to get on with reading, probably as do you.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptionally difficult novel to review because, as my friend quipped, Fresan is 'doing everything at once'. Though this is prominently a cerebral affair about readers and writers, Fresan deftly accomplishes an undercurrent of emotional heft. One of the dimensions of Fresan doing 'everything at once' are the parts when The Writer protagonist speaks eloquently about the future of reading and writing, touching on the innate sadness of Writers, the solitude of work and how that work is sullied by the institution of Writing ( the politics of promotion, publishing, speaking, describing what his books 'mean').

If nothing else-- and for lack of better articulation about all the wonderful things Fresan is doing here--and all the polymath metafiction acrobatics aside (I'm not being dismissive here, Fresan's tricks of the trade are fucking incredible) I feel Fresan is speaking to me personally, validating all the time I spend alone reading.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

It disappoints me to say that readers just don't seem to be interested in reading Rodrigo Fresán at the moment. I found The Invented Part to be rather entertaining! It's a book that ought to engage readers. It was written for us. So, anyway, there are some tweets on X, posts on Bluesky, and you'll find reels on Instagram and TikTok.
#Fresán24 #TheInventedPart

[César · Rating 4 out of 5]

3'5

No sé exactamente la cantidad de meses que han transcurrido desde que vi la portada del hombre de hojalata por primera vez. Fresán ha sacado nuevo libro, nunca he leído a Fresán, parece que está en buena forma, más de quinientas páginas, quizá algún día. Recurrentes encuentros con el hombre de hojalata y maleta en mano fueron familiarizándome con el título, asociando portada y título a ese escritor argentino que parece estar presente en todos los prólogos de novelas norteamericanas recién traducidas a nuestro idioma y que parece escribir reseñas -por lo tanto, haber leído- sobre todas las novedades literarias de origen estadounidense. ¿Escribirá Fresán tan bien como lee? ¿Serán los libros de Fresán meras excrecencias o detritos de sus apasionadas y voraces lecturas? ¿Puede ser un gran lector un buen escritor? ¿Un lector tan obsesivo, absorbido, apasionado, mitómano?

El libro ha tenido éxito en su traducción inglesa, premio mediante al traductor por su buena, magnífica, traducción. ¿Por qué no aprovechar el hecho de compartir idioma con Fresán y tener la opción de leer la obra en su lengua original? Y no está nada mal. Hay en ella evidentes ecos de Foster Wallace y su prosa anfetamínica, enciclopédica, digresiva, capaz de acumular conjunciones copulativas hasta el desmayo; de Pynchon en ciertas ramificaciones de la trama dementes y adictas a la tecnomodernidad pero mucho más contenidas que en el modelo. Un tributo a estos dos y a muchos más escritores del panteón particular de Fresán, algo que no es necesariamente criticable porque todo lector para el que la literatura es su escafandra en un planeta sin oxígeno termina escribiendo un poco como sus escritores de cabecera, infectado por la prosa de sus libros favoritos. Y ya no sólo nos referimos al estilo; la parte inventada, la sustancia de las historias, se entremezcla con la realidad del lector y obtenemos réplicas exactas de famosos personajes en personas de carne y hueso o nuevas reencarnaciones, una vez más en personaje. La idea tramada parte de la realidad, se noveliza, y regresa a esa realidad en algún punto del espacio y el tiempo. Aquí deberíamos mencionar entonces a Scott Fitzgerald.

La idea de la novela es participar al lector del mecanismo mental de un escritor, de la forma en que las ideas surgen y se materializan en palabras escritas. Hay en la novela críticas a los nuevos soportes de lectura, a la nueva condición de los escritores más mercantiles, a la promoción y venta de la figura del escritor y cómo este termina en esclavo de las exigencias del negocio editorial, a la proliferación de lectores con la capacidad retentiva y la atención jibarizadas y a diversos aspectos de la disuelta realidad de nuestros días. Parece un viejo que grita a las nubes, con parte de razón pero, también, enyugado por su nostalgia. Lo propio de quien por edad ve pasar su mundo infanto-juvenil empaquetado de vuelta al olvido. Y la velocidad de lo que viene atronando ha roto su personal barrera del sonido.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Invented Part is not so much a novel as it is a sprawling, maximalist work of metafiction that stands in defiance to a frenetic digital culture that can't be bothered to read anything longer than 140 characters or (I'm looking at you, Booktube) more complex than the next derivative bestseller. So yes, there is a fair amount of "kids these days" and "Get off my lawn!" but that's about what I'd expect from a fiftysomething curmudgeon with idealistic views on creativity and creation. The fertile interplay between a writer's headspace and a writer's external environment is the unifying theme threaded throughout the stream-of-conscious ramblings; the seemingly disparate chapters following different characters with no real plot or aim in mind; the extended ruminations on Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and the relationships between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and their patrons in France during the Roaring Twenties; and not to mention the tragedy of the writer's doomed parents during Argentina's period of political unrest, as well as their collapsing marriage intertwined with their and their son's favorite book, Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Fed up with the state of literature in the twenty-first century, Fresán's unnamed writer would make the whole world his imaginative playground, not realizing that it already is.

In unjust times, when everything seems to settle for the bare minimum: abbreviating, reducing, miniaturizing, and when he, from action to reaction, is expanding like a gas, resolving to occupy all available space, repeating himself and correcting himself and repeating himself again.

The Invented Part is amazingly quotable.

A book that - aired or aerated - would be like the stand-up comedian of itself, all alone, in a club on the last night of the end of the world. . .

A book like antimatter, like the anti-material that - its energy so dark - will turn into another book, in another dimension. . .

A book that would invite you in with a "Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story" and that, once you're there, would push you over the edge and, as you fall headlong into the void, would shout at you, "But why'd you believe me? Didn't your parents ever tell you not to talk to strangers?" . . .

A book that's toxic - both for its author and readers - but a book that, once processed and digested, the fever broken, functions as a kind of exorcism, leaving behind someone who, after feeling like hell, looks up at the sky and smiles that smile of prayer-card saints.

There's certainly plenty to disagree with Fresán's writer on - the blanket condemnation of ebooks, the narrow perspective of literature as thunderingly exalted Art (hey, I love me a good Warhammer 40k novel), and the irritating portrayal of women as either crazy, airheaded, or as muses rather than creators themselves. But Fresán's fiftysomething narrator is intentionally and ironically flawed despite his pretensions to godhood. That's another misunderstanding one encounters among readers - the idea that the protagonist, as the character we identify with the most, is supposed to be correct in all things, like the infallible god of their setting.

[Livietta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Queste 4 stelle non sono 5 solo per le critiche alla lettura digitale.
per il resto è stato un viaggio stranissimo e bellissimo. Libro strano, circolare. Non è un libro di trama.
Si parla di scrittura, di scrittori, di prosa. E' un insieme di scatole cinesi disegnate da Escher, in cui ci si perde, ma rimanendo sempre attaccati ad un appena visibile filo rosso.
Mi è successa la stranissima cosa di commuovermi senza realmente capire il perché: questo libro ha avuto la capacità si smuovere qualcosa che non so bene cosa sia. E non credo che riuscirò mai a scoprirlo, neanche rileggendolo.
L'accostarsi di vari stili invoglia ad andare avanti, nonostante capoversi di decine di pagine: tutto sembra tranne che un mattone, e alla fine mi sono trovata con il desiderio che non finisse mai e allo stesso tempo una voglia matta di ricominciarlo.
Intanto, mi ha convinto a conoscere meglio Fitzgerald. Per il momento ho attaccato l'epistolario (bellissimo!), ma potrei anche rileggere Tenera è la notte, la cui lettura risale ormai a diversi anni fa.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rodrigo Fresan is one of those twenty first century Latin American superstars that you definitely need to check out. He is one of the true masters of 'metafiction' in this new century that are worth mentioning. This is the second book from him that I have finished so far after Kensington Gardens. In this, as in his previous book, he challenges the concept of modern fiction by concocting a new blend that seamlessly intertwines long digressive episodes of highly illuminative & speculative prose with elements of a literary biography and 60's and 70's pop culture and counterculture, as well as his particular penchant for his muse, the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and the 70's British psychedelic rock group, Pink Floyd.

The dazzling highlights of this book comes only after lengthy digressions of around 300 pages or so, and it comprises a rather elaborate chapter in the second part of the story that describes the last days of the life of Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, during the writing process of his last work of fiction titled Tender is the Night, and his numerous associations during his time at the French riviera, most notably, the American writer Ernest Hemingway and the aristocratic couple, Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara. This section with its dizzylingly intricate structural pyrotechnics is, for me, some of the best sections of prose I have recently read.

This amazing section is followed by another where the author displays his penchant for 60's and 70's pop culture, and particularly the history of the progressive rock movement that reigned supreme during that period, and the section is replete with more than generous mention of all those prog rock groups including Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd (and especially their mid 70's opus Wish You Were Here), Van der Graaf Generator. He likes to say that Pink Floyd were the only great band that produced timeless music and all the others were just fancy upstarts. This is one thing that is particularly contentious and is one which I am wont to disagree completely with the author. This is what he writes about them:

'...technical sophistication with a casual elegance approximated only- just a little, not much- by Genesis, already sans the histrionic Peter Gabriel......Luckily for him (Yes and their covers anticipating the Avatar silliness and Jon Anderson's little voice were never a problem; Mike Oldfield was a species of Pink Floyd crossed with Liberace; King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator were too hermetic and virtuosic; and the truth is that Ian Anderson and his flute and his shepherd stork poses make you feel a little embarrassed for him.......all those diversions, products of adolescent hormonal curiosity, didn't last long. And Tom returned to his same desert oasis as always. Pink Floyd was unique, they began and ended in Pink Floyd. Their music- their harmonic climates and sonic sequences- remained classically modern and modernly classic'

So Mr. Fresan thinks that Pink Floyd was the only timeless band. Wrong. I am a devotee of 70's prog rock and I think Yes and King Crimson were the most instrumental and sophisticated bands during that period, and I must say that Steve Howe was the greatest guitarist of that era and Steve Hackett was as good a guitarist as David Gilmore, if not better.

That said, I must once again contend that the random and lengthy digressive episodes do not stop here. Indeed, even reading this from the perspective of a devotee of modern metafiction, this book reads rather strange and unusual. Rodrigo Fresan has created here something that I would like to call a metafiction 'hybrid'- and particularly one that hangs rather loosely on the sleeves. Call it 'speculative' fiction. Or even 'digressive' fiction. Or even non-fiction.

The writer concentrates the last section exclusively on the role of books or fiction in this modern 'multitasking' era. And even the role of writers in general in this modern age. Here's what he has to say:

'...Personally, I don't worry about the future of the literary book. There will always be a happy resistance reading Proust and Joyce and, probably, courtesy of gratuitous pirating or sold authors' rights, there might even be more people trying, at least for a few pages, to read Proust and Joyce. There's no crisis there; in what we call literature. Literature will find a way to survive; and a few days ago I read a book where it was suggested that literature's salvation would come from wealthy melancholics who would take exclusive control of their favorite authors' novels, to be read by them alone, in exchange for sizable sums....'

[Gaspar Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

En varias oportunidades, Fresán hace referencia a los libros tralfamadorianos de Vonnegut, donde todo se lee al mismo tiempo, donde "no existe relación particular entre los mensajes excepto que el autor los ha escogido cuidadosamente; así que, al ser vistos simultáneamente, producen una imagen de la vida que es hermosa y sorprendente y profunda. No hay principio, ni centro, ni final, ni suspenso, ni moraleja, ni causas, ni efectos."

Este libro es un poco así, o quiere serlo. El problema que tiene, es que no lo es, porque los libros tralfamadorianos eran exactos, y "La parte inventada" es torpe, en el buen sentido de la palabra. Va tropezándose sobre ella misma y eso la hace interesante. Se arma un palimpsesto donde no importa mucho lo que estaba sucediendo, sino, veamos donde nos lleva esto, como un montaje donde cada escenografía tapa a la anterior pero dejando huecos que advierten de lo que está siendo tapado.

A veces Fresán quiere ser DFW, a veces Perec, y ahí es cuando menos funciona, porque la gracia de esta "novela" es que, como un mago que saca pañuelos de un sombrero, nunca se detiene de lanzar cohetes luminosos. Fresán es tan hábil con el lenguaje y tan rápido y conciso, que arma en estas 550 paginas alrededor de 5 novelas que se entrecruzan y que, más que personajes, nos presentan a la misma novela como actor principal, que va mutando y se va criticando a si misma, partiéndose y volviéndose a armar. Si bien todo el tiempo está diciendo que es un libro sobre la escritura, creo que se volvió más bien un libro sobre un libro, como si estuviésemos en la escena de Micky Mouse en Fantasía, Fresán haciendo magia con las palabras y el libro multiplicándose, amontonándose uno sobre otro, tratando de tomar aire pero finalmente siendo sepultado en una avalancha de partes inventadas.

[Sebastian Uribe Díaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

El cintillo del libro lo promociona como "La novela total". Esta vez creo que la frase trasciende el márketing. "La parte inventada" es una novela que parece encerrar todos los temas del mundo. Una sátira de nuestro tiempo. Genialidad que se percibe en cada párrafo. Ideas que llevan al lector, de forma inteligente y nostálgica a explorar su propia mente. Un texto que te da ganas de al terminar, salir corriendo a escribir, pero sobretodo a LEER. Aquí va mi reseña http://unperroromantico.blogspot.com/...

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

545 pages of masturbating to Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, F Scott Fitzgerald, and Stanley Kubrick... to name the big ones.

Do you want your literature to feature repeated references to Twitter, WhatsApp, hashtags and Justin Bieber?

Absolutely zero prose quality to speak of. The first 50 pages were somewhat enjoyable, but talk about falling off a cliff. I’d guess the majority of this book is simply regurgitated factoids from Wikipedia.

Avoid like the plague.

[Muzzy]

All due respect to Fresan, who is a very clever and cunning author. And to the remarkable translation.

Sorry, I couldn't do it. It's not Fresan's fault. It's just too too close to a big dream project I've been needling away at for years. I would prefer to finish my own work without any interference or competition.

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

a mixed bag - variations of boring and incredibly interesting. Felt like it took me forever to get through but I always enjoyed it when I picked it up.

[Mike E. Mancini]

A modern epic that never feels like an epic in the classic sense of the word. Fresán has complete control of his sprawling, seemingly infinite story. He manages a variety of dialogues on a sundry of subjects with an ease and thoroughness that left this reader shaking his head in awe.
To read it but once is to do a disservice to one’s self, as well as to the author. This is an absolute titan of contemporary literature and should not be missed by anyone interested in works of art that will be relevant 100 years from now.

[Regan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Stars, Review Forthcoming

[Braden Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Rodrigo,

You wrote: "Is there anything as irreal as so-called realism?" That's exactly it. I just haven't heard it put so succinctly, so perfectly packaged, filled with paradoxical bubble wrapping, one of the world's best inventions (as you wrote, so cynically!). Whatever the "real" means, it tends to be as elusive and illusive as it is apparent and self-evident. In some ways, books like "Solenoid" read as far more realistic to me, at least in terms of the psychodynamics of memory, or phenomenologically even, than something like "Madame Bovary." But that's besides the point. What I really want to say is goddamn you to hell for writing the book that I wanted my book, "Solarium", to be. It's not that I think we wrote the same book, but what I was trying to do in my first amateur novel, written in the heights of grad-school ennui, you managed to do with elegance, grace, sorrow, and more importantly, joy.

Like my book (which I will henceforth cease embarrassingly comparing it to as if it were some kind of personal watermark), yours is a book about books, about a writer obsessed with other writers, trying to invent fictions, open-ended short stories, fragmented Chinese biji notaries, using the plots of other lives and soundtracks (eg. Pink Floyd, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Bob Dylan, and The Kinks), to indirectly touch upon a deep trauma, an open wound. It is too bad your good friend Roberto Bolaño would never be able see the triumphs you have achieved in "The Invented Part." If anything, the author of 2666 would beam admiringly at a book equally ambitious to his 2666, even if it reads more humorously, with a quippier, more schmalzy, waltzy, singsong musicality ringing through it, a complicated book, with "seven channels broadcasting simultaneous programs that are all one." Truly, a manuscript meant to cope with all of life, from juvenescence to senescence, the cradle to the coffin. Your descriptions of old age and being a child are, for me, Proustian (an allusion which you, self-referentially, make obvious to the reader).

As much as "The Invented Part" is one large defense mechanism ad nauseum, it stands tall as one gorgeous literary monolith, one that I will continue to inspect curiously, like one of Kubrick's hominins, as I push forward into "The Dreamed Part."

- Braden

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is often said that Hollywood types love movies about movies, so it feels a little bit cheap, as a literature fan, to enjoy books about writers, especially books about writers writing the very book one is reading -- but this is a really good book. The powerful sense of an actual person speaking to you was reminiscent of the best of David Foster Wallace, but the intricacy and complex games seemed almost Joycean. It's one of those novels where you think, my god, how can there be so much stuff in this book?? But it doesn't feel overly clever or pleased with itself. It's truly a delight to read.

[Ian Mond]

You don’t know this about me—and why would you?—but I usually have two books on the go.* There’s my main squeeze, where I aim to knock out thirty thousand words per day,** and then there’s the long-term project: usually a doorstopper, where I chip away ten to fifteen pages at a time. [Miss Macca](https://ianmond.substack.com/p/books-...) was such a novel.

As it happens, the [Two Month Review](https://threepercentproblem.substack....) podcast—courtesy of Open Books and Chad Post— takes a similar approach: reading a novel slowly over the course of two months. The first title they tackled, way back in 2017, was The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán. It’s a terrific choice because the novel—broken into seven distinctive parts—lends itself to being discussed section by section.

This isn’t to say that I loved The Invented Part. I liked stretches of it, but I wasn’t nearly as effusive or in awe as Chad, co-host Brian Wood or the parade of enthusiastic guests who rotate through each episode.

According to the back cover copy, The Invented Part is about a writer—known only as “The Writer”—who, disillusioned with and alienated from literary culture (much like most of Substack***), travels to the Hadron Collider and merges with the God Particle. The Writer now exists in everything and everywhere… all at once.

The novel is nowhere near as linear. The first time you get any hint that The Writer is one with the God Particle is a blink-it-or-miss-it mention deep in the second section. Instead, The Invented Part opens with a cascade of quotes from a rogues gallery of writers—Cheever, Heller, Murdoch, Easton Ellis, even Bob Dylan—talking about storytelling, the nature of fiction, the slippery quality of truth. This is Fresán making abundantly clear, if the title wasn’t plain enough, that what we’re about to read—even the bits that are true—is a constructed reality.

If that hasn’t already triggered your pretension alarm, then the first section of the novel, beginning with a three-page parenthesis on the shape of question marks and the idea of starting a book with a parenthesis, will have it screeching in your ear. I can see certain readers—those allergic to experimental, post-modern guff— stopping at this point. That would be a shame, because as reflexive and metafictional as The Invented Part is, it’s also overflowing with absurd ideas, brilliant jokes and historical tangents. Is it confounding? Yes. Surreal? Definitely. Hilarious? Fuck yeah. But never, ever dull.

The seven sections, which, allegedly, Fresán wrote simultaneously, feature, amongst other things, The Writer as a young boy; his sister, Penelope; a Young Man and a Young Woman making a documentary about The Writer and The Writer panicking over a possible cancer diagnosis. It all (mostly) links together, but really, each section is an excuse for Fresán to explore creativity in all its forms—whether it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (an emotional lodestone for The Writer, because he remembers his argumentative parents reading it on the beach when he was a kid), the life and excesses of William S. Burroughs, or the music of Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett. Fresán is also a science fiction fan, and his love of the genre shines through.

The second section, entitled “The Place Where The Scene Ends So The Forest Can Begin”, is the highlight of the novel. It’s divided in two. In the first half, the Young Man and Young Woman, working on the documentary, wander around the Writer’s home, examining his library, checking out his books and films. This section is good, especially the Young Man’s hunger to be a famous writer and his hankering for the Young Woman.

But it’s the second portion where things get properly weird. We shift focus to The Writer’s sister, Penelope (there’s a whole Odysseus thread running through the novel that I have no time to go through), who marries into the ultra-wealthy Karma family. When Penelope’s husband, Maximiliano, ODs, she and he are moved wholesale to the family’s compound somewhere in Argentina. That’s where the weirdness starts, including Max’s sister, the vapid and disaster-prone Hiriz, somehow creating a race of mutant, giant green cows. I’ve never laughed so hard.****

Other parts of the novel come close to Penelope’s experience with the Karma family.**** One section involves The Young Man stealing his dead best friend's book, which he passes onto The Writer, who loves it. Then there’s the section where a single scene is repeated again and again—also featuring The Young Man and The Young Woman—with subtle changes each time until the narrative completely unravels.

Still, nothing compares to the family Karma, who deserve their own cinematic universe.

The Invented Part is a long book. It’s also, at times, a frustrating one. But if you love meta-fiction and novels about writers and leaps of wild imagination and narratives that collapse in on themselves, then I heartily recommend this and The Two-Month Review podcast.

*What, did you think I was going to admit to something naughty?
**Go on, ask me how I know I’ve read 30,000 words. Go on…
***Burn!
****Obviously an exaggeration, I have laughed so hard. But the cow stuff and all the shenanigans involving the Karma—both stupid and evil—are lol worthy!
*****There are several entertaining rants about e-books, which is ironic because I was reading the novel on a Kindle. I am the problem!