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Here's something I've been thinking about recently: why is it that as a nation we don't produce authors who write "fantastical" fiction, or "magical realism"? To clarify, I mean authors like Marquez, Pynchon, Borges, Calvino, Kundera, Rushdie? After much thought, I came up with Angela Carter and her grotesques. Not much really, considering how many books we publish ever year. We still seem entrenched in the realistic mode; detailing individual lives, insular and introspective. Maybe it's a echo of the death agony of the class system or just a literary tradition that can't be broken? I'd love to hear other people's thought's on the matter... I'm sure there's many examples I've missed??
Alessandro Barrico's fourth novel City, grows out of this grand tradition of magic realism but in many respects transcends it. If you were looking for the DNA thread that drives it and links it to the past you'd look for a helical mixture of Kundera and Calvino, entwined with Vonnegut and Murakami; but Baricco throws in several mutations to the mix. His main project seems to be narrative voice and the ownership of this voice. There is a constant theme throughout the book of humankind's division from themselves: how we are divided from the world. And there is multiple narrative jumps, several characters occupying the central role. So you have a sense where there is the overarching presence of Baricco and then a layer of multiplicitous narratives, a babble of voices, all laying claims to be heard. And two of these chacracters do not exist. So in a story, a fictional land, there are two characters, that even here do not exist, that in a sense, are two steps removed from reality. Yet their voice is as strong as any other. Baricco seems to be saying: how do we have any kind of voice in this modern age, how do we assert ourselves, how do we know we exist? The two main characters command centre stage for the majority of the time; and both are fabulists. Gould is a genius, who attends a college and is guided by 27 professors. He has two imaginary friends, and between them, they have created an imaginary boxer, Larry. His tale is entwined with Gould's own and to some degree, eventually supercedes it, fantasy becoming more real than reality. Gould meets Shatzy Shell and she becomes his guardian (he's only 15 and his Father and Mother are in absentia). Shatzy carries around a dictaphone which she records thought and ideas with, for her metaphysical westerns. And again, her imaginary narrative to some degree becomes more important than her, blots her out. City could be cited as a perfect example of the postmodern narrative: it has no denouement; it borrows from other texts and genres; it has no center; it is positively discontinuous and fragmented; and is deliriously self-conscious. And these could all be criticisms, ways to lay it bare and show it's emptiness. But City has a heart; and at it's (admittedly shifting) core, there is a promise of transgression and illumination.
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