by Salvador Plascencia
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Product Description
THE PEOPLE OF PAPER is an astonishing debut novel about the anguish of lost love. Author Salvador Plascencia, a "once-in-a-generation talent" (George Saunders), weaves together the stories of a large cast of colorful characters, including: a disgruntled monk, a father and daughter, a gang of carnation pickers, and a woman made of paper.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Definitely get the hardcover edition!, 2008-07-02
This book feels great. Whatever they did, I wish more books felt like it. It may be the canvas on which the beautiful illustration rests or the ink or the tight binding, but I love cradling it, sometimes even when I'm not in the middle of reading it.
And this is surely intentional--much of the book cries and pleads for you to hold it close and to remember that it is physical, whether this be through typography or cuts in pages or the use of multiple perspectives per page. It hops, taunting: "Try to make me digital! Try to make me audio! Try!"
I could talk about the story, but if you're not sucked in by the romance of the artifact, you're not worth it.
Also, the red ink that makes up the flowers on both covers bleeds onto your hands while you grip the book and read, and you become as one of El Monte's many flower pickers, stained and sometimes bleeding their own ink. The black, the outline of 53 and Baby Nostradamus, smudges like so many notes left on Merced de Papel, more so when wet. Either way you become one of those made of paper.
Bleeding ink is likely accidental, but intention doesn't matter.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 The last thirty pages change everything, 2008-03-24
This books is like being inside someone's head as they are dealing with great sadness and loss while they try to squash/heal it by creating an imaginary world with people who are all dealing with the same/similar pain. Sadly, he never escapes his own pain by chronicling theirs. The book makes sense only after page 200 or so, but you want to keep reading before that - like a search for answers to questions you don't even know you're asking. If you are still totally lost and hate this book and don't want to finish it, page 218 mid page it tells you what the book is about and you have a light bulb moment.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
How to Read People, 2008-03-19
What a fascinating book! I really enjoyed it, but I am having a hard time explaining why - or even what the book is really about. I started to wait a while to write this to see if more understanding would come from further reflection, but decided I wouldn't know more then than I do now.
Through use of magical realism, Plascencia places us in the middle of a fight between: the author; his characters; and his real world friends. And the author and real world friends are also characters in the book. Or the characters are real and the author + friends are characters. Or something like that. Or not.
My recommendation: 1. Read the book. 2. YOU try to describe it to someone (other than saying "Trust me. You'll like it." 3. Be very, very wary of turtles.
Trust me. You'll like it.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A Very Novel Novel, 2007-08-01
Federico de la Fe is grieving for his wife who left him because he wets the bed. And he is leading an insane, futile, and destructive war against Saturn. Who is not only the planet Saturn but the author, Salvador Plascencia. That's the plot, I suppose. The book is packed with character sketches, meditations on the creative process, mind-bending inventions, including mechanical turtles, origami surgery, papercuts in intimate parts of the body, and its recurring theme, the pain of love and loss.
Author Plascencia is a fountain of creativity, but he is also repetitive and sometimes too clever. It is hard to really connect with the characters because the characters are too busy fighting a war with the author to develop themselves as three dimensional persons. They remain, mostly, people of paper.
The book is like a combination of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and James Joyce. It's intriguing, but hard to read, and hard to assimilate. It is a most novel novel. I recommend it but not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Very Moving, 2006-11-30
The aim of magical realism, like all fiction, is to find new, more accurate, ways to reflect real life--to show us ways to understand our own heartbreak and our own sorrow. Plascencia's novel is wonderfully inventive in doing just that. Not only does it have an interesting structure and many elements that are not seen in other texts (like the black blotches), but the style is also engaging and hard to get it out of your head. I loved it. I didn't want to finish it.
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