The People of Paper – Salvador Plascencia
Plascencia’s First Novel is a Meta-fictional Masterpiece
Feb 9, 2009
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Salvador Plascencia is a graduate from Whittier College and holds an MFA from Syracuse University. His first novel, The People of Paper, is a complication of trysts retold in an Italo Calvino manner that spans within the lives of a community where the citizens of El Monte have forged war against Saturn.
Story Within Story Conflict
Without any forewarning the novel opens up in heartbreak. Federico De La Fe’s wife, Merced has just left him and his daughter for another man. Federico De La Fe and his daughter, Little Merced leaves their home in Mexico and crosses the border to El Monte where they sought to forget their painful past. Under the watchful eye of Saturn, Federico De La Fe wages war against the One with Many Names.
Hidden underneath lead tortoise’s, Federico De La Fe and his El Monte crew hide their thoughts from Saturn, blocking out everything that might be of interest to him, thinking only of “fringed petals and green stems, pink and white carnations bloom[ing] from tight buds and the air scented by fertilizers and flowers, and crop dusters mist[ing] the petals with insecticide.”
Character Medleys
Here, the strategies of warfare are often fought for the medleys of the heart. The characters in this book use their physical pains as an anesthesia for sadness and emotional wounds:
Merced de Papel—she is an origami creation, created through the precise hands of Antonio, the surgeon who healed with paper hearts and paper lungs. Whenever anyone loved her they were left with paper cut wounds. “The men who came to love Merced de Papel did so with caution…when they left her apartment their lips and penises glistened….”
Federico De La Fe--singed his flesh to forget about his painful memories. His wife left him because he pissed in bed, an ailment he cured through the burning and singing of his flesh.
Cameroon—needles were the remedy for her sadness. Saturn, though who has many names himself, never calls her by her actual. From the bee stings that penetrates her flesh, the scent of honey bees follows her and that is how Saturn will always remember her.
Sandra—doesn’t want to forget her father so he comes alive in her memory. Every night her father’s ghost comes back to haunt her with his fists and limbs that bruises her body and every night she is reminded of her father’s death. But in order to forget what happened between her and Froggy, she lets this happen.
Saturn aka Salvador Plascencia—writes to forget though ironically this book was what caused his and she who may not be named's breakup. He looks upon these people’s lives to see his own, an escapist strategy to forget, but only to be reminded constantly of his pain.
A Meta-fictional Masterpiece
A mega meta-fictional creation, Plascencia delves into the beings and thoughts of creation and writer in his first novel. With magical ease, Plascencia manages to interweave these characters’ lives into his own. The unique formatting and layout of this book resembles a funhouse with the text running down the page in columns according to point of view and with whole sections blotched out by the thoughts of Baby Nostradamus.
According to award wining author, T. C. Boyle, “The People of Paper is a novel like no other…Calvino, Borges, and Garcia Marquez will come to mind, but Plascencia’s novel is a creature of its own, firmly grounded and soaring at the same time.”
Plascencia, Salvador
The People of Paper
Harcourt, Inc.
2005
0-15-603211-2
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