Salvador Plascencia: The People of Paper
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, October 2005]
Though first met with a steady stream of publishers’ rejections, this breakout debut novel (McSweeney’s; 245 pgs; $22) from Guadalajara-born Salvador Plascencia eventually earned some grade-A love from Entertainment Weekly. The novel’s a compelling blend of playfulness and gloom. Some pages are set in three columns, with the prose under characters’ names as if it was dialogue in a play, and others have full-ink circles and holes where a character’s name would’ve been. What begins as a fantastical story of a father and daughter immigrating to California—encountering gangs of carnation pickers and a baby Nostradamus—becomes an authorial self-crucifixion over the loss of a girl. The novel’s characters—I imagine them as little paper Smurfs—grow resentful, and they do their best to revolt.
They might rather feel grateful, as their maker is inspired and skillful, creating a chewy richness in the prose not through feelings but through things, not through adjectives but through nouns. There are wonderful nouns: carnations and switchblades, limes and bees, chestnuts and shards, tongues and brushes. Take this: “Carmen Cansino shed syllables from her name and velvet curtains from her stage, rising, leaving a trail of draperies and scraps of paper cut from her birth certificate, to emerge as a star.” If I told you this sentence made perfect sense in the context of the novel I’d be lying. But isn’t it wonderful? The entire novel falls a bit short of being so. But it’s fresh, and promising, and a great deal of curious fun.
