![]() ![]() It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. ![]() This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture. Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets ( The Unfortunates by B. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves ( Composition No. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he read. This is an introduction to a novel you will never read. In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly:
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