/lit/ - Literature

>>13987059
[cont.]

And then there's the endless joy of opening each envelope up and pulling out and unfolding and reorienting each letter, and then afterwards folding it away again. The back cover and inner dust jacket panel blurbs on my copies, as well as a couple of online reviews I glanced over, are stuck fixating on the "somewhat conspiratorial thrill of reading other people's mail" without fully appreciating the delight of participating in the characters' letters as objects, like interactive art exhibits, the story carried by its ephemera (including even typos and written corrections) rather than textually abstracted from it and forced into the format of a typical book.

There is also a great deal of room for subtle detail in such an approach to a story. Most immediately and obviously in the first book is the revelation that Griffin has designed all of the postcards he sends, produced through Gryphon Cards, and that Sabine, aside from the hand-drawing and doodling enmeshed in all of her postcards, works in an official capacity as the "Philatelic Designer" of her islands, and that she has produced all of the stamps on her postcards herself. Similar to this in the second book is the added dynamic of Griffin's internationally drifting postage stamps, and of Sabine's notebook doodling around her postcards (although how does this work: does she not send them to Griffin?—it can't be a notebook collected after the story's events, because the villainous stranger of the third book asks after her notebook).

The subtlety with which some of these details are injected allows the reader to gainfully and enjoyably flip back through the books again and again, reviewing each postcard and letter several times by the end, picking up on more and more each time. Some of these are thematic: of particular importance is the title of each of Griffin's Gryphon Cards cards, progressing in the first book as follows, each passing one increasingly pertaining to the narrative: Drinking Like a Fish, Kangaroo with a Red Hat, The Alchemist, Man Descending a Staircase, Frankie and Johnny, The Blind Leading the Blind, and Pierrot's Last Stand; in the final postcard, sent by Sabine, the heading is "The ceremony of innocence," lent even greater significance by the fact that she had not once sent a heading'd postcard prior.