/lit/ - Literature

Nabokov or something wrote a layered marginalia book right?

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In case it baits more replies, here's my Griffin & Sabine review/thoughts:

>This brief trilogy most especially appeals for the creativity with which it engages with the medium of the Book. Although probably a closer cousin of the pop-up book and the artist's book, of things like the Futurist Manifesto and The Medium is the Massage and the image-essays of Ways of Seeing, I have my own biases, and I cannot flip through Bantock's trilogy without thoughts of the genre of "experimental literature," classically embodied in Sterne's Tristram Shandy and more recently exemplified by Gass' The Tunnel and Danielewski's House of Leaves.

>Bantock has some awareness of this, or at least wears a love of certain writers on his sleeve, paying repeated homage to Yeats (in Griffin's initial London address, in the cat Minnaloushe, in Vereker's friend Maud) and perhaps obliquely referencing Joyce in Griffin's Dublin postcard ("I came to Dublin because it was my grandfather's birthplace & because of the powerful words that have been written here.") and perhaps drawing the name Vereker from Henry James' The Figure in the Carpet, whose theme of secrets held by "lovers supremely united" ties in closely with the implicities in the Griffin & Sabine trilogy. Beyond this, I'm sure there are many other allusions I missed, especially amid all the vaguely mythological and alchemical and Jungian imagery, and there are occasional references to particular visual artists whose mention I was less equipped to appreciate.

>This is not primarily experiment in style, though, as in Yeats or Joyce or James, but rather an experiment in the physicality of the book itself, experiment alive with a playful self-consciousness about print media. The story itself is serviceable more than anything else: it is technically a standard epistolary novel of the ilk of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and it is a little cheapened by the awkwardness of Bantock's narrative leaps between each individual book in the trilogy, and even more cheapened by the Frolatti character and the suddenness with which the narrative wraps up, although I'm not sure how else it could have been done, and Bantock's use of Griffin as a mouthpiece for an indirect apology ("I haven't decided what happens next. To tell the truth, I don't know about the story, but I quite like the pictures.") at least suggests that he wasn't oblivious to it.

>But these are art books more than narratives, and the art is where the strength lies. The pictures are pretty, yes, and consistently thematically important, sure, but I especially like the manner in which Bantock takes advantage of the two-sidedness of the page with his postcards, each postcard's aesthetic face presented first, to one's right while reading, followed by a disclosure of its written contents to one's left upon turning the page. Each postcard and letter elegantly flows into the next, the message previously sent always sitting beside its yet-undisclosed response.

>>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.

>>13987071
[hm, forget to greentext]

>The visuality of Bantock's approach also allows for a layered recurrence of imagery, for example Griffin's final postcard to Sabine in the third book (heading'd "The Gordian Mirror"—an especially loaded name, Sabine's previously implied role as Griffin's shadow self being made out to be a Gordian Knot) is a directionally and chromatically inverted version of a card he had sent in the beginning of the second book. And then that final postcard closing the trilogy, the synthesis and integration of Griffin and Sabine's styles, Sabine's writing but Griffin's Gryphon Cards logo, and the subtle recurrence of that fish-and-wine-glass image from Griffin's first postcard in book one, lent yet greater significance by Maud's Jungianly informed Tarot reading with Griffin, cards of "Unthinking Drinking, the goldfish escaping from the glass" as well as "the Blind Leading The Blind" appearing and being "emblematic of a number of minor themes, such as escape and rite of passage."

>Bantock not only appreciates the Book as a tangible and malleable Object, but also appreciates postcards and letters and envelopes and postage stamps as the same, and weaves the Objecthood of these items into the Objecthood of the Book with smooth panache. At an initial glance and an initial reading it is hard not to describe Bantock's Griffin & Sabine trilogy as "cute," and that cuteness holds out, but there is a depth and seriousness or at least expansive creativity to these books, which, even if they are not "high literature," makes "cute" seem too weak a designate...instead, I'd say that these books are a "delight."

>>13987071
if you glue an envelope in a book you don't have a book anymore 2bh you have a letter that is contained in an envelope that some nigger contains in a book and makes you pay bucks for it

>>13987129
should have used a folder

>>13987129
One could have a standard book with an appendix stuffed with letters, pictures, legal documents, etc.

>>13987175
are these documents printed onto the book's pages? if not it's not a book.

>>13987188
What would you call the rest of it, then, random paper?

>>13987196
they are documents. usually you file them in a folder or cabinet or somewhere else

>>13987218
No, what is the rest of the book if a book incidentally includes documents?

Why not just focus on writing a good text instead of slapping on a bunch of gimmicky BS?

>>13987539
Ideally one does both at once

>>13986777
Pale Fire, I guess.