The Invented Part (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
There are plenty of novels that are innovative and thoughtful as well as beautifully written. Then there are the books that push the boundaries of what literature can do, books that literally change your DNA as a reader. THE INVENTED PART by Rodrigo Fresan is just one of these. It's almost beyond description, but it fouses on a writer, his sister and the divorce of their parents. And yet, this description is surely a disservice. It's really about books (Tender is The Night, Slaughterhouse-Five, Naked Lunch, plus tons more ) and writers (William Burroughs, John Irving, Philip K Dick plus tons more) and music (The Kinks, The Beatles, Pink Floyd plus tons more). Along the way literature, pop culture and history are thrown into a blender but handled with the most capable and deft hands because the writing, the writing, is simply brilliant. Funny, ecstatic, generous and quite literally unlike anything I've ever read before, THE INVENTED PART is a warm-hearted journey through a brilliant imagination and what a novel is capable of doing.
— From Mark RecommendsDescription
"A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."--Jonathan Lethem
An aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically dramatic manner: traveling to the Hadron Collider, merging with the God particle, and transforming into an omnipresent deity--a meta-writer--capable of rewriting reality.
With biting humor and a propulsive, contagious style, amid the accelerated particles of his characteristic obsessions--the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the music of Pink Floyd and The Kinks, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the links between great art and the lives of the artists who create it--Fres n takes us on a whirlwind tour of writers and muses, madness and genius, friendships, broken families, and alternate realities, exploring themes of childhood, loss, memory, aging, and death.
Drawing inspiration from the scope of modern classics and the structural pyrotechnics of the postmodern masters, the Argentine once referred to as "a pop Borges" delivers a powerful defense of great literature, a celebration of reading and writing, of the invented parts--the stories we tell ourselves to give shape to our world.
Rodrigo Fres n is the author of nine books of fiction that together compose an expansive, interconnected fictional universe--a complex system of storylines, resonances, and self-reference that call to mind the works of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Roberto Bola o.
Will Vanderhyden received fellowships from the NEA and Lannan Foundation to work on The Invented Part.