In a message dated 3/15/00 11:01:14 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Someone told me there was a French novel out once
>that came in a box, the size of a trade paperback, and the chapters were
>on cards. The reader then was able to make their own novel every time
>by shuffling the cards. Anyone know what the title was of this book? Who
>wrote it?
Jay, you may be thinking of "Composition No. 1" by Marc Saporta. It consists
of 200 or so loose pages designed to be shuffled like playing cards -
combined by the reader into a potentially new text at each reading. Each page
length vignette - rendezvous with a mistress, a rape, a theft - takes place
in a different order and evokes a different story. Saporta writes: "A life is
composed of finite elements. But the number of possible sompositions is
infinite."
The citation above was by Multituli (pseudonym), writing on "In.S.OMNIA," a
computer bulletin board here in Seattle back in 1985. Multituli was
describing his collection of Depraved Books, such as "Rayeula" (Hopscotch) by
Julio Cortazar, which offers the reader two paths - the Low Road leading from
Chapter One to Chapter Two and so on, and the High Road which begins
73-1-2-116-3-84- and so on, hopscotching back and forth through the pages of
the book. Also, there is "Cent Mille Milliard de Poems" by Raymond Queneau,
consisting of ten sonnets on ten pages - But each page is in fact 14 pages,
as the pages are cut between each of the 14 lines, allowing the reader to
read line one from the first page, line two from the fifth page, line three
from the seventh page, for example. In all there are 10 to the 14th possible
sonnets in the book. Multituli also mentioned books-as-objects created by
Dieter Rot and others.
As a personal aside, Fluxlist often reminds of that long-gone BBS,
"In.S.OMNIA." But that was in the era of ASCII before the Internet blossomed.
There were no urls then, leading you to pictures. And correspondents were all
local. Also, there was still die Mauer (which couldn't hold back the river
any more than my nostalgia).
Tom G. as Frank Function
