I picked up this book because of the flap copy, which starts like this: “This book is unique as no other novel can claim to be: one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations of the same work of fiction.” As the flap copy goes on to explain, the book “comprises ten chapters, and the fifteen pairs of paragraphs in each of these are shuffled anew for each published copy. No two versions are the same.” In his foreword to the book, Umberto Eco says this: “If we wanted to arrange the pieces of an infinitely variable story, it would be better for the textual blocks to be ‘prepared,’ like pieces of Lego, each already designed to fit together with other pieces in multiple ways. Such is the case with Balestrini’s book, whose game is ‘regulated’ in the sense that it does not aim to celebrate fortuity so much as the possibility of an elevated number of possible outcomes” (ix).
Unfortunately, the experience of reading Tristano was more frustrating than not. It’s a short book, but I’m with Josh Coblentz, whose review on HTMLGIANT describes “the annoyed trudge that was the experience of reading this book.”
I am not necessarily a plot-driven reader, or a character-driven one; I can sometimes enjoy a book for its mood, its language, its concept, its setting, its descriptive passages. And I get that Balestrini is playing with what a novel is, what meaning is, how meaning is created: there are lots of moments where the text could be describing itself. “A huge pile of sentences that don’t mean anything. The making and breaking of language” (69). “All this seems to mean something but in reality it has no meaning whatsoever” (55). “Many sentences recur” (18). “You could even start from another episode and obtain a slightly different story. Though the question is rather irrelevant” (5). “Without any sign of organisation or notions of the beginning or end of a logical development” (43). But there just wasn’t enough to interest me. There are people in this book, but all the proper nouns (people’s names, places) are replaced with the letter C, so it’s hard to figure out what’s going on: it seems like there might be a woman and her husband and another man she’s sleeping with, but who knows. I leave you with this passage:
One thing transforms into another by means of a leap. Signs that are surprised and cut by the vital system of the current communication. Only individual parts but not the whole. I don’t know what that means. C turned round completely naked. Where are the things. There’s nothing else in the mirror. The completely empty wardrobe. There would be many other things to add but it’s not worth it. (58)
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