Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.) - Softcover

Lu, Pamela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1891190040 ISBN 13: 9781891190049

Publisher: Atelos, 1998

Synopsis

Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel rocks. Lu manages to explore, critique, and worry about identity, location, self-expression, communication, shopping malls, orange dresses, and the future with glorious intelligence and laugh-out-loud humor, in the context of exquisitely wrought and very long sentences. One suspects that, like the character YJ, Lu "was always living and writing against a blind wall of cacophony that existed somewhere between plain sense and the din of cultural expectation and popular music." The narrator P (as well as her twenty-something friends L, R, YJ, C, A, and so on) thus occupies "the contemporary position of always being foreign to herself, a private predicament which necessarily played itself out on the public level, in the politics of making a literature that struggled to catch sight of itself, as if that could provide some assurance of its existence. We were using a borrowed language to add more words to our names ..." Where do we draw the line between fiction and autobiography? Frankly, when reading Pamela, we could care less. The truth of this writing is in its extreme excellence: we need no more.

About this title

About the Author:

Pamela Lu is also the author of Ambient Parking Lot and The Private Listener, a chapbook from Corollary Press. Additional writing appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error, and in periodicals such as 1913, Antennae, Call, Chain, Chicago Review, Fascicle, and Harper's. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Review:

Pamela: A Novel ... is [an] astounding work that inhabits a new fictive space, a space so odd and alluring that one looks up from it a little changed. ... Lu's provocative use of pronouns does nothing less than suggest a new sense of what the "I" might be and do. --Carole Maso, American Book Review

Instead of detailing events in the lives of its characters, [Pamela: A Novel] takes the explanations its characters have for each other and turns them into narrative. The project is fascinating, the writing exact and purposeful. --Brent Cunningham, Context

Pamela: A Novel is one of the finest books to emerge from the ardent, experimental writing scene in the Bay Area. ... Lu builds a social space and founds a society. --Robert Glück, The Stranger

Reading the word "I" in this novel becomes a mystical experience--an invitation to connect to the "I" in all of us. ... This is a work of "precision," as Robert Musil would say, "in matters of the soul." It extends the novel's capacity to think. --Aaron Kunin, Rain Taxi

While the new sentence--the prose wing of Language writing--strips narrative down to pointed sets of shifting referents, Lu, in her debut,knowingly resuscitates it, creating a precise and humorous elegy to theself, and to its self-subversions. This quasi-bildungsroman charts theemergence of an ""I"" (not ""P"" and not ""Pamela,"" though the threecharacters do appear together) into a 20-something Bay Area, withmemories of a suburban childhood close on her heels. Like thosememories, familiar postmodern tropes such as professional/vocational,performance/authenticity, suburbs/city or butch/femme no longerestablish identity or location, and Lu and her friends, ""L,"" ""R"" and ""YK"" etc., can find no way to make it new: ""And so in the midst ofour contemporary lives we were in need of classical reassurance; we were always playing reels of old movies which we could fall into and fall in love, the way James Dean could tilt back his head under a geyser spoutof black Texas oil and drink in that greasy rain of love and money withhis entire body, only we could never be half as iconic or even half ascampy."" The ""novel"" of their lives progresses not because Lu resolves the relation between the professional and the vocational, or betweenlove and the love-story, for instance, but because thesemicro-discourses, after rigorous and often hilarious consideration, getbound up in the poet's contingent ""tone"" (another dissected term),which in turn becomes the novel's revolving stage. This is a book ofextraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages totell a beautiful story in spite of itself. (June)

About this edition

• Publisher: Atelos
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1891190040
• ISBN 13: 9781891190049
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 98