Calendar of Regrets
 | |
| Author | Lance Olsen |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postmodern novel, Historiographic metafiction |
| Publisher | FC2 |
Publication date | September 6, 2010 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 456 |
| ISBN | 1573661570 |
Calendar of Regrets is a postmodern novel by American writer Lance Olsen, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2010.
Plot summary
[edit]Calendar of Regrets is a collage novel comprising twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel—through time, space, narrative, and death.
The narratives involve: 1) the poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; 2) former CBS anchorman Dan Rather's mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolled home alone one evening; 3) a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; 4) a high school teacher who videos her own auto-erotic asphyxiation and sends them to strangers across the U.S.; 5) a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers in London; 6) a terrorist commandeering a family's car on the Italian Autostrada; 7) the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s point of view; 8) a series of pirate podcasts by a young drifter along the shores of the Salton Sea in southern California; 9) an interview between forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz and the man who assaulted Dan Rather; 10) an angel (based on the one appearing in symbolist Hugo Simberg's famous painting titled The Wounded Angel) discovered by two boys in the Finnish countryside; 11) a man built of borrowed organs, each with its own story; 12) a boy born as a notebook.
Each narrative is composed in a unique style and genre, breaks off in the middle, and is nested inside the one that preceded it. The twelfth forms the mid-point of the novel. Each interrupted narrative then concludes. Reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, they form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. Calendar of Regrets is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.
Reception
[edit]Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote "these stories explore the perplexity about ways of knowing and how knowledge is made manifest through storytelling,"[1] while Rain Taxi said Olsen's novel "ultimately reminds us of the ways that art and narrative doggedly navigate that thin line between the drive for order and the deep-seated realization that the universe that greets us each morning has only increased its entropy."[2]
References
[edit]- ^ "Calendar of Regrets". Review of Contemporary Fiction. 1 April 2011. Retrieved 7 December 2012.
- ^ "Calendar of Regrets". Rain Taxi. Summer 2011. Archived from the original on 2012-11-02. Retrieved 7 December 2012.