Cardboard Castles

It would be easy to discard the encomium "an innovative writer" as being an overworked phrase, cliched even; but in Axelrod's case, that's not so. After publishing the "feature novel" Bombay California, one might have thought there would be little else one could do with the novel. Though Cardboard Castles does pay homage to the fathers of the modern text (Quevedo, Cervantes, Rabelais, Machado de Assis), Axelrod also establishes himself as innovative in ways unlike the novels of other postmodern Latin American writers such as Garc'a Marquez, Cortazar, Marcio Souza and Borges, the latter of whom Axelrod knew personally. Axelrod slowly dismembers the architectonics of the 19th century "realistic" novel (which continues today under labored breathing) and buries it, albeit with civility and grace, in the archives of what the French structuralist critic Alain Vieux-Sottise has called "the labyrinth of long ago." It's difficult to approach Axelrod's novel (which it surely is) without discussing a bit of its structure. The novel is divided into 130 chapters, which range in length from three lines to thirty pages; it includes a table of contents (an accoutrement that falsely gives the impression that the book can be read at any part); and is replete with visual effects such as: musical notes, resumes, physical exam charts, crossword puzzles, multiple choice exams, and typographic alterations which would have made Joyce envious, all of which significantly alter, if not bombard, the reader's sensibilities of what constitutes a novel. One could easily label his techniques as "gimmicky" if it weren't for the fact that none of the devices are used indiscriminately for their own sakes, but are used precisely within the contextuality. Because of its construction it would be difficult to give an account of what the novel is "about," though the action (if one can call it that) takes place in the United States (Minnesota mainly where Axelrod finished his PhD), England, and France. Though the plot deals essentially with the protagonist's, (the Brazilian-American Duncan Katz) adventures while living in and visiting America, London, Paris, and the south of France, the plot is merely a conveyance for the words he has to use and for the "digressions" that seem to possess him. Unlike Sterne, Axelrod's digressions always seem to mean something, whether he's talking about nostalgia or world hunger, the Jewish Holocaust or basketball. From the outset of the novel, Axelrod is constantly juggling the reader's sensibilities. His prologue is a tour de force of literary wit, irony, and perspicacity as he explains the protagonist's early experiences with books and their effect on him. From that point on, the reader is well aware that what's to follow will not, in most cases, reflect anything like a Balzac novel. From the chapter titled "The Trial," in which Duncan takes God to court to the "split-brain" chapter titled "Rave Gauche, Rave Droit," it is obvious that Axelrod's fiction is in no way some dalliance with literary convention. The comparison that some might make between Axelrod's texts and Joyce's will obviously do a disservice to them both. Joyce's penchant for the portmanteau, metaplasmus and other forms of enallage don't have any significance in Axelrod. Axelrod makes literary use of seemingly non-literary objects and does it in such a way that Joyce, who lacked Axelrod's graphic sense, could not have done. For example, in one chapter titled "Dying, Hadara...," Axelrod uses a simulated telegram complete with sender, receiver, address, and miscopied message in order to emphasize the apparent futility in technological communication. Two chapters later in "...Almost," we discover another telegram stating that the former telegram was incorrect. Undoubtedly, Axelrod's experience with the Noigandres (the Brazilian school of "concrete poetry") prepared him for using these techniques in fiction. Likewise, Axelrod's characters are as diverse as the novel structures of the novel. Katz runs into such characters as Jean-Christophe, a homosexual gardener who becomes famous for his metaphysical treatise titled Meliora Speramus; Hadara Halevi, Katz's lover and an Israeli spy; and, of course, "Death" whom Axelrod first meets while the two of them are sunbathing on the French Riviera. These characters appear and disappear and reappear throughout the 130 chapters which, like his apparent digressions, seem to be randomly arranged, but which, upon closer analysis, one discovers are tightly and neatly organized. Axelrod constantly deals with evanescences, with appearances, with the relativity of truth and how we, as humans, perceive it. Not all of his prose reminds one of some Kafka vagary dressed in Gogol's overcoat; there are those times when the echo of Beckett (a long-time friend) appears as well. But beyond the polyphonia in the novel, the myriad voices of...