Reviews

The Book of Freaks by Jamie Iredell

shimmer's review

4.0

Iredell's earlier collections have been fragmentary, full of moments and sketches that add up to powerful impressions of places and lives. With Book of Freaks, the same fragmentation is at play but he's pulled back a bit, including the book itself in that gaze, not to mention the reader. In fact, the biggest "freak" here may be the book itself, because of the sheer unlikeliness and artificiality of a linear life like those we've learned to expect from fiction. The questions Iredell raises about how disparate elements can be arranged (or not) into a single, straightforward story are made more complex by including the components of the book itself — the copyright page, the blurbs, etc. — on an equal footing with the fiction (that description probably doesn't make much sense until you look at the book, I'm afraid). It made me think a lot about Lev Manovich's essay "Database As Symbolic Form," or Oulipian works in which a reader can assemble any number of potential works while ignoring others. None of which (sorry) gives a very useful description of the book as fiction, but trying to separate the "story" from the object in this case seems pretty futile — just pick it up and read it.