More to Pop Up

Thinking about the form of novels has led me down many paths: some narrow, some wide, some dusty, some hard, some stoney, some light and some dark. Nothing like mental peregrinations when the evenings draw in. Let us hibernate, by all means: so long as our minds remain awake. Springtime shall ever blossom in the brain. No go for snow there.

For a few days, I had nothing but heptagons flying through my head. I was fixated by the idea of the seven-sided novel. No longer. Which is not to say that I have lost faith; merely that I have begun to consider other futures for literature. Other, perhaps brighter, futures.

One of these futures rolled into my mind this morning as I reconsidered, not for the first time, the literature of my children. What books there were, what books there were! So many books, of so many sizes and shapes!

This last point is significant: at what age is it, after all, that we tire of reading strangely shaped stories? Where does the colour go as we grow? It seems to me that words get smaller, pages duller and shapes ever more uniform. Tristram Shandy’s black page, celebrated as it is, remains a rarity: so too B S Johnson’s cut-out. Books for adults have little time for play – or if they do, the play is wrapped in esoteric complexity that it ceases to be play at all, at least beyond the surface.

All of which, I think, amounts to the following short, considered observation (or, if you choose, rallying cry): Where, oh where are the pop-up books?

The Shape of Things

Patagonian priests pray by it, Chilean miners cherish it, and Brazilian beach-bums beat drums in its honour. They mull over it in Mexico, praise it in Peru and argue for it artfully in Argentina.

I am talking, of course, about the octagonal novel: the most exciting thing to hit the South-American literary world since Lupez Lupez wrote a novel on a football and kicked it through a publisher’s window.

Why the octagon? I know not. All I do know is that the shape seems to have its followers. ‘Novels will never be the same again,’ wrote one Bolivian critic. ‘Forget the four-sided book,’ sneered another: ‘any self-respecting story these days is safely printed on eight-sided paper’.

Over in Venezuala that may well be the case. But here in Europe we entertain different ideas. Eight-sided novels have yet to take off – but that isn’t to say we aren’t experimenting shape-wise. Circular novels have been doing the rounds for some decades now. Remember Benjamin Yodek’s Mulberries and Mudcakes? That has to stand as one of the most headache-inducing novels of the last hundred years (speaking as one who has a penchant for difficult forms). And what about Boris Bash-Benver’s triangular novel Tripulation? I say triangular – and yet, of course, the book revolved around three circles in a triangular formation. It was, in that sense, multi-shaped.

What of the future? I have heard vague rumblings that Oa Aayorta (Andorran master of strange forms) has abandoned his plans for a ‘twitter-novel’ (praise each and every lord) and is turning his attention to the trapezium (or ‘trapezoid’ as the Americans call it). Over in Norway, meanwhile, Edmund Ek has (apparently) been musing over pentagons. His ex-wife Heidi Kohlenberg claims to have received a long-winded letter from the former firebrand in which he recounts a dream wherein ‘a man flew down from the sky upon a plate of burning food, and said to me: “put the words within the pentagon”‘. Some would take this to have some relation to the headquarters of US defence; Ek has clearly taken it to refer to a pentagon-shaped book. Good on him.

That leaves us with various options. Am I the only one rooting for the heptagon? I can’t think of many books that wouldn’t benefit from being printed on seven-sided paper. Don’t ask me why. Call me a prophet if you will, but part of me can’t help perceiving that this, truly, is the shape of things to come.