Simply put, Diane Schoemperlen’s By The Book is an odd duck. Subtitled “Stories and Pictures,” By The Book stretches the boundaries of both terms, perhaps to their breaking points. Even making the simple distinction of fiction or non-fiction is difficult. Or is it poetry? An art book, maybe?
By the Book is composed of two types of collage, textual and visual. Each “story” relies on one or two source texts, generally textbooks or encyclopedias from the late nineteenth century. Schoemperlen slices and dices and rearranges fragments of her chosen texts, each story being reassembled in a different manner.
The collection’s lead story, “By The Book Or: Allesandro In The New World: An Unlikely Tale Of Translation, Time Travel, and Tragic Love,” is the book’s lone narrative, and the only story to feature contributions of writing from Schoemperlen herself. The story’s source text is a turn of the century English-Italian handbook intended for the freshly arrived immigrant to the New World. The handbook, portions of which make up about half of the story, contains something of a narrative itself in its many sample letters intended to assist the new immigrant in his correspondence. Allesandro, the protagonist, is a present-day Italian who begins the story bound for the America. He discovers the handbook, which belonged to his great-great-great-grandfather, in his luggage. Upon arriving in America, Allesandro is transported into the world of the handbook, and his journey follows the handbook’s comically odd guidance.
The book’s other stories wander much farther from the strictures of traditional narrative. For example, “A Nervous Race: 222 Brief Notes On The Study of Nature, Human and Otherwise” and “Around The World In 100 Postcards: In Which The Geographer Makes A Survey of The World, Finds It Wanting, Comes To The Conclusion That There’s No Place Like Home,” take pieces of their source texts, from a sentence to a paragraph, and place them in numbered lines.
By The Book’s most procedural offering is “A Body Like A Little Nut: In Which The Botanist Looks For Love In The Wild, Appropriates The Alphabet, Waxes Poetic, Succumbs To Despair.” Schoemperlen selects phrases from a late nineteenth century high school botany textbook and arranges them in alphabetical order. For example, the complete paragraph for the letter “E”:
Easily recognized by the globular head. Eastward and northward. Embracing the true. Erect or reclining, armed with hooked prickles. Escaped from cultivation. Except in a very general way. Extremely common.
The book is often funny, as the blinkered wisdom offered by the source texts’ experts ranges from silly to absurd:
Q. What is garlic?
A. A bulbous root of an offensive smell and strong flavour, much eaten by the lower classes of the French, Spaniards, and Portuguese.
Q. What other people eat it to excess?
A. The Jews.
The stories are illustrated by beautiful, hand-assembled visual collages, dozens of them, with pages of the source text serving as their backgrounds, and accompanied by period-appropriate images. The collages have something of a difficult relationship with the book’s text. They offer proof of the provenance of the source text but rarely feel integral to the reading of each story; I often had to remind myself to stop and examine each collage, instead of skipping over it. But they are beautiful, and playful, and have a levity of spirit that would be missing if the book were nothing but text. Perhaps the illustrations are intended to provide the reader with a philosophical orientation, an attitude with which to approach the accompanying text.
Superficially, Schoemperlen’s take on her source texts can often be boiled down to a simple “get a load of this kooky old-timey stuff!” However, the deeper into By The Book I got, the more I found jumping off points for different avenues of thought. The book’s collisions of random fragments of data mirror the way that our culture processes information—I know it’s a cliché to point to the 140-character tweet as the exemplar of communication in our current zeitgeist, but here it must surely be allowed. It’s unclear whether or not the authors of Schoemperlen’s source texts were considered authorities in their time, but they present themselves as such; perhaps Schoemperlen intends the book to underline the folly of certainty. And while the simple passage of time has rendered most of the source texts obsolete, the tone of the selected passages isn’t just one of false authority—for all their faults, Schoemperlen’s chosen authors possess a keen sense of wonder at the workings of history and the natural world. Perhaps Schoemperlen wants to invoke this sense of wonder, drawing parallels between her chosen authors’ reportage and Schoemperlen’s own acts of creation.
Schoemperlen’s work—always formally ambitious—has been gradually becoming more and more wilfully avant garde over the course of her career. But fans of her relatively more traditional fiction may be unwilling to follow Schoemperlen down this book’s particularly odd rabbit hole. Admittedly, ploughing through randomly organized lists of figures from nineteenth century encyclopedias can be a bit of a slog. However, though they may differ from the pleasures inherent in traditional narrative fiction, By the Book contains rewards aplenty for the reader adventurous enough to engage it on its own unique terms.
‘By The Book,’ by Diane Schoemperlen
Book Reviews
Simply put, Diane Schoemperlen’s By The Book is an odd duck. Subtitled “Stories and Pictures,” By The Book stretches the boundaries of both terms, perhaps to their breaking points. Even making the simple distinction of fiction or non-fiction is difficult. Or is it poetry? An art book, maybe?
By the Book is composed of two types of collage, textual and visual. Each “story” relies on one or two source texts, generally textbooks or encyclopedias from the late nineteenth century. Schoemperlen slices and dices and rearranges fragments of her chosen texts, each story being reassembled in a different manner.
The collection’s lead story, “By The Book Or: Allesandro In The New World: An Unlikely Tale Of Translation, Time Travel, and Tragic Love,” is the book’s lone narrative, and the only story to feature contributions of writing from Schoemperlen herself. The story’s source text is a turn of the century English-Italian handbook intended for the freshly arrived immigrant to the New World. The handbook, portions of which make up about half of the story, contains something of a narrative itself in its many sample letters intended to assist the new immigrant in his correspondence. Allesandro, the protagonist, is a present-day Italian who begins the story bound for the America. He discovers the handbook, which belonged to his great-great-great-grandfather, in his luggage. Upon arriving in America, Allesandro is transported into the world of the handbook, and his journey follows the handbook’s comically odd guidance.
The book’s other stories wander much farther from the strictures of traditional narrative. For example, “A Nervous Race: 222 Brief Notes On The Study of Nature, Human and Otherwise” and “Around The World In 100 Postcards: In Which The Geographer Makes A Survey of The World, Finds It Wanting, Comes To The Conclusion That There’s No Place Like Home,” take pieces of their source texts, from a sentence to a paragraph, and place them in numbered lines.
By The Book’s most procedural offering is “A Body Like A Little Nut: In Which The Botanist Looks For Love In The Wild, Appropriates The Alphabet, Waxes Poetic, Succumbs To Despair.” Schoemperlen selects phrases from a late nineteenth century high school botany textbook and arranges them in alphabetical order. For example, the complete paragraph for the letter “E”:
Easily recognized by the globular head. Eastward and northward. Embracing the true. Erect or reclining, armed with hooked prickles. Escaped from cultivation. Except in a very general way. Extremely common.
The book is often funny, as the blinkered wisdom offered by the source texts’ experts ranges from silly to absurd:
Q. What is garlic?
A. A bulbous root of an offensive smell and strong flavour, much eaten by the lower classes of the French, Spaniards, and Portuguese.
Q. What other people eat it to excess?
A. The Jews.
The stories are illustrated by beautiful, hand-assembled visual collages, dozens of them, with pages of the source text serving as their backgrounds, and accompanied by period-appropriate images. The collages have something of a difficult relationship with the book’s text. They offer proof of the provenance of the source text but rarely feel integral to the reading of each story; I often had to remind myself to stop and examine each collage, instead of skipping over it. But they are beautiful, and playful, and have a levity of spirit that would be missing if the book were nothing but text. Perhaps the illustrations are intended to provide the reader with a philosophical orientation, an attitude with which to approach the accompanying text.
Superficially, Schoemperlen’s take on her source texts can often be boiled down to a simple “get a load of this kooky old-timey stuff!” However, the deeper into By The Book I got, the more I found jumping off points for different avenues of thought. The book’s collisions of random fragments of data mirror the way that our culture processes information—I know it’s a cliché to point to the 140-character tweet as the exemplar of communication in our current zeitgeist, but here it must surely be allowed. It’s unclear whether or not the authors of Schoemperlen’s source texts were considered authorities in their time, but they present themselves as such; perhaps Schoemperlen intends the book to underline the folly of certainty. And while the simple passage of time has rendered most of the source texts obsolete, the tone of the selected passages isn’t just one of false authority—for all their faults, Schoemperlen’s chosen authors possess a keen sense of wonder at the workings of history and the natural world. Perhaps Schoemperlen wants to invoke this sense of wonder, drawing parallels between her chosen authors’ reportage and Schoemperlen’s own acts of creation.
Schoemperlen’s work—always formally ambitious—has been gradually becoming more and more wilfully avant garde over the course of her career. But fans of her relatively more traditional fiction may be unwilling to follow Schoemperlen down this book’s particularly odd rabbit hole. Admittedly, ploughing through randomly organized lists of figures from nineteenth century encyclopedias can be a bit of a slog. However, though they may differ from the pleasures inherent in traditional narrative fiction, By the Book contains rewards aplenty for the reader adventurous enough to engage it on its own unique terms.
Biblioasis | 352 pages | $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-1927428818