Experimental Fictions

For those of you who have never gone to a Rahna Reiko Rizzuto reading or enrolled in one of her classes, she's a knock-out green-eyed Italian/Irish-Japanese astrophysics-trained novelist/memoirist who was born in Honolulu and has made the world her home (and left the world with, among other things, Why She Left Us, the novel that won an American Book Award). She's also one of my dearest friends, and every now and then a package will arrive with Reiko's writing scrawled across the front. Saturday that happened. Inside was a book by Christian Peet, a story told through postcards titled Big American Trip. Yes. A story told through postcards. Angry, odd, fantastic comminiques that all add up to a singular voice that may be male, may be female, may be fiction, may be not.

Addressed to the Sweet Grass County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center in Big Timber, MT, for example, these words: "I do not wish that the world would go by. I do not wish to watch the world leave."

Reading through Trip yesterday afternoon, I thought of all the other deliberately odd books that have won my heart—the out-of-the-boxers that made me want to write a book like Flow, a river's autobiography, and that inspire the work I'm doing now. Carole Maso's Ava, for example—the final words of a dying woman, the unpieced fragments of a life. Michael Ondaatje's pseudo-biography of Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter. John Berger's novel in unchronological letters, From A to X. Markus Zusak's Death-narrated The Book Thief. Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide. Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds. Alexansdar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Forest Gander's As a Friend.

These books don't hew to the sound bite. These books dare. I've got an entire shelf of them here. I like sitting among them, breaking rules.