Reviews of Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper. - - - - To order The People of Paper, click here. - - - - El Paso Times Review: "Heartbreak, Imagination Star in Original Novel" By Rigoberto González Entering the fantastic world of Salvador Plascencia's "The People of Paper" (McSweeney's Books, $22 hardcover) is like inhabiting a poem that tantalizes with its brilliant imagery and imaginative leaps. Although the novel's conceptual narrative and structure claim lineage to magic realism, it stands firmly on its own as an original book. Like his Roman namesake, Saturn is the quintessential co-dependent god who channels his loneliness onto his creations. Among the mortals is the heartbroken Federico de la Fe, whom Saturn shadows until Federico grows tired of the scrutiny, blaming Saturn for the ills that have befallen him. And so Federico wages "a war for volition and against the commodification of sadness." Enlisting the help of gang members at his California neighborhood, Federico's first strategy is a lead shield; the lead comes from obsolete mechanical tortoises. This shield is oppressive but does manage to keep the mind-reading Saturn in the dark. "There are some things that are better kept hidden," Federico de la Fe declares. For a while, the people are content keeping to their secrets, which include the self-mutilation many perform to dull their emotional pain. But the toxicity of the metal eventually sickens the people and forces them out of hiding. The second attempt is more successful. The mortals claim autonomy by writing their own stories, independent of the grand author. At this point, the novel ventures into the metafictional realm: Saturn, weakened by the coup, and by his inability to displace his own heartache, is unmasked as a flesh-and-blood author who is pining over the loss of his girlfriend. The girlfriend, dismayed at her ex's harsh portrayal of her as the selfish wife of Federico de la Fe, steps forward to plead, "Sal, if you still love me, please leave me out of this story. Start the book over, without me." The author complies but strikes back at his characters with a vengeance. The couples Federico-Merced and Sal-Liz are but two pairings that move through the parallel universes in search of a cure for sorrow. There are also Froggy and Sandra, the star-crossed lovers of the El Monte gang, and Ramón Barreto and Merced de Papel, the last of her species, the people of paper. She alone is spared the grief of love because she lacks emotion, though this does not save her from Saturn's terrible ink. And circling the atmosphere like smaller (though not less significant) planets are Baby Nostradamus, the silent prophet; Little Merced, Federico's young daughter with an addiction to citrus; and a Oaxacan songbird that soothes the damaged soul. All become embroiled in the battle between those who would confront their feelings and those who would deny them. For all its idiosyncrasies (like Saturn's ordering of multiple perspectives into columns on the page, the black spots superimposed on the print to signify that Saturn's prying has been blocked, and the mythopoesis of Rita Hayworth and the Mexican wrestler Santos), Plascencia's novel is a story of one man's journey through the stages of mourning and how he employs writing as a recovery process. As evidenced by his creation, this movement is difficult but dazzling. - - - - LA Weekly Profile: "Flower Power: Salvador Plascencia on His People of Paper" By Ben Ehrenreich Salvador Plascencia is not into authenticity. Wearing a Smiths T-shirt and heavy black-framed glasses, he hunches over his coffee cup and explains. "I'm not interested in realism or documentary or reportage," he says, and anxiously swats the words away. It's a relief: The wide boulevards that stretch outside the window are real enough. We're eating at Flo's, a brick-walled El Monte coffee shop not far from the house where Plascencia's parents still live. El Monte is pretty bleak, but not in any picturesquely gritty, inner-city way. It's just barren, stuck hard with the edge-city doldrums—yawning stucco plains of tire shops, Toyota dealers, mini-malls and Taco Bells. And except for a few smog-crusted oleanders on the exit ramp from the 10, and occasional bougainvilleas or rose bushes fenced off in people's yards, there are hardly any flowers. The El Monte of Plascencia's imagination suffers no such scarcity. His novel, The People of Paper, is set in "a town of furrows and flowers," part rancho, part suburb, part Swiftian fantasyland. The social scene is dominated by the El Monte Flores, or EMF, "the first street gang born of carnations." They work in the fields picking flowers, hustling profits out of cockfights and sales of goat milk on the side. They pack carnation knives and are fighting a war against Saturn—but we'll get to that. El Monte really was a farm town once, and Flores, delightfully enough, is the real name of the local gang. "I don't know why they're called the flowers," smiles Plascencia, who now lives in Whittier. He's 28 and far from tall—Napoleon plays a small but symbolic role in the novel. Plascencia's hair is almost red, and his light eyes leap with nervous energy. "I don't think there were flowers in El Monte," he says. "I know there were berries and walnut trees, but I never heard about flowers." A quick web search reveals that part of El Monte was once farmed for seeds, and the fields were in fact filled with blossoms. That section of town was dubbed Flores, but no matter. "My history is murky," Plascencia says, "and I wanted it to be that way so I could just be free to do whatever I wanted. I was scared that if I did find out, I'd be constrained." Constrained The People of Paper is not. Just flipping it open makes it obvious that this is not your average magical-realist metafictional epic set in the south San Gabriel Valley. Already in the first chapter, every page-spread is split into three columns: one narrated by a voice we know only as Saturn (planet? god? mortal?), another by a precocious, lime-addicted girl named Little Merced, the third by a revolving cast including a sainted lucha libre wrestler, a lotería barker, a retarded infant prophet and a mechanic who builds robotic turtles. Later in the book, Saturn's column gets split in two. Toward the end, what fragile order exists breaks down. Text runs sideways up the page. Phrases are crossed out. Words are physically punched out of the paper. Black circles crawl across the page, hiding the text beneath them. It's not surprising, given the risk-aversion of the current fiction market, that Plascencia had a hard time finding a publisher. "It got rejected by ... everybody," he says with a small laugh. Eventually McSweeney's published a chapter and, as part of the magazine's new Rectangulars imprint, released the whole thing in hardcover in June. Plascencia spent most of the early summer on tour, trying to figure out how to read aloud from a book which is in part about the reader's physical interaction with the printed page. For all its feverish typographical energy though, The People of Paper is, at its most basic level, a story about heartbreak. Several heartbreaks, really. The first belongs to Little Merced's father, Federico de la Fe, whose unruly bladder (he wets the bed) drives his wife into the arms of another man, and who escapes the agony of abandonment with self-administered burns, and by leaving his home village of Las Tortugas, Mexico, with his daughter. They make it as far as El Monte, where de la Fe finds work in the flower fields and begins to plot a war against the still-mysterious Saturn, enlisting EMF in his peculiar struggle. De la Fe can't stand that Saturn is always watching him, always there—somewhere. Then there's Froggy, the EMF veterano who becomes de la Fe's second-in-command. His lover leaves him when he kills her abusive dad, after which she insists that he address her as Subcomandante Sandra. Froggy finds solace with Julieta, who hails from a Mexican village in which everything is literally turning to dust. And then there's Ramón Barreto, one of many men loved and left by a woman made of paper; they recognize one another in the streets by the paper-cut scars on their mouths, "at times flicking cleft tongues" in silent, mournful greeting. The guiding heartbreak, though, is hinted at in the dedication ("to Liz, who taught me that we are all of paper"), and finds its way into the text after Smiley, another EMF member, sets out in search of the elusive Saturn. A curandero or faith healer reveals to Smiley that Saturn is none other than Salvador Plascencia—de la Fe's war is in fact an insurrection against the tyranny of the all-knowing and all-seeing author. ("It is an affront to God's kindness," Froggy later protests, "to limit us, to relegate us to strict columns and force us to act in one story and submit to the commands of a dictator.") The curandero sells Smiley a map, which Smiley follows to the top of the highest peak in the San Gabriels. There he scratches away the sky with his carnation knife and pulls himself up into his creator's bedroom. He finds Plascencia "asleep, sprawled and naked, laying on his stomach, pillowcases beneath him but the pillows tossed against the wall." Liz has left him ("for a white boy," at that), and Smiley resists the urge to do him harm: "There is an etiquette that must be followed, even in war. You cannot kill or steal from a man while he is asleep and heartbroken." First novels, convention has it, tend toward thinly veiled autobiography. The author of The People of Paper favors the all-out fun-house hall-of-mirrors approach, but more ordinary autobiographical details do sneak through, complete with ordinary veils. As a small child, the flesh-and-blood Salvador Plascencia lived with his mother outside of Guadalajara on a ranch called La Tortuga until they migrated north to join his father in El Monte. His memory of that period is, he says, "a little murky." Plascencia won't volunteer much about the reality behind the book's fictionalized breakup, except to moan a little when I bring it up. Names have been tweaked, he says, picking at the scraps of his French toast. Chronologies have been condensed and personalities combined. It happened when he was living in upstate New York, enrolled in an MFA program at Syracuse University. (He's now at USC, three years into a combined writing and English literature Ph.D. program.) He had already written the first third of the novel when everything collapsed. Heartbreak changes everything. Plascencia didn't know how to proceed with the book he had been writing and eventually found his solution, he says, in "the idea that the book is falling apart because of [a] girl." As convoluted as it may sound in summary, on the page, Plascencia's solution has a simple elegance. The Liz-break-up plotline and the characters' rebellion against their creator intertwine, justifying one another and lending the book a painful immediacy. It doesn't feel tricky, just true. "Metafiction has this weird stigma," Plascencia says, "like it's a dirty word somehow. I wanted to make it as fleshy and human as I could, but not high-concept-wise, more like I'm a dumb writer and I don't know what I'm doing—things are getting out of control." The ploy works. The novel seems to pull itself apart. If anything is conveyed with attention to authentic, realist detail in The People of Paper, it's that sense of all-consuming sorrow. Love dissolves and lovers leave. Towns turn to dust. Wars are lost. Stories disintegrate on the pages that hold them. I ask Plascencia how the real women behind the characters of Liz and one other fictionalized ex-lover reacted to the book. He smiles sadly. "I think everybody's okay with it now." - - - - Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages Review: "Salvador Plascencia, Meet Salvador Plascencia" By William Waltz The most memorable—and quite possibly the cheesiest—scene in the 1998 Jim Carrey hit The Truman Show comes when Truman Burbank sails his yacht into the wild blue yonder. Granted, it's not the sky, exactly, but the sky-blue back wall of a sound stage—the setting of his unreal real life. At that moment Truman's worst fears and suspicions are validated: He is a character in someone else's story. Most of Salvador Plascencia's characters in his debut novel The People of Paper are in a similar predicament—they just don't know it. The book ostensibly tells the tale of the war between the planet Saturn and the people of El Monte, led by a Mexican immigrant and soldiered by "the first street gang born of carnations." The reader is inclined to believe that this is the plot's trajectory, but there are ominous signs that things aren't quite right. Mechanical tortoises with binary brains roam the desert; a baby who is telepathic or retarded or both renders advice; Rita Hayworth remains alive, well, and Mexican; and, oh yeah, people made out of paper practice cunnilingus with fleshy counterparts, despite the risk of paper cuts. Born in 1976 in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in El Monte, California, Plascencia earned a degree in fiction from Syracuse University. Somewhere along the line he cultivated a rhizomic imagination and a propensity for innovation. García Márquez and Calvino might come to mind upon reading The People of Paper, but that's not the half of it. Add the beatific mundanity of life in Ben Katchor's comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, pile on the dispassionate presentation of fantastic circumstances in Cabeza De Vaca's 16th-century travel diaries, and toss in the Museum of Jurassic Technology's cat-and-mouse game with truth—imagine all that and you're almost there. Part Two of this three-part book changes everything. That's when Smiley, the only chulo with cajones, solicits advice from the local curandero. It is this medicine man who divines, "Saturn's real name is Salvador Plascencia." Atop a mountain Smiley peels away "at the deteriorating glaze of blue, collapsing a part of the sky and exposing a layer of papier-mâché." Through this hole in the firmament, Smiley enters Saturn's room to find the author asleep. This brings us face-to-face with the primary concerns of the book: How does one overcome the jagged wounds inflicted by love, and how far can literary innovation take a writer before he succumbs to the narcissistic noodlings of pretension? The Salvador Plascencia that Smiley finds sprawled naked on his bed is bitter and brokenhearted and struggling to finish his first novel. This second narrative revolves around the would-be author, his beloved Liz, and his backup girlfriend Cameroon. It is with these characters that the reader sympathizes. Salvador is a wreck. He can't bear to utter the name of Liz's new lover. Here the book recalls, strangely enough, Jim Carrey's other success, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which memories can be deleted like so many e-mails. Plascencia employs a similar bit of trickery: Where the lover's name ought to appear on the page, there's a hole in the paper. Here and elsewhere, Plascencia skillfully uses design to fulfill the promise and possibility of the story. He and his publisher are perfectly matched; Dave Eggers and McSweeney's do nothing, if they don't do design well. In addition to cutouts, The People of Paper deploys blackouts, diagrams, drawings, empty pages, perpendicular text, and fading ink. Salvador Plascencia the author is always there to give a leg up to Salvador Plascencia the character. And by turning the author's literary bar trick into a personal novel of love and loss, the character returns the favor. - - - - San Francisco Chronicle Profile: "His Darkly Magical First Novel Takes Nervous Young Writer on a Wild Ride" By Jane Ganahl Salvador Plascencia, just 28 and on his first book tour, glances nervously at the podium at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, then at the capacity audience that eagerly awaits his words. The pale young man in T-shirt and jeans looks down again, as if to block out the intimidating view for another moment, adjusts his heavy glasses, reads over the material one more time. There is a lot to live up to. So many expectations raised by the book that is starting his career, a book with blurbs so effusive that he feels as if they were not written for him, exactly, but this thing he mysteriously created that's now a separate being. George Saunders calls this being, titled "The People of Paper," "a stunning debut by a once-in-a-generation talent." T.C. Boyle says it's "a novel like no other" and compares Plascencia to "Calvino, Borges and Garcia Marquez." Entertainment Weekly gave it an A grade, and made it an editors' choice. Pretty heady stuff for someone who grew up on a farm in Jalisco and didn't speak English until he was 8, when his parents settled in East Los Angeles. No time to think of that now, the show is on. And an odd show it is, as mysterious and offbeat as the novel itself. Signs cut from foam core that say "Saturn," "Little Merced" and "Santos" are taped to three reading stations: the bookstore's podium and two metal dollies. Introduced by Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's, the youthful publishing house founded by Dave Eggers that took on "People of Paper" when the big houses turned it down, Plascencia blushes when Horowitz proclaims, "I'm more excited about this than anything I've been involved with so far." Plascencia comes to the podium and notes, hesitantly, "This is a very experimental reading, so it's possible it will go badly." Then he throws himself into the prose. "Federico de la Fe discovered a cure for remorse. A remorse that started by the river of Las Tortugas." As he reads, his voice becomes as authoritative as his writing. "Every Tuesday Federico de la Fe and Merced carried their conjugal mattress past the citrus orchard and laid it down at the edge of the river. Federico de la Fe would take out his sickle and split open the mattress at the seams, while Merced sucked on the limes she plucked from the orchard." The audience is in his hand, church-like in silence. After five minutes or so, the book is passed to another reader, who reads the part of Federico's daughter, Little Merced; after her, the part of Santos, a disillusioned saint turned pro wrestler, is read by Daniel Alarcon, who is also 28 and, like Plascencia, is enjoying rave responses to his first book, "War by Candlelight." As Alarcon sits down, author and former bank robber Joe Loya gets up to read the part of a Loteria caller. Another audience member comes up to portray the role of Baby Nostradamus, but says nothing, his role reduced to looking about, bug-eyed, like an infant. The overall effect is joyful, magical, darkly humorous—and pretty confusing. "One editor told me this was the most confusing book she ever read," chuckles Plascencia after the reading, as he sits behind a small desk and prepares to sign books for a line of readers that snakes along the bookstore's wall. "That was, as she was turning me down." Loya and Alarcon buy books to have Plascencia inscribe. Asked if they think Latino literature is a happening genre, the jovial Loya responds: "Oh yeah, everybody's hot for it. There is a subdivision of HarperCollins, Rayo, that is very successful. Latino writers are in demand now." Alarcon, who hails from Peru and lives in Oakland, is less convinced. "Do you really think that's true?" he says, rubbing some scratch marks left on his arm by a new kitten. "I'm not sure I've seen evidence of that—although my publishing company was good at promoting me." "Yeah, and you're young too," says Loya. "And me—I've got that whole 'formerly incarcerated' thing going for me." They both laugh. Watching Plascencia sign book after book, Horowitz smiles. "When he (Loya) read in L.A., all his gang friends came. That part of the book is not a lie." Plascencia has called his book "a memoir with lies," but that doesn't quite explain it. Other ingredients in the dazzling frappe include mysticism, Southern California immigrant mythology, surrealism and true confessions. Five years in the making, "The People of Paper" is, as Publishers Weekly crowed, "a virtuosic first novel (that is) explosively unreal." Plascencia deflects the praise, saying it feels curiously as if it's for someone else. "I know I wrote the book, but there's this distance between me and it," he says, sipping coffee in a Market Street cafe. "It was my ineptitude with the long narrative that kept it chopped into pieces like it is. And in person I'm rambling and inarticulate, but my book is focused." He seems a tad nervous; do interviews do that to him? He laughs. "I don't dislike doing interviews, but I worry about how I sound. I've only done three in my life, and none of them have been converted into stories yet, so I don't know how badly I did." After two days of basketball and partying, San Francisco style, Plascencia is tired and ready to return to his home in Whittier, where he attended college. Even though he spent a few years on the East Coast, getting his master's degree in creative writing at Syracuse, he returned to the L.A. area when he had his degree. "New York was an incredible experience," he says. "The creative writing department was amazing. But it was the first time I'd seen snow, and it was kind of a rough adjustment." Plascencia is now at University of Southern California, where he's going for a doctorate in writing—maybe. "They say my diction and syntax are lacking," he says, eyes wide with irony. "So I don't know—maybe I'm not at a good point yet critically. Maybe I'm done with school." Education has always played a starring role in Plascencia's evolution as a writer. "In sixth grade, I was in fourth-grade English," he says, shaking his head. "In a way, that was influential in my becoming a writer because I didn't like the humiliation and started picking up all the books I could read. The Hardy Boys—whatever I could get my hands on. I don't have many photos of me as a child, but I do have one where I'm sitting in my dad's lap and he was reading to me. So they were very supportive." Are his parents proud of him? He smiles. "Both my parents are from agrarian families, and they are embarrassingly proud—especially my mother. My younger sister just graduated from college and is going to be a clinical psychologist. They wanted to position their children to succeed and they did." Plascencia's unique writing style was influenced both by the fantastical Mexican folktales he learned growing up and by college professors who turned him on to the Dalkey Archive, which contains work by hundreds of innovative modernist writers. "It was a really exciting discovery; there were no rules." The young scribe says he was most influenced by "a synthesis of experimental literature, and the work of James Baldwin. He wipes me out on an emotional level. Also I never got over Steinbeck. I just reread 'Tortilla Flats' and it was so tender, so emotionally rich." Of his own book, he sums it up thus: "It's a very simple story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. It's a Smiths song." One should not mistake Plascencia's light tone for a cavalier attitude about his book finally getting published. For that, he is overwhelmingly grateful. "I was turned down by Random House and everyone else. But I had a piece in McSweeney's 12—they excerpted the first chapter. Eli called me and asked if I had an entire book, so I sent it to him. When he called me pretty soon afterward and said they wanted to publish, I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it." Plascencia is wary of the notion of Latino lit. "Anytime I see the names of Marquez and Borges attached to my name, I am of course very flattered and excited. But then I wonder why people feel compelled to compare a Latino to a Latino? I worry that when you talk about Latino literature that it starts to become insular. For that reason, it was exciting to be picked up by McSweeney's, which is not exactly a Latino imprint." Despite labels, critical praise and book tours, Plascencia insists that life goes on the same way as it always has. "I live with a housemate. I play soccer on weekends. I drink beer with my friends. I write," he says, smiling and collecting his things to take BART to the airport. "My life is nothing terribly exciting, but it is very joyful." - - - - Los Angeles Times Review: "North Of Tijuana" By Daniel Hernandez It's hard not to draw comparisons between Salvador Plascencia's first novel, "The People of Paper," and Gabriel García Márquez's seminal masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Both drolly tell of fantastical, impossible happenings. Both unravel sagas of war, love, longing and death. Both chart one family's tumultuous search for equilibrium. But Plascencia's may not be the book that "saves" magical realism. It also may not be the book that "saves" Chicano literature, although the author's biog raphy begs for that possibility. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1976, Plascencia grew up mostly in El Monte, about 12 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. His novel tells the story of Federico de la Fe and his daughter, Merced, who leave the town of Las Tortugas, Mexico, for El Monte, "a city named after the hills it does not have." With the help of the local gang, EMF (El Monte Flores), Federico leads his daughter and the city in a war against sadness. Federico's obsession with fighting sadness starts when he is abandoned by his wife in Mexico (she could no longer tolerate him wetting their bed). Near the edges of this story, a woman made of pa per wanders, haunted by her inability to retain lovers because her body causes paper cuts. Plascencia acknowledges García Márquez as a major influence in his writing, but "The People of Paper" strays from being the "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for turn-of-this-century Southern California when it ventures into the world of Federico's enemy, sadness. In this surreal realm, sadness is personified by Saturn, a lovesick young man in El Monte who also happens to be named Salvador Plascencia. Plascencia, or Saturn, narrates the story but also battles against its characters. Sound complicated? Some of the funniest moments of the book start here. The war escalates. And "The People of Paper" gets weirder. Readers might take this as an attempt to impress the hipster literati devoted to the post-ironic cult of McSweeney's, Plascencia's publisher, but "The People of Paper" is impressive on terms anyone can appreciate. Behind all the devices, Plascencia still manages to construct a classic story. The characters who populate it have their own dilemmas, each rendered with a sweeping note of tragedy by Saturn, who's a sympathetic narrator. The particulars provide an added treat. Cowardly saints avoid their duties by moonlighting as masked Mexican wrestlers. A decaying Rita Hayworth is har assed constantly by agitated lettuce pickers, who call her a vendida for being ashamed other past (she was once a dancer in Tijuana's casinos). Oaxacan song birds, mechanical tortoises, elote sellers, curanderos, a slobbering baby Nostradamus, a cardinal named Mahony—they all exist in a land where the only dividing line is one made of white chalk somewhere just north of Tijuana. As Saturn and the other characters fight their war and, gradually, fight for control of the story, the novel's real star emerges. It's the setting. A lot of it is familiar, yet the whole thing feels new and unexpected, giving Southern California and its mythology a borderless treatment that our literary heritage, until now, has seemed to lack. - - - - The Elegant Variation Review by Daniel A. Olivas Salvador Plascencia's debut novel The People of Paper is a wonderfully strange, hallucinogenic and hypertextual blending of fiction and autobiography. The Prologue's first sentences thrust us into an almost familiar yet purely mythical world while introducing Plascencia's sly brand of humor: "She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets—rare exceptions granted for immaculate conceptions." The papal decree shuts down the monk-run factory where people were made so that humans could be free to populate the world in a more organic fashion. They begin a march that "was to proceed until the monks forgot the location of the factory—an impossible task for a tribe that had been trained to memorize not only scripture but also the subtle curvature of every cathedral archway they encountered." But one monk, the fifty-third in the procession to be exact, sneaks away from the formation and wanders off. He eventually gives the coordinates of the padlocked factory to the brilliant paper surgeon, Antonio, who uses the factory to create his masterpiece, the "she" of the first sentence. Antonio, when finished, collapses on the factory floor, blood dripping from his hands. The paper woman silently steps over him, leaves the factory and walks into a storm: "The print of her arms smeared; her soaked feet tattered as they scrapped against wet pavement and turned her toes to pulp." Now comes the strange part (or the first of a series of strange parts). Chapter One switches from standard book-page format to what will become a recurring visual motif: columns (similar to the look of a typical newspaper), each one headlined by the name of a character and written either in the first or third person. We learn of Saturn, the omniscient presence who lets us see poor Federico de la Fe, a bed wetter who is married to the beautiful Merced. They have a daughter, Little Merced, who sucks limes like her mother and who loves her father very much. Merced cannot stand the bedwetting (at least that is Federico de la Fe's belief) so she leaves him for another man. To quell his heartbreak, Federico de la Fe discovers a "cure for remorse": the infliction of pain through fire. He also decides to leave Mexico and head to Los Angeles where he and Little Merced can begin a new life. On the bus, they encounter the Baby Nostradamus whose columns are not filled with words but with black ink. They also meet the paper woman who tells Little Merced that she was never christened. So Little Merced dubs the woman Merced de Papel—a name that can translate loosely to "paper favor" or "at the mercy of paper" or even "thanks to paper." Federico de la Fe and Little Merced eventually settle in El Monte, a predominantly Latino community about a dozen miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is here that Federico de la Fe becomes the leader of an army to fight Saturn who lives in the sky and can read everyone's thoughts. Federico de la Fe recruits a gang of cholos as his troops. Other story lines abound. There's Margarita Cansino, the Mexican beauty who sleeps with lettuce pickers until Hollywood discovers her after she changes her appearance to look white; she becomes Rita Hayworth. Merced de Papel makes a home in Southern California and passes the time by sleeping with many men who cut their tongues and fingers on her private parts; these men belong to a secret society of those who have suffered such exquisite paper cuts. There's also the wrestling saint, Napoleon Bonaparte, a curandero, flower pickers, Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, a glue sniffer, and a mechanic who makes robot tortoises whose lead shells Federico de la Fe uses to encase the homes of his troops to keep Saturn from penetrating their thoughts. And who is this mysterious Saturn? As the novel progresses, we learn that he is a Mexican who is dumped by his Mexican girlfriend, Liz, who falls for a white man. Saturn eventually attempts to fill the void with another woman, Camaroon. All the while, a curious cholo, Smiley, who doesn't heed Federico de la Fe's warnings, searches out Saturn to learn whether he is good or bad. How does he do this? He rips a whole in the sky and enters the bedroom of Saturn aka Salvador Plascencia. Saturn is really nothing more than a writer. And his creations are taking over his life. Smiley confronts Plascencia who sadly does not recognize him much to Smiley's consternation. Is he not important enough a character that his creator should know him immediately? Too many characters, apologizes Plascencia. Too many to remember. The battle continues. Plascencia fights heartbreak. His creations fight for autonomy. When Plascencia is too depressed to control his characters, their voices spill onto the page in haphazard fashion, columns running vertically and horizontally, all semblance of plot ripped apart by voices wanting to be free and heard. At one point, the novel begins again when Camaroon complains about being turned into a character in Plascencia's book. What an astonishing, strange and deeply moving novel this is. In all his playfulness, Plascencia nonetheless grapples with troubling issues of free will, religious fidelity, ethnic identity, failed love and the creative process which he melds into a dreamscape that is impossible to forget. Plascencia—the God of his paper people—has given us a startling work of fiction that stretches not only the norms of storytelling, but also the bounds of our imagination. - - - - Baltimore City Paper Review by Violet Glaze "Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino in a coastal town in Jalisco, where at the age of six she sowed a plum orchard irrigated solely by salt water. When the sea was dry she resorted to onions and sad memories to water the black soil." That account may come as a surprise to the New York-born Hayworth, if she were still alive to witness her appearance as a minor character in Salvador Plascencia's magic-realist novel The People of Paper. It's probably also not true that she bedded Howard Hughes on a cushion of fresh Kleenex or that she was presented ceremonial bouquets of washed red-leaf lettuce in honor of her selfless promiscuity among the migrant lettuce pickers of her homeland. But her fictitious exploits are among the most rooted in plausibility among Paper's population, a census of which would include an ecstatic bee-sting venom addict, a surgeon who reanimates the dead by implanting carefully folded paper organs in their vacant chests, and an all-origami woman whose lovers must weigh the pleasure of cunnilingus against the inevitable paper cuts on lips and tongue. To say nothing of the Baby Nostradamus. Plascencia's audacious first novel documents the struggle of the quixotic residents of Las Tortugas, Mexico, against the planet Saturn's continual pull and omnipresent gaze. It's not as though Saturn (whose steady glare is revealed to be that of the author staring down upon his characters) doesn't have his own heartaches, too. His girlfriend has left him, and the loss prompts him to start his novel all over again midbook, this time with a new dedication and with every printed mention of her name scissored out of the paper. Meanwhile, back in Las Tortugas, Little Merced discovers that if she concentrates she can will blobs of black to sprout over the page and obscure whole paragraphs, blocking the view from the reader and confounding Saturn's control over his own story. Plascencia's handsome prose infuses Paper's boundary-busting format with melancholy and enchantment, perfectly complementing the lucid multicolumn layout that allows each character his or her own voice in turn. Magic and profound (and wildly ruleless without ever losing its way), The People of Paper is a sizable triumph, a satisfying summer read for thinking people. Just don't tell those spoilsports at the Hayworth estate. - - - - Curled Up With a Good Book (curledup.com) Review by Barbara Bamberger Scott The author of this book is acclaimed, as he should be, as a new Latino voice. Born in Mexico he immigrated to California, graduated from Whittier College and holds an MFA from Syracuse University. Being heir to the American dream, he has adopted a dreamy style of writing reminiscent of Borges and Marquez. But the setting is the less than magical: migrant camps and barrios of the less than romantic US of A. He has transformed the landscape, inventing characters from other lands and even other universes to keep the spell alive. "Ralph Landin had once spooned swastika soup in his native Hungary, feeling the sharp bends of the noodles on his tongue before they tore the walls of his cheeks." The book revolves at times around the mysterious Mexican, Rita Hayworth: "The in-house linguist at Fox Pictures touched Rita's tongue, teaching her to unroll her r's and pronounce words like salamander and salad without sounding like a wetback." There is much to do, including wars among the chrysanthemum pickers, the christening of a blind baby psychic and the death and resurrection of Little Merced. "Froggy found Little Merced on Sunday morning, lying on her back, surrounded by lime skins." It is viewed through the eyes of children as well as of the characters themselves. The chapters are short and don't follow any particular timeframes but meander like a river to the sea of stories told and left to be told. The theme of emigration pulses through the book: "In all her years in Tijuana she had never managed to cross the border." "When we came across a white chalk line that ran from the Pacific shore to the Rio Grande, my father looked around to see if anybody was following us or watching through telescopes. When he felt that we were alone we stepped over the chalk line and walked toward a world built on cement." In the world of cement Little Merced and her father, Federico de la Fe, are in fact being watched by Saturn, which starts out as a planet and becomes a personage. The book never lets ordinary boundaries get in the way of the stories. The author doesn't even mind talking to you: "You need to remember that I exist beyond the pages of this book." And with that, at his own request, he starts the book all over again. - - - - San Francisco Chronicle Review: "Slipping Writer's Grip, and Gunning for Him" By Joe Loya Few writers distrust the straight novel and autobiographical forms as much as Salvador Plascencia, a nervy new voice. In his first novel, "The People of Paper," a story by turns fiction, symbolic autobiography and historical nonfiction, it's sometimes difficult to follow the plotline. But, oh, is it fun. The story begins in Mexico with the creation of a woman made entirely of paper. Perfect origami organs, veins made of tissue paper, cardboard legs, newsprint digestive tract—that sort of magical realism thing. From there the story is told by multiple narrators—the planet Saturn is one of them—each often commenting on the same incident. The second part of the story begins in Las Tortugas, Mexico, where a bed-wetter named Federico de la Fe (Frederick of the Faith) is convinced that his wife has left him and their lovely daughter, Little Merced, because of his enuresis. He is full of remorse, so he decides to travel to Los Angeles. On the bus ride to Tijuana, Little Merced encounters a baby Nostradamus and the paper woman, whom Little Merced christens Merced de Papel (Paper). In Tijuana, Federico de la Fe believes that something is watching him, "some hovering entity that seemed to know everything about me." It isn't until he meets a car mechanic and hides in the shell of a mechanical tortoise—perhaps one of Mexico's ubiquitous VW Bugs?—that he feels free from surveillance. Very soon, after arriving in El Monte, a city 13 miles east of Los Angeles, he determines that Saturn is watching him and causing his sorrow. So Federico de la Fe enlists the help of local cholos from the gang El Monte Flores to fight in his war against Saturn, "one of the greatest wars against tyranny." Because of his moral stridency, we come to see Federico de la Fe as a 21st century Don Quixote, the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, tilting at windmills. Throughout the narrative, we follow parallel stories: the transformation of Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino into Rita Hayworth; a living saint named Juan Meza hiding from the Vatican as a masked wrestler in Mexico; and Apolonio, a curandero (shaman-healer) who tends to most of the characters at one time or other. Plascencia is one of those fantasist writers who always have the upper hand over the reader. So when gang member Smiley begins to resist warring with Saturn and thinks only about his own existence, his own "place in the novel," we know we are in for a big twist. And we aren't disappointed. Smiley goes to Apolonio to find out more about Saturn. Smiley asks, "So what is Saturn's real name?" "Saturn's real name is Salvador Plascencia." With map in hand, Smiley goes to the top of the San Gabriel mountain range near El Monte and peels open a rough spot in the sky. He climbs up into the messy house of the naked and sleeping author, Salvador Plascencia. Salvador wakes up and doesn't notice Smiley, who, after being ignored, strolls around the untidy house, only to learn by looking out the window that he