Something I’m always looking for in submissions to Weird Lit Magazine are stories that make me feel less alone. As in that cosmic sense. I look for it everywhere: in stories, movies, paintings, in those moments where I make eye contact with a stranger on a train car going the opposite direction and we both smile a little. The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara (1995) gives me that feeling in such beautiful and haunting ways. This post is an overview of why you should read this huge freaking book (almost 500 pages).
I’ll admit I chewed on this novel for a while after finishing it, trying to digest into a review my thoughts on such a complex and weird work. And I think I get it, which is as good as getting it, really, I mean, maybe.
The first three quarters of the novel are a disjointed, multi-narrator onslaught of dialogues, scenes, emotions, and situations, with no periods (so it reads quite breathlessly) and no traditional cues that a new narrator has taken over (often mid-sentence). It feels a lot like you're flipping through the radio dial in a particularly erudite and clever county. Tying it all together are recurring themes of isolation, alienation, being totally lost down your own road, self-doubt, failure, and yearning. Some of these sections brought me to tears in that ah holy shit that's touching an incredibly nuanced thought I've had for years and have never heard anywhere else kind of way.
I have to warn you, there's a lot of book. There's so much going on, and so many scenes and voices that, while interesting, I couldn’t immediately see how they contributed to anything larger. But as I read through these scenes, I could relate to them, and I realized at the end that there’s an ineffable cumulative effect.
The last quarter of the novel is a disjointed, multi-narrator onslaught of dialogues, scenes, emotions, and situations, with no periods (so it reads quite breathlessly) and no traditional cues that a new narrator has taken over (often mid-sentence), BUT this time it's on one topic! And the voices are often in the same room! And there's a continuity! A cohesion! A story! And this time, the theme is of community coming together, listening to each other, and uniting against a common evil.
So that's why I think I get it. The majority of the book is a lovely and haunting mix of glimpses into a lot of lonely people's minds, none of them really connecting with anyone else in the ways they (think they) want, and then the last section is the opposite. Is the ending scenario an answer to the problem of isolation? I think it's one of them. The conceit of this extremely ambitious and often baffling book works. It works! It feels like a magic trick, but it works.
Recommended for: people who want a challenge, patient people, poets, fans of postmodern experiments.