Evan Lavender-Smith’s Avatar (Book Acquired, 3.22.2013)

Came home to Evan Lavender-Smith’s Avatar in the mail. Loved his book From Old Notebooks. What is Avatar about? I asked Evan and he told me. This was in an interview we did that will run next week here on this very blog. Here’s a sample:

Biblioklept: I haven’t read your novel Avatar—can you tell us a little bit about it?

ELS: It’s a monologue spoken or thought by someone floating in the depths of space who can see only two points of light, two stars in the distance, one in front and one behind. The speaker/thinker has apparently been stuck in this condition for a very long time, having spent much of that time — hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of years — trying to puzzle out how he/she arrived in such an awful situation, what it means to be there, what to think about next, etc. It’s very different than From Old Notebooks in most respects — a number of people who liked From Old Notebooks told me they didn’t care for Avatar, and some people who liked Avatar told me they weren’t crazy about From Old Notebooks — but I believe they share at least one main concern, which is an attempt to come up with a formal analog that would describe a figure for thought, to formally systemize and to abstract or maybe almost to allegorize thought within the context of a book. Ulysses is probably my all-time favorite novel, and one of the things I love best about it is how its method of interior monologue functions, to my reading, both as this bizarre formal contrivance — people don’t really think like that at all, don’t rely so heavily on words to think, at least I don’t — and as a beautiful linguistic or formal analog to real human thought. In both From Old Notebooks and Avatar, I believe I was trying to do something along those lines, to come up with a way for a book to develop its own peculiar grammar or system of thought quite distinct from real human thought and at the same time have that grammar somehow formally or abstractly correspond to the ebbs and tides and the fits and starts and the beauty and boring repetition of how a mind really thinks; to develop over the course of a book a formal figure for thought that both does and doesn’t resemble thought as we encounter it in our day-to-day lives.