Pigeon Post Book

Tsepeneag is a game player, a writer who writes about writing with extreme self-consciousness of being a writer writing about writing. I would say to not even bother with him if this sort of approach bothers you, or even makes you cry This is fucking bullshit!, but (and I must say this sort of approach often rubs me the wrong way) Tsepeneag does it with a difference.

The difference being that there's something extra-literary at work here, something that speaks to the reader's consciousness and awareness and how he/she processes stimuli, whether internal or external. This is plausible as he founded a lit movement in Romania in the 1960's named Onirism, which in some ways furthered the Surrealist agenda, but which was/is more intent on using automatic writing in a larger more intentionally structured format; and, as the name suggests, Onirism aspired to the logic of dreams and/or hallucinations. I cannot say that the two novels of his I've so far read resembled hallucinations, or even dreams, to me, but as I read them something did begin happening in my head, something new and interesting and (most importantly) something extra-literary. I do not mean something transcendent. I mean something like a rearranging of small parts of my brain as I read, which allowed light and air into dark and unused spots, a freeing up of faculties. But even as I say this I have my suspicions that Tsepeneag would refute the notion that there is anything extra-literary about his literary production, that he would say to expect anything extra-literary from a work of literature is pure foolishness. Was he indeed parodying this notion in Hotel Europa with the recurring UFO theme? Was the woman looking up into the sky at the conclusion of that novel a representative of the foolish reader or the ideal reader? I don't know, and I don't know that I care. I very much enjoyed reading the book, as I very much enjoyed reading this book.

Pigeon Post is a book about a writer writing a book. The book that is being read is a record of the process of writing the book itself. It is an intentionally undermining of the reader's expectations blahblahblah. Yeah, who really cares about this kind of "radicalism" anymore? But Tsepeneag does it with a casually fun flair that is eminently engaging; and anyway he doesn't stop at that simple undermining of intentions, he also puts forth a compositional technique based on music - progressive classical music, and he weaves chess and its playing into the text, as well as having Nabokov stand in as the unnamed and mysterious presiding spirit of the whole operation. Though I didn't quite catch them I am sure there wee numerous references to Nabokov's last two books in Pigeon Post. I even suspect that this book is an attempt to one-up the master. But this is pure speculation, as I don't really care to ferret out the references and get all egg-headed about the experience. I will leave that to the dear eggheads, as I'm moving on! … to reread Nabokov's last two novels.