Waiting on Wednesday is held over on Breaking the Spine, where bloggers list what books they’re waiting for. This week my choice is well, Multiple Choice.
I honestly don’t know how to describe the book other than to say the uniqueness of how it’s presented as in the form of a multiple choice test. Here’s the Blurb:
A masterful, pioneering new work of fiction by “Latin America’s new literary star” (The New Yorker)
The works of Alejandro Zambra, “the most talked-about writer to come out of Chile since Bolaño” (New York Times Book Review), are distinguished by their striking originality, their brevity, their strangeness, and their flouting of narrative convention. Now, at the height of his powers, Zambra returns with a book that is the natural extension of these qualities: Multiple Choice.
Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to complete virtuoso language exercises and engage with short narrative passages via multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one where the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning. Full of humor, melancholy, and anger, Multiple Choice is about love and family; privacy and the limits of closeness; how a society is affected by the legacies of the past; and the conviction that, rather than learning to think, we are trained to obey and repeat. Serious in its literary ambition but playful in its execution, Multiple Choice confirms Alejandro Zambra as one of the most important writers working in any language.
Along with the format and the themes of love and family, and that line there in bold is what I want to read.
What do you think? Is it too odd for you? Or does it pique your interest?
I think this does sound odd, but I have to admit to being curious. Maybe I’ll wait and see what you thing about it first before deciding to pick it up. It is a really unique find though!
wow the format is def unique. I hope you get to read it!