His espionage novel stolen by a celebrity
‘sweeper’
author, Archie Lees embarks on a helter-skelter odyssey seeking justice
inside the dark worlds of Anglo-American publishing, the tale swinging
from London to Barcelona, New York, Aigues-Mortes and back again over
twelve months, November 2003 to October 2004.
Louisiana Alba ransacks categories, voices and genres excavating
plagiarism and influence, reanimating modernism, realism, magic
realism, poetry, pop, drama, screenwriting and the postmodernist novel,
defrocking the methods and madness of major and minor literary
techniques and reputations in a century of writerly solitude.
Caustic, funny, celebratory, "Uncorrected Proof" is a slow-burn literary thriller and satire of the creative writing and publishing processes. A century after Bloomsday the story traces the fury of Archie Lees as he wonders whether it is worth trying to regain control of his novel after it is stolen.
Landing the story in places readers will be familiar and unfamiliar with - London, New York, Barcelona and Aigues-Mortes - Louisiana Alba progresses the tale via stylistic shifts, taking the reader through the major and minor methods of the twentieth century/twenty-first century novel of the modernist and postmodernist periods. Alba parodies over 100 writers, critiquing, reanimating and re-contextualizing methods and styles.
Louisiana Alba enfaces a portrait of the artist as a postmodern, reversing Joyce's engineering of his modernist self-effacement from the Dublin he recreated in one day. Alba asks what literary influence consists of in the contemporary novel, if the novel and other literary forms - poetry, drama, screenwriting, short fiction, diaries, essays and pop - are not all inexorably part of a seamless continuity of technique and content.
Tracing the legendary fury of Achilles, Alba cites Joyce's mythic schema in Ulysses by mining the unwritten prequel to the Iliad, reworking the disaffection of Achilles, the breakdown of Helen's marriage to Menelaus, the first kidnapping of Helen, her meeting with Paris and her subsequent flight to Troy, the controlling hand of Agamemnon throughout, and the roles of Hector and other characters from Homer's martial tale, all recast into the twenty-first century.
Readers' Reviews:
I found your book very refreshing... very readable but also so postmodern and referential. I delighted in your sources. You should come out west and do a reading sometime.
Richard Olafson, Editor, Pacific Rim Review, Victoria, B.C.
It reads like a splendidly maintained & protracted metafictional elaboration of the climactic shoot-out in the fun-fair corridor of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles's 'Lady from Shanghai'.
I was glad to see refs. to 'King of Comedy', surely one of the last century's vy best films...
Tom Gibbons, painter, writer, academic, Perth
With tongue in cheek humor and a sly poke at genre fiction, literary untouchables and the publishing industry this book seems tailor made for smart praise.
Even though I wasn't able to pick out all the literary styles interwoven playfully within the book -- and frankly at a certain point I was so into the story it didn't matter -- when I was able to pick up on an author or style it just added to the fun.
Very impressed with the versatility of the prose and the ability to coopt all these writers and yet still make it all work within the story being told, a story that holds its own as a larky genre thriller with literary overtones and a lot of humor too.
In the end all came off as clever parody.
Especially enjoyed the 'genre thriller' kick of the kidnapping and rescue of Ellen mirroring the story within the story within the story.
Given the levels of literary byplay and the scope and ambition of the prose styles, the story is amazingly accessible. It even is a bit of a high concept as well -- literary high concept (or highwire act) in which, while flawlessly speaking in all these different voices the book still tells a thoroughly enjoyable pulp story about stolen manuscripts and deferred vengeance in the volatile, cutthroat world of publishing. Making publishing a life and death enterprise is a nice conceit that allows all the tropes of detective and spy fiction to come into play and gives it much of its kicky fun.
Paul Duran, LA director and writer (Flesh Suitcase and The Dogwalker)
Quite an extraordinary work. ..Initially the surreal plot threw me then I realised that the plot, the use of various styles and forms, present continuous, film scripts and cooking instructions etc, were creating a particular structure. Eventually, I concluded that it was some sort of a coded book, either intentionally or as some kind of experiment, which I failed to appreciate. Like most coded works, the book consists of two novels seamlessly interwoven. In this case the characters from at least one are able to inhabit the other. This is clear when you separate the two novels by the plot and other code markers. The two novels are quite different, and even seem to deal with different subjects and are sometimes contradictory.
I have tried this coded thing but I used simple invisible multi-layering as you do when encoding engineering drawings. This form of yours is way beyond that.
This is a very brave new world you have stepped into, or invented, a new realm.
Eric Willmot, author of Pemulwuy and Below The Line, Melbourne
Uncorrected Proof, by the wonderfully-named Louisiana Alba, who lives around here
I believe...I looked at it and thought it looked good. I'd read it. If I were reading anything. So if you are local or can get to a copy, have a look & get it & let me know what you think.
Katy Evans-Bush, Poet, from her much followed blog on books Baroque in Hackney http://www.baroqueinhackney.com/
Contact the author via his Blog:
Swimanog
