sewn paper
Stories; FIC 029000
September 2005
224 pages
ISBN 0-88984-275-2
$21.95

e-mail the Author

Search by Title

Search by Author

PQL Home

Alumni

To order

Order Direct

The Dodecahedron
or A Frame for Frames

Twelve narratives, twelve narrators, twelve genres and twelve fictional worlds collide in Paul Glennon's The Dodecahedron; Or, A Frame for Frames.

Glennon, the award-winning author of How Did You Sleep?, takes his adventures in fiction to strange new regions, where professional polygamists, heretical alcoholics and hallucinating arctic explorers find themselves sharing plot points, character traits and dialogue. These apparently distinct stories -- which include the first chapter of an adventure novel, the journal of an early Spanish explorer, and the confessions of a polygamist -- all have their own tale to tell, but each story is re-interpreted through the lens of its neighbours.

Intriguing, compelling, philosophical and farcical, The Dodecahedron is a bravura performance, in which a range of well-known genres -- investigative journalism, academic articles, children's stories, adventurer's diaries, and more -- are folded together in a feat of literary origami. Its twelve chapters hint at the strange synchronicity of the world and the elusive ambiguity of fiction.

The Dodecahedron is a work of Oulipian origins, born of a series of self-imposed constraints that give the book its structure and its title. It's a rarely pursued art form that favours absurd humour and eccentric insights. Christian Bok's Eunoia is perhaps the only other major Canadian venture in this genre.

Twelve narrators, twelve stories, twelve genres, and twelve fictional worlds collide to build this `novel of sorts' -- an eccentric bravura performance for lovers of the offbeat, the original and the mysterious. The Dodecahedron will be the strangest book of the season, but it will also prove to be one of the more entertaining.

Glennon currently has the profile of a writer's writer. Critics who search out innovation in Canadian writing loved How Did You Sleep?, his first collection of stories. The Dodecahedron is a much more readerly book, with the potential to build on Glennon's critical success and reach a broader audience.

`There's a lavish intelligence at work in Glennon's book. He plays with the reader -- joining hands at times with her, at other times pushing her forcefully away -- but this is a fine model for reading: an experience that is once intellectual and visceral. A Frame for Frames is a worthwhile experiment. It makes something old new again.'
    -- Michael Redhill, the Globe & Mail

`The Dodechedron delivers the tension inspired by true magicians: the longing to understand the reality of an illusion along with the fervent desire to believe in magic.'
    -- Mary Jane Copps, Aloft

No other book contains a laugh-out-loud-funny memoir of a professional polygamist, a modern Canterbury Tales set in an airport's departure lounge, a plot to hide a pre-Columbian European presence in the Americas and the memoir of a collector of messages in bottles, all worked into a single coherent structure.

`To call The Dodecahedron Paul Glennon's second "collection" would be a little misleading. Images, phrases, characters, and scenarios recur so frequently over these twelve stories that spotting the skewed correspondences becomes a sort of hallucinatory game for the reader, making this wonderful book less a collection or novel of linked stories than a puzzle - one whose solution remains delightfully out of grasp. ...

`While it's difficult not to detect the guiding hand of the author in such an overtly constructed project, Glennon's presence remains unobtrusive. The characters' voices guide the tenor of the prose, not vice-versa. So despite wearing its conceptual underpinnings on its sleeve, The Dodecahedron never ceases to be about people: how despite the diversity of our obsessions, convergences prevail among us. One rarely sees a book of such scope and ambition succeed so thrillingly.'
    -- Stewart Cole, Quill & Quire

`Readers interested in solving the puzzle are recommended to build a model. One assumes Glennon had one sitting on his desk so that he could keep it in front of him while he was putting the book together. You just can't hold a structure like this together in your head. In other words, the concept is indisputably there, but also nowhere since it is invisible. The connections, recurrences, and relations are easy to spot, but not the shape of the whole. At this point one can be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is just a stunt, and too clever by half at that. Maybe it is. But it's also one of the liveliest, smartest, most original books you'll ever read.'
    -- Alex Good, goodreports.net

`The Dodecahedron is a book about stories and language. Specifically, it is about the freedom and fluidity of words before they are captured in writing. The interplay between stories allows this flow to exist on Glenon's printed page. Because the details, the meaning and the accuracy of each piece of information is uncertain, the reader must keep speculating about the stories, allowing them to remain alive.'
    -- Kris Rothstein, matrix

The cover image is a photograph of a room in the Collegium Maius, Cracow, Poland, where Copernicus studied in 1502.