The Dodecahedron, or a Frame for FramesThe Dodecahedron, or a Frame for Frames
The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames is a kaleidoscopic novel ... of sorts. Twelve stories of seemingly different genres cohere into a book of astonishing literary dimension.
Twelve narratives, twelve narrators, twelve genres and twelve fictional worlds collide to spectacular effect in Paul Glennon's The Dodecahedron, or a Frame for Frames. The second book from the author of How Did You Sleep? takes his adventures in short fiction to strange new regions, where professional polygamists, heretical alcoholics and hallucinating arctic explorers find themselves sharing plot points, character traits and dialogue.
At turns philosophical and farcical, The Dodecahedron makes for intriguing, compelling reading. Each of the book's twelve chapters has its own style and apparent fictional autonomy, but every narrative finds itself corroborated or undermined by the next. Messages found in bottles, computer-generated dialogues and the lamentations of the world's last genie shouldn't have much in common, but their paths constantly intersect in The Dodecahedron, creating networks of allusions and contradictions. The Dodecahedron revels in the art of story making and proves once and for all that the geometry of the dodecahedron is a rich source of comic fiction.
`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.' -- Quill & Quire
Twelve narratives, twelve narrators, twelve genres and twelve fictional worlds collide to spectacular effect in Paul Glennon's The Dodecahedron, or a Frame for Frames. The second book from the author of How Did You Sleep? takes his adventures in short fiction to strange new regions, where professional polygamists, heretical alcoholics and hallucinating arctic explorers find themselves sharing plot points, character traits and dialogue.
At turns philosophical and farcical, The Dodecahedron makes for intriguing, compelling reading. Each of the book's twelve chapters has its own style and apparent fictional autonomy, but every narrative finds itself corroborated or undermined by the next. Messages found in bottles, computer-generated dialogues and the lamentations of the world's last genie shouldn't have much in common, but their paths constantly intersect in The Dodecahedron, creating networks of allusions and contradictions. The Dodecahedron revels in the art of story making and proves once and for all that the geometry of the dodecahedron is a rich source of comic fiction.
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- The Porcupine's Quill, 2005.
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