Gran idea, bon desenvolupament. Segurament dels que treus més suc un cop ja llegit. Però és tot d'una tirada, sense diàlegs, amb paràgrafs immensos... Difícil, però ha valgut la pena. ( )

Like all the works by Tulli I have read, this is a complex, allegorical, poetic, and somewhat metafictional novel. It start out with a tailor making costumes (and it will turn out that clothes really make the man in this tale) and a city square with streets that end a little beyond it. Tulli mentions the cost of manufacturing what seem to be props. Is this a movie set? Gradually, the reader gets to know the people who live and work in the square: a notary with a wife and two children, the maid who works for them, a policeman, a student, a waiter in a café, and more.

But then, something unsettling happens; it isn't clear what at first, but it later develops that some military man has seized power, not in the square but in the country it is a part of. Suddenly, refugees start arriving in the square, much to the discomfiture of the residents. The student, changing his costume by the addition of a sash, commands a squad of grammar school students. Then a group of air force officers mysteriously arrives, and await a helicopter that can fly them to where they are really supposed to be. (The helicopter, when it comes, is apparently made of cardboard.) Through a series of events, the air force general leaves his coat and hat behind; the waiter finds them and is transformed into a general who tries to enforce various nefarious orders.

But this is just the plot, such as it is. Tulli is playing with ideas, not just of clothes making the man, but also of what is a story. She mentions that this is a story frequently:

"And what about that other square, in a different story, of necessity vacated and closed down? And the suddenly interrupted strands of stories entwining it?" p. 62

"Now things must move faster, as the general too is in a hurry. Having already been derailed from its course, the story has entered a different track. The same one that every story ends up on unavoidably sooner or later, because it is the track of the world, always ready to give direction to whatever is moving without purpose or destination. In the quiet of early evening, the story is already heading straight towards violent and cruel events, as if there were no one to take care of it. If this story belongs to me, I am powerless to change its course or turn things back." p. 158

Tulli also uses phrases like "If I am the maid, i would ..." or "If I am the policeman, I would ..."

So Tulli is playing with the idea of what makes a story while telling a tale that could, in magically condensed form, be a story that is repeated all too frequently, with particular resonance now, of military dictators, refugees, and cruelty directed at the perceived other.

I enjoyed Tulli's playfulness, as I have enjoyed it in the other books I have read by her, but this book didn't grab me as much as some of the others. I suspect it was my mood, rather than the book.

Un llibre difícil, ple de simbolismes.
Tampoc ha ajudat gaire el fet d'intentar llegir només 40 pàgines a la setmana. Feia que quan el tornava a agafar el sentís llunyà.
Però al final no m'ha agradat. No és del tipus de llibres que m'agraden. No el recomenaria. ( )

Diverse correspondences come to mind: Kafka, Di Chirico, Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, the African-American book of folk tales The People Could Fly.
FLAW is a tale about tales, an allegory, a stage set; yet imbued with enough historical and psychological resonance that its painted props and faceless characters who engage in no dialog provoke both intellectual and emotional involvement in the “story.” The setting (also, the set) is an urban square with one streetcar line; there is no elsewhere. (“The story is not taking place here or there. It fits entirely into itself as into a glass globe . . . .”) The most important thing here is to have the right costume; for in FLAW, in the most fundamental way, clothes make the man.
A large group of refugees from another story, destitute “outsiders,” appear out of nowhere; they don’t exist until they board the streetcar at one stop and get off at the other stop in front of the government offices. The same can be said of a group of military officers, airmen, who don’t know why or how they have come to be here and who await a helicopter, which finally arrives at the end of the story to take them away. So, there is an outside and an inside to this story, although we are never allowed to see beyond the painted plywood perimeter of the square. (“It is the backdrops that determine the look of the world . . . . Closing the space, the boards open it up at the same time, offering an illusory distance that seems to stretch into the unseen suburbs.”) Even the helicopter is constructed of cardboard and silver foil, yet manages to fly out of the story with the officers aboard. Rumor has it that the refugees themselves will be taken away in taxis to America; although these taxis never arrive, the refugees mysteriously disappear at the end of the tale (having been sealed into the basement of the cinema and left there to suffocate upon the orders of the new Commander of the Guard). There is a political coup, a band of delinquent boys (refugee orphans and local boys in cahoots); a diverse assortment of uniforms, a revolver loaded with one bullet; a servant girl who is dishonored and dismissed, a pompous student who meets his due, and assorted square-dwellers (never rising to the level of townspeople, since there is no town). In short, many of the elements of a conventional narrative, although a conventional narrative this decidedly is not. Here we are in story time and story place, and yet some of the rules resemble those of “real” time and “real” places, for instance: “It is a rule in this story that the weaker person carries the greater burden.” As for other rules, “In principal the loaded revolver ought sooner or later to be fired, though they were still counting on the imperfect nature of the rules and the fact that from time to time they failed to operate. Maybe this rule too would not work—and even if it did, let it at least affect someone else.”

( )

The first ten pages of this novel are the best ten pages I've read since I finished Erasmus' 'Praise of Folly.' Tulli creates an amazing double allegory kind of thing, in which the sewing of clothes by a tailor ends up standing for, in increasing order of interest, a) making clothes; b) writing fiction; c) living in the world ("The needle hurtles unrestrainedly towards its only goal--the final calculation of materials and labor").

And then for no apparent reason it turns into Jose Saramago, without the humor, beauty or weirdness. Now if you like your fiction without any of those things, and without named characters, and without much in the way of syntactical variation (possibly the translator's fault), and with a few moments of meta-fiction ("If I am the maid, I feel..."), you may well love this. And Tulli is obviously crazy smart, and capable of pretty great things.

But damnit, this novel is just really boring. The tailor thing should have been tacked on to the front of a much better novel. ( )