DEFOE
New from Sun & Moon Press (6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036)
distributed by Small Press Distribution, Consortium, and at select bookstores
DEFOE, by Leslie Scalapino,
Classics 46, 365 pages, $12.95; ISBN # 1-55713-163-5
DEFOE, Leslie Scalapino's new fiction, is an epic where images of
battle become meditations, an epic wherein events flap in silence as the
narrative moves toward a place where the reader and text become one. The
images of this fiction don't resemble events, but are new occurences in
time and space. In Part I, Waking Life, the heroine, in love with James
Dean, discovers herself in a desert pocked with fires in which the "henna
man"- a drug dealer- is being carried in a white cocoon. And throughout
Scalapino's work the reader is taken into a world where the written word
creates " an event retrieved from so far back that it is separated from its
memory." While not resembling reality/history, the fictionalizing induces
the simplest movement possible in its whole expanded, unique structure, to
change real past and present.