Paper City

by Nathalie Stephens

In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author's two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the characters n and b , and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1552451267
• ISBN13: 9781552451267
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Ink Filled Nights in the Paper City

Paper City is built largely in prose-esque paragraphs, with recurrent reference to language and languages (Stephens also writes in French), and with recurrent allusion to logic & linguistics. The work is pervaded by a Beckett-like sense of the despair of living and relating inside a paper/language city (the anxiety of reference), untranslatability, unspeakability. In what one might by now consider a small tradition among younger innovative writers (thinking of Pamala Lu's A Novel) her "characters" are named only by their initals, n and b. A character named "?" also shows up, and one named M. Some of the syntactical complexity, tweaked narrative, and antique vocabulary reminded me periodically of Taylor Brady's book Microclimates. Since n could be Natalie, or could perhaps (in my reading) also function as "neither" versus b for "both" in the classic neither-both logical construction, the prose poems neatly bring forward the question of whether there are other models for narrative besides fiction--what's narrative in logic, what's narrative in linguistic analysis, etc. ? There's also a rich undercurrent of transgressive sexuality and feminisms, a foregrounding of the body, with attendant radical gender questions going on ("Who will speak for the body?" etc.). The prosody is less line by line or word by word than a rhythm back and forth between intelligible content, the appearence of such content, and elusive collapses. Stephens also has a good essay in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, also from Coach House.