This book’s title grabbed my attention while browsing at the Boston Atheneum and when I took it down from the shelf, the rough drawn diagrams of novels from “Beloved” to “Moby Dick” fascinated me.  How does one draw a novel???

Solares is a Mexican writer, editor, and critic whose work has been described by Junot Diaz as ‘brilliant but not generally available in English.”  This book was not translated for 10 years after being published in Spanish, and it was evident in reading it that it was intended primarily for a Spanish-speaking audience.  Most of the references were to authors and books originally in Spanish, and as a result much of the text was lost on me.

There was, however, a wonderful chapter entitled ‘Structure’s Ghost’.  Solares, like Forster in his classic “Aspects of the Novel” explores the roles of structure, character, plot, voice and other novelistic techniques, but lands on structure as the key.  He then applies this lens to a number of novels written in English including ‘Moby Dick’, Twain’s Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, ‘A Connecticut Yankee’, and ‘Prince and the Pauper’, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, and a number of others from ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ to the novels of Paul Auster.  Reading this chapter made wading through the rest of the book worth it. I especially enjoyed his critical assessment of Melville’s novel. Other recommendations he made that I will pursue are the novels of Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, and Cormac McCarthy.

This was not an easy read, but it did contain some gems of observation and literary criticism.  Not likely to be enjoyed by the leisurely reader.