Last week I was the recipient of a very strange novel. It's titled "Revisions Of..." and the author is someone writing under the pseudonym "Goodloe Byron."
I read the back cover and the book seemed fairly interesting I suppose:Nathan First is a childlike biographer, making barely enough from his writing to survive. His only source of contact with the outside world is his sister, whose recent marriage has left Nathan to his own devices. Moved by a paltry obituary that he reads in the paper, Nathan sets out to compose his masterpiece; a biography of an ordinary man. But this will be no ordinary book; as Nathan becomes increasingly ambitious, the project blossoms into a study of the dark matter of humanity and appears to contain the abandoned history of the world.Actually, the book sounded like a leftover from the reading list of someone's socialism class. The guy who passed this book on to me was a local student I met while prepping for a night out. It was my first and only time meeting this dude, so he knew nothing about my reading habits and what I prefer to read, only that I enjoy reading and have an English degree. But he enthusiastically recommended this book.
"If you love to read, you'll love this book," he said. "Plus it's free!"
Indeed it was:
Reading the bottom half of the back cover, I was even more convinced this is someone's little socialist project. Not only is the book clearly priced at $0.00, it is also part of something called The Zero Dollar Tour, which "[d]istributes book to the public free of charge. The previous rounds have distributed twenty thousand copies of 'The Abstract: Tales of Wickedness and Sorrow.'"
Uh... ok. Never heard of the tour or that other novel, but I'm always down to read things with which I'm unfamiliar.
The first twelve pages of the book are dedicated to explaining what exactly The Zero Dollar Tour is. All the descriptions, divided neatly into 11 personal narratives, are in the third person and all provide background information about the author, Goodloe Byron, and his travelling book tour. Byron goes around the country to book fairs, coffee shops, parks--anywhere really--and tries to give away copies of his manuscript, sometimes to no avail. His request to leave a pile of his free books at one location was met with suspicion: "[W]hat's the catch? Is this pornography? Is it Satanic?"
Pretty much the same things I was thinking about the book as I read it.
Many of the narratives praise Byron's efforts to get his book to the masses for free.
"...[L]ike a traveling road show of yore," is how author Steven Cleaver describes Byron and his band of vagabond book distributors. "If nothing else, in the story of his own life, Goodloe Byron is creating a character to remember," Cleaver wrote.
Cleaver is attributed in his signoff as the author of two books, "Saving Eramus" and "Dear God, Whatever Your Name is Now." I Googled Cleaver and his novels to verify he was a real person. I found "Saving Eramus" on Amazon.com, described as a "bizarre, whimsical novel [that] will charm and delight some readers and perplex others." Again, I felt as if the same could be said for "Revisions Of..." It was certainly perplexing me.
I tossed the book in the back seat of my car and pretty much forgot about it until earlier this week. There was a website listed for the publisher of the book on the back cover, so I decided to check it out. Maybe the company behind this book could offer some insight into the author and his motives.
The website for Brown Paper Publishing, www.brownpaperpublishing.com, is amateurish at best, especially for a publishing house. In fact, the very first words on the main site are "Alright, so i have no idea how to edit the website." Most of the information to be found there is out-of-date anyways. Even some of the links are dead. Great.
If you Google "revisions of goodloe byron," not much comes up, except for a few paltry reviews and a Facebook group that has 12 members. By this point, I had pretty much given up on caring who Goodloe Byron really was and what exactly his book was about. I could barely make it past the first chapter it was so... difficult to follow and make sense of. I didn't even know in which context to read the book: is it a satire? A biography? An autobiography? It seemed to be all three and possibly more.
Anyways, that brings me to this post. I am angry and frustrated that Random Guy gave me this crap book to read. I want to ask him so many questions: Why did you recommend this crap book to me, stranger? Were you kidding? Do YOU understand this mess? So. Many. Questions.
I want the minutes and seconds of my life that it took to read as much of "Revisions Of.." that I did back! Just looking at the book, sitting there, being all elusive and nonsensical and ish, is pissing me off! At least it was free.
I have plans to leave the book in a bookstore, Dunkin Donuts, park or side-of-the-freeway near you, so maybe you (or some other hapless, bored soul) can make sense of it.
