'Tristano #11615: A novel' by Nanni Balestrini

Nobody else in the world has read this book, at least not in the way I have read it. In the mid-1960s Balestrini wrote ten fields of short paragraphs which were intended to be randomly ordered, generating a potential 109,027,350,432,000 different versions of his novel. At last computer technology has made it possible to realise his experiment, and each copy of this edition is different (a bibliographer’s headache!). The ‘story’, such as it is, concerns some lovers in Milan: can they escape and be together or will contingencies get in their way? As the reader reads their unique text, a unique story should be revealed. Whilst this is a very interesting experiment (reminding me of B.S. Johnson’s considerably more profound The Unfortunates) and worth having a copy of for this reason (comparing a few different versions also presents itself as an interesting thing to do), Balestrini unfortunately makes it hard to judge the results of his experiment by writing in a way that resembles randomness anyway, so that the effect of the randomisation is unclear. Combinatory permutations of more straightforward basic elements under strict laboratory conditions would perhaps have revealed more about the role of temporal structure on the reading of fiction.

(May 2014)