After I forced myself to get over the fact that this is a women-bashing story of a little man who just can’t get over the fact that a girl left him, I tried to look for the ways in which this book qualifies as a post-print fiction book.
I think the book incorporates a lot of the elements of the new media into the traditional print form. Starting with the presentation and the physical structure of the text, we see similarities with digital works presentations. There is a lot of use of white space, different fonts, and the format changes from columns to uninterrupted text, definitely separating from “Gutenberg’s archetype of the unmarked text.” (Drucker 95)
Another incorporation of new media is the way in which the story is delivered as a compilation of characters’ points of view of an incident instead of using dialogues and an all-powerful narrator to which traditional narrative has accustomed us. This approach reminds me of the idea of databases explained by Lev Manovich and where the sequence of a beginning to the end is less important to make sense of the story. This gives a reader a much greater power of interaction with the book, for example one could chose to read all the pieces of a character from beginning to end and then another, and so forth. This way the experience could be a different one in each read or to each reader.
The coolest approach is the interaction of the characters with the author, who is himself a character of his own story, diffusing the line between what the author is going through while writing his novel and the story of the novel itself. Suddenly he loses control over the characters of his books—which has been admitted by many an author in the past— but also people from his own life seem to find the way into his novel apparently without his permission. I think this is the most fascinating part of the story, when he appears to be looking down in his backyard and see those characters interacting at their own will instead of him writing about them, and then to his surprise, real people from his real world show up to the village and there is nothing he can do about it. This enhances the element of virtual experiences so in vogue through the digital and interactive narratives of today.
While the story is not as self-aware as that of Italo Calvino or that of Danielewski, Plascencia focuses his attention on the relationship of the writer and his characters and how he is a character also manipulated by the others in the story. The story proclaims itself as a “war on omniscient narration.” (218)
I appreciate your comment that the women are mistreated and dumped upon, but I wonder if the men come out any better. And the man who is bashed most of all—who I don’t think we’re meant to like or respect—is Saturn himself, Salvador Plascencia, the “author” of the entire thing. In some ways, I think this makes the book even more self-aware than If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, because not only does the author incorporate himself into the novel, he also portrays himself as a jerk.