The No World Concerto

Porta, a one-time collaborator with Roberto Bolano (on Tips from a Disciple of Morrison to a Fan of Joyce), dexterously plays with a concept now well-known to both literature and film: the storyteller who blurs the horizon between objective reality and creative endeavor. A man identified only as "the screenwriter" sets to work in a Parisian flophouse, giving various indications that the sexually self-exploitive girl who visits him and the pianist of his screenplay are not merely muse and character but a single entity. From the nexus of this enigmatic girl, all elements of environment, history, and society become swept into a sort of literary limbo. Appropriate to the concentration on cinema, repetition of barely-altered observations gives the text the feel of a cerebral art-house film. Similarly, the stream-of-consciousness style befits the screenwriter's organic story-drafting methodology. Porta builds curiosity in an unorthodox manner, presenting globules of subjectivism within the structure of the girl's own reality-blurring writing, and some passages even break the fourth wall. While the novel doubtless strikes a form appropriate to the philosophy sprinkled throughout, its reception will hinge upon a given reader's tolerance for unceasing disorientation and the characters' looping mantra that life is a game. (Apr.)