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Fabian: A Cubist Biography is a surreal venture into what happens when a novelist writes a biography...of someone who never existed. Unbeknownst to Fabian, the disillusioned, would-be filmmaker after whom this enigmatic novel is named, his inventor and biographer-a writer known as Tom Newton-has abandoned conventional authorial practice and conscious decision-making. Fabian, press-ganged into existence, is inspired or doomed to create his own fictive universe peopled with conquistadors, Aztec priests, a charlatan psychoanalyst, immortal alchemists, and more. The tale careens across time and the globe in a bizarre whirl of adventure both psychic and corporeal. Opinions, digressions, ambiguous photographs, even footnotes and appendices challenge the novel form. No assumptions can be made! Iztlaca Tenemilizpoalli...
The biography of a mutable individual who is not so much a fictional character as a type of literary tulpa. In other words he has been created from a liberated speculation and a rigorous whimsy, his flesh and bones and career grown from the protein of an organic thought experiment. This book is a highly enjoyable romp through the ramifications of Bonini's paradox, in which a gradually evolving model becomes more and more difficult to understand fully as it approaches parity with the object or idea it is modelling. Fabian seems exactly like a real person, his treatment at the hands of Tom Newton more like a discovery than an invention. The writing is cool, crisp, precise, without waste. I am strongly reminded of Borges, naturally enough, also Paul Valery and even W. G. Sebald, but as the text progresses it acquires momentum, hurtling through its various territories of concepts, images and pure unabashed story . Essentially, this is an excellent narrative, splendidly rich, sincere, clever and deeply satisfying. -Rhys Hughes, author of The Postmodern Mariner
Enormously readable and thoroughly engaging...the only cubist novel I've ever read, and I love it. The book comes at you from many directions-it's as much a Rubik's Cube as it is an artistic one-and if you're eager to encounter reality in a new and startling form, then you will feel totally welcome inside this multi-dimensional work. Fabian himself is a strange and marvelous character, shape shifting, original and erudite, and the book he travels through is fast-paced, often funny, sometimes sad, and always surprising. I hope it receives the acclaim it deserves. -Kos Kostmayer, author of Fargo Burns
A page-turner, a voyage, and a delight. When an author invites his readers to join him in asking "what if," fiction meets biography, and we all face the truth. "One must live while one still can," Fabian tells us. His story proves the point. Newton's novel has echoes of Paul Auster's Book of Illusions and Kate's Atkinson's Life After Life while leaving no doubt that the invention and storytelling are beautifully his own. -Rob Ackerman, playwright, Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson
