Assignment 1: People of Paper

In an increasingly visual world, it is shocking that literature has continued to exclude visual elements. However, in Salvador Plascencia's work The People of Paper barriers are constantly broken between fiction and reality, text and image, and character and author. Plascencia doesn't go so far as to constantly insert pictures but instead represents and obstructs particular characters' thoughts with large black spaces.

The story follows a Mexican farmer, Fredrico de la Fed and his daughter, Little Merced as they leave their small river village and head into America. Fredrico is plagued with the sadness of his wife leaving their family due to his bed wetting problem and "cures" this pain with the aid of fire. When he begins to notice a crushing presence from the planet Saturn, de la Fed declares war against the tyrannical planet. When the family arrives at a Californian flower town named El Monte Flores, Fredrico recruits the local gang to aid him in his battle against the invasion of privacy. The story begins to follow other inhabitants of the town and explore their own personal losses: the ending of a relationship between Froggy and Sandra due to the murder of Sandra's father, the girl plagued by disintegration, Julieta, the town's 'witch doctor', Apollino, and a baby prophet named Baby Nostradamus.

Not only does the author chose to site the sadness of his characters but begins to intertwine his own personal loss of his girlfriend, Liz into the book. A gang member even breaks through the 'third wall' and finds himself in the bedroom of Salvador Plascencia, who turns out to be the oppressive force of Saturn. Combining mythology of the creation of paper people, wandering monks, and sainted wrestlers, The People of Paper is built upon many layers of the religious, the sacred, and the heartbroken.