Kaleidoscope.: A Short Novel About Writing

KALEIDOSCOPE. A short novel about writing, sets out as the logbook or personal diary of Sergio Ranelagh, a 23 years old fledgling writer from Argentina whose wealthy, upper class family has sent him to the USA to polish up on his outmoded English, learned from his British governess. Hoping to become a mainstream American writer, he enrolls in a creative writing course in a college in upstate New York Schenectady. In this journal he jots down Americanisms and slang expressions, records his impressions on fraternity life and reflects on the behavior of his fellow students in the pre-hippie era of the sixties. Gradually the scattered pieces of information about his new friends, as well as elements from Sergio´s own life, are turned into fiction and become the stuff of his writing assignments for the course. This is a book full of surprises, the choice of language being but the first. Kalman Barsy, an established Spanish speaking author, makes a cross-over and writes in English, integrating this fact into the corpus of the text itself by making the first-person narrator a student of literary creation in a language in which he is not a native speaker. The linguistic dilemma of the text is thus astutely resolved and --at the same time-- this solution highlights the main theme expressed in the subtitle. The novels storyline is told on different layers that overlap and mix in a diverse and changing ensemble, quite literally like the shapes and colors in a kaleidoscope --the last of which leads us to re-focus the whole novel, as we are made to realize that all we have read so far is nothing but a fictional constructo made up by Sergio from scraps of his real life. In the end we come to understand its skillful and ambitious interplay of mirroring narrations, splendidly summarized on the last page: "It's like a mirage come real, metamorphosed into the words that sprout up on the pages of your notebook. In the end, all becomes one: the delusory distinction between fiction and non-fiction, bullshit and truth, vanishes, abolished by the enlightenment of true inspiration" . Here the novel finds its true, enlightened inspiration and we are captivated by this dazzling hodgepodge of falsehood and truth. The construction is impeccable; the storytelling, enticingly imaginative and sprinkled with humor. Without a doubt, whether in Spanish or English, Kalman Barsy proves to be a superb spinner of tales.