Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned, they remain indistinct throughout. There is no story of any conventional kind, except for what could loosely be called the story of the main character recollecting (and recreating) her now dead lover, Few concrete events aside from this recollection are related in present narrative time (it could be said that part of the main character's motivation is to, in effect, annul narrative time altogether), although eventually we are presented with brief episodes of more concrete activity occurring in the past. The novel seems to be set nowhere in particular, but wherever it is it is cold, and it seems to snow quite a lot.
These formal features are reinforced in the novel's style, which is highly metaphorical but doesn't provide a lot of close figurative description, the language more philosophical and rhetorical than lyrical:
Between them, the night, its shadows, ambivalent as to whom to protect, him or her; the night that cannot tear itself asunder, the night that cannot offer itself to both of them; the night, its shadows in disarray, from her steps to his hesitations and back again, from the idea, no from the essence of a god, the god of this painting in reverse, this painting that shows her leaving when it was, in fact, that reality took the shape of his departure; from this essence of a god to the rest of the world, in throes, to the world immersed in petty passions and ebbing desires and folding of the senses.
This language is employed to disclose the efforts of the main character, who is a writer, to not merely remember her lover, who was a painter, but to in effect keep him alive in her continuing acts of imagination. It might be said that the novel as whole comprises this character's attempt to meld past and present through a kind of perpetual visionary projection.
Thus, while Schism Blue never does develop the drama or narrative movement of the kind readers might expect, it does acquire its own sort of fascination as a contemplative metafiction that ruminates on the process of fiction-making--or on the process of fiction-making as it unfolds within the consciousness of its main character. This character is not relating her experience in her own voice, so it as if the larger narrative voice observes these cerebral acts of creation, although it is more like this voice reports on the character's awareness as she creates, while the actual creation--the fictional character that is the lover, and the specifics of his actions (his "story")--remains unavailable to us, tucked inside the writer's desk. The "narrative" offered by the novel, is indeed the story of the storytelling, without access to the story told.
Because of this odd narrative structure (a narrative that is a supplement to another narrative that is hidden), the pleasures to be found in Blue Schism are realized in individual passages of writing rather than the architectural whole to which they nominally belong. In an extended reverie in which she summons the lover by thinking about the image of a red house (presumably an image in one of his paintings), the main character reflects:
A beautiful echoing, this memory now for assembling all that she has gone to assemble; a house amidst spruces; a house he made for her; a house on the beach; a house, emergent, on the highest of crests, in the deepest of caves, a house from the hands of a painter, from the mind of a writer, from a beautiful creator of tiny red houses.
She is able to apprehend the nature of this red house. And that is happiness. That too is paradise. She is able to situate this house inside the human space of the mind. She is able to create correlation and contain absence and presence and coming-into-being inside of its redness. She is able to carry this house.
The novel is best at offering this sort of insight into the aesthetic transformation of experience, expressed metaphorically and rhapsodically, ultimately making such transformation what the novel is actually "about," acting as both the object of its discourse and the engine of that discourse. Schism Blue pushes against the tyranny of the conventions of plot, character, and setting as strongly as any novel I've read, even though I wouldn't really call it a work of experimental fiction. It is more like a prose poem than a formal or stylistic experiment.
Still, I wouldn't call Schism Blue "poetic" as that term is usually applied in reference to works of fiction. Its metaphorical language is used not as lyrical embellishment but as a formal pattern that brings a unity to the novel that usually comes from plot. The novel does depict characters, even if they are less explicitly delineated than in most novels. And if the setting is also mostly nonspecific, it actually figures into the living memory the protagonist is attempting to create by serving as evocative imagery. This novel definitely blurs strict boundaries between fiction and poetry, but it works most provocatively as an unorthodox work of fiction.
No doubt some readers would find it too unorthodox, too dependent on its elaborate prose, providing too few of the usual signposts by which we navigate most works of fiction. For those who absolutely require those signposts in order not to lose their way, perhaps Schism Blue would prove too perilous. For those willing to get lost once in a while but trusting that the work itself will ultimately guide them back, the effort is fully worth the risk.
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