The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories: Towards a Collection of Creative Paratextual Writing or Literature in potentia

Although the genres assembled in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories have been discussed more than once, the collection encourages further enquiry and diverse comparisons with experimental fiction. This essay, drawing on the writer’s choice and stylistic tendency to hover on the verges of fiction and non-fiction, proposes to re-view the hybrid material of the volume as a collection of paratexts immersed in a rich history of paratextual writing. Vladislavić’s spectrum of inspiration is broad, and several of its sources are mentioned explicitly in The Loss Library (Laurence Sterne, François Rabelais and Jorge Luis Borges), but the discussion that follows refers only to two collections: A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books and Imaginary Magnitude, both by Stanisław Lem. The essay argues that the decision to withdraw from either mainstream or experimental literature into paratextual writing is aesthetically and politically meaningful. The withdrawal entails a spectrum of consequences involving the assemblage and leporello-like architecture of the collection, a typically paratextual emphasis on transition, an obliteration of borders between the text and the extratextual, as well as a notable emphasis on communication. Additionally, a multiplicity of voices taken from everyday life, resulting in a proliferation of focalizers, and the politics of pronouns, including the plurality of the first-person narrative, to name but a few, create a sense of community, inviting the reader to participate in the creative process. Instead of authorship as authority, instruction and guidance, the collection proposes a sincerity of communication and tenderness on the part of the narrator.