Calendar of Regrets

Author| Lance Olsen
Country| United States
Language| English
Genre| Postmodern novel, Historiographic metafiction
Publisher| FC2

Publication date

| September 6, 2010
Pages| 456
ISBN| ISBN:1573661570

Calendar of Regrets is a postmodern novel by American writer Lance Olsen, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2010.

## Contents

* 1 Plot summary
* 2 Reception
* 3 References
* 4 External links

## Plot summary

Calendar of Regrets is a collage novel comprising twelve interconnected narratives, one for each month of the year, all pertaining to notions of travel—through time, space, narrative, and death.

The narratives involve: 1) the poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; 2) former CBS anchorman Dan Rather's mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolled home alone one evening; 3) a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; 4) a high school teacher who videos her own auto-erotic asphyxiation and sends them to strangers across the U.S.; 5) a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers in London; 6) a terrorist commandeering a family's car on the Italian Autostrada; 7) the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s point of view; 8) a series of pirate podcasts by a young drifter along the shores of the Salton Sea in southern California; 9) an interview between forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz and the man who assaulted Dan Rather; 10) an angel (based on the one appearing in symbolist Hugo Simberg's famous painting titled The Wounded Angel) discovered by two boys in the Finnish countryside; 11) a man built of borrowed organs, each with its own story; 12) a boy born as a notebook.

Each narrative is composed in a unique style and genre, breaks off in the middle, and is nested inside the one that preceded it. The twelfth forms the mid-point of the novel. Each interrupted narrative then concludes. Reminiscent of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, they form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. Calendar of Regrets is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.

## Reception

Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote "these stories explore the perplexity about ways of knowing and how knowledge is made manifest through storytelling,"[1] while Rain Taxi said Olsen's novel "ultimately reminds us of the ways that art and narrative doggedly navigate that thin line between the drive for order and the deep-seated realization that the universe that greets us each morning has only increased its entropy."[2]

## References

1. ↑ "Calendar of Regrets". Review of Contemporary Fiction. 1 April 2011. http://www.readperiodicals.com/201104/2321643991.html. Retrieved 7 December 2012.
2. ↑ "Calendar of Regrets". Rain Taxi. Summer 2011. http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2011summer/print.shtml. Retrieved 7 December 2012.

## External links

* FC2's trailer for Calendar of Regrets (2010)

0.00

(0 votes)

Original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar of Regrets. Read more

|

Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=History:Calendar_of_Regrets&oldid=2411531"