A Reading of The Lost Scrapbook

While updating the resources for this site, I included an expanded entry for a series of posts from a pseudonymous blogger named Ba Jin. Back in the summer of 2015, he offered a memorable chronicle of his first reading of The Lost Scrapbook, which is laced with sharp insights and the inevitable questions that arise when trying to orient and re-orient yourself in a novel that is stingy when it comes to support.  When paired with Steve Russillo’s Lost Scrapbook page, this can serve as an ad hoc reader’s guide for anyone preparing to take the leap.

• everybody’s grandpa – https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/everybodys-grandpa/  — pp. 6-72
• a pomo parable – https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/pomo-parable/ — pp. 72-175
• brain chaos in the muffin factory https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/brain-chaos-in-the-muffin-factory/ —pp. 175-225
• a conduit and not a content (excerpt) https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/a-conduit-and-not-a-content-excerpt/ — excerpt from pp. 190-92 of TLS.
• don’t tell my head, my large and heavy head –https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/dont-tell-my-head-my-large-and-heavy-head/ — pp. 225-280
• the thoughts that were my scourge – https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/the-thoughts-that-were-my-scourge-excerpt/ — excerpt from pp. 271-73 of TLS.
• cartoon physics, curious chemical cartel – https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/cartoon-physics-curious-chemical-cartel/ — pp. 282-402
• trauma kindred towns – https://bajinbooks.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/trauma-kindred-towns/ — pp. 402-end.

In his closing entry, Jin offers up a pointed question that pokes at the root of Dara’s accomplishment:

But perhaps the biggest challenge arises from the question: “Who is the novel’s protagonist?” Even the wildest novels have an easily id’d main character: Joyce’s Leo Bloom, Pynchon’s Slothrop, Nabokov’s Hugh Person. Can we say that Evan Dara has really done it? That is, fashioned a novel in which the protagonist is a utopian collectivity of individuals across a vast space, moving towards a collective action of protest against an equally abstract antagonist of crony corporations and their destructive capitalist system?