Oh how I wish I had formed a reading group just for this one book alone!
It struck me–maybe unreasonably, maybe just very late–that there is another underlying theme to the whole of this book. Chapter 9, and we’re back to 2nd person pov of you, the Reader, and having read much of the book Flannery handed you it is confiscated at the airport upon landing. A nice woman whispers that she will provide you with a copy and does so, though of course it is not the same book.
It is a book you are seeing for the first time, and it does not look the least bit like a Japanese novel; it begins with a man riding across a mesa among the agaves, and he sees some predatory birds, called zopilotes, flying overhead.
"If the dust jacket’s a fake," you remark, "the text is a fake too."
"What were you expecting?" Corinna says. Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won’t stop. We’re in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified…(p. 212)
I think of the argument of there being only 37 different plots of story–some say it can be narrowed further down into 6. So then, is Calvino making this point throughout the book, and more emphatically here for those of us too slow to have caught on yet?
It would seem that the phrase "everything that can be falsified has been falsified" is open to the interpretation of all truth told has been told, and can only be told in new and creative ways. Fiction, as we know, is false truth.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology