Fragments in the Form of a Calendar (eBook by Plain Editions)

Fragments in the Form of a Calendar: A Novel.

Washington, DC: Plain Editions, 2010.

Fragments in the Form of a Calendar is to plot-based fiction what the great Modernist choreographer George Balanchine's seminal work "Apollo Musagete" is to nineteenth-century ballets like "Swan Lake." Balanchine stripped away the dramatic events of enchantment and redemption in the plot-based spectacles he'd grown up with to create a pared-down work where the dancing, and the relationships between the men and women onstage, were the point. Similarly, Fragments creates a world of the constant perceiving character, remembering and experiencing, but in units of three- to five-page microcosms that are arranged through the list of days in the week, the months in the year and their flowers and birthstones, and the seasons, to form a kaleidoscope that is more than the sum of its parts, both individual and personal, fragments that form a time and place. The result is a neo-Modernist novel, a kind of work both new and old.