Synopses & Reviews
Fiction. PART OF THE WORLD is a fugue in both a musical and psychological sense. It is a canonical juggernaut of lyrical language--ever dissolving, devolving, shifting, then reconstituting itself into a new knowledge of reality. This language comes straight from a compulsive mind in a Quixotic state--ceaselessly harping on the everyday perturbations and peculiarities of our humdrum lives--our cars, apartments, health, finances. But if you relax your focus as if staring at some sort of holographic fractal, with each part containing the whole, the superficial meaning is purged, layer by layer, peeling back and revealing the subtext of what the mind is capable of under the burden of trauma and accountability. "Robert Lopez has written a darkly hilarious exploration of the trickery of memory, the unreliability of personal history, and the strangeness, even uncanniness, of our daily transactions"--Dawn Raffel. "Literary pleasures like this are all too uncommon"--Laird Hunt
Review
Robert Lopez has written a darkly hilarious exploration of the trickery of memory, the unreliability of personal history, and the strangeness, even uncanniness, of our daily transactions. As we follow Lopez's hapless narrator about the business of trying to navigate his homely part of the world, we are made to reconsider our own well-mapped relations, the unhygienic corners of our homes. Dawn Raffel
Review
The prose found in Robert Lopezs new novel, Part of the World, is as flat as this piece of paper but as deep as the deepest well. The world this world is a part of is an affectless poetics planet caught in the black-hole gravity of a Stephen Dixon-esque free-falling narrative sink. Stranger than The Stranger, it is a relentless, droll, blinkless, book. Michael Martone
Review
Reading Part of the World by Robert Lopez felt to me like standing in front of one of those marvelous, mind-bending exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology that seem at first glance to be doing exactly nothing and at second glance to be dissolving and reconstituting reality as we thought we knew it. Literary pleasures like this are all too uncommon. Laird Hunt