The Breathing Pages trilogy - Paperback

by Philip Todd Pfuehler (Author)

Reader's BEWARE

This is a novel built in layers. Snippets of details and the emotions of what seems to be, at first, a confused and lost narrator are put into short "Dispatches" that slowly evolve into a dystopian world where books and the cleaning of old books stacked in endless rows become the center of existence. There is first a bookkeeper and then the bookkeeper is gone as the narrator struggles to learn about his job in an enormous, dusty warehouse. And what about Paige? Who is the young girl in the earliest dispatches?This is not our everyday world, although we are never sure whether the story is set in our world or in some timeless universe where books are everything. Characters appear and disappear as the trilogy's three books unfurl. Cats and a dog become important as the story rollicks onward. Robots (or are they robots?) take over the writer's, the trilogy's, I and then lead him away from the reality he believes he has lived, the one with the beautiful woman in his bed. Then there are the story characters running and roaming as they try to avoid fates that seem to hover just beyond where they are. And always, always, there are the books you blow on to clean, bringing them back to life so that their pages become part of who you are.This is as unusual a book of literature you will ever read even if you love Kurt Vonnegut or Franz Kafka.