Peter Pessl Aquamarine

Annotation

Aquamarine is the result of two years' musings following the author's long and twisted journey (both in terms of pathways and encounters) to Mexico in 1993. After having been variously reworked, the volume was eventually published in German in 1998. Considered groundbreaking in form and style, the novel is composed of seven intertwining tales whose unsettling, exceptionally ambivalent female protagonists, "Aquamarine" and "Marine," crisscross diverse Mexican landscapes and cities of both external and internal geographies much like a madcap road movie plowing straight through historical episodes into present-day reality. Along the way we encounter the horrific tragedies of private and political worlds as the tales channel into a common stream of storytelling that is so immediate in its presentation it violently impacts the very language itself (and the immanent possibilities or impossibilities in the author's use of language). The reader is thus swept into a swirling dreamscape of words and images, a ramshackle narrative construct where every kind of reality that is, always was, and will continue to be exist simultaneously. Aquamarine explores the unfolding of ideas using a palette of blues, yellows, beiges, or "leg-color," ideas coiled like a garden hose with all its kinks, awkward convolutions, and ungainly twists, each loop having its own radius but belonging to the same — is the same — loop. Revolution in every sense.