The People of Paper

The People of Paper, originally published in 2005, is Salvador Plascencia’s debut novel. The book received immediate critical praise. Reviewers from The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Financial Times cited The People of Paper as one of the best books of 2005, and Plascencia won the 2008 Bard Fiction Prize for writing this novel. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Plascencia emigrated to California with his family when he was a child, and the immigrant experience plays a role in the lives of the novel’s characters. This Postmodern, metafictional novel, set in Mexico and El Monte, California, explores the relationship between an author and his creation by employing a complicated narrative scheme, experimental typography, and an overlay of magical realism to blur the distinction between fiction and reality.

This study guide refers to the 2006 HarperCollins paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material uses coarse language, including derogatory and offensive terms for women, and includes instances of self-harm, self-mutilation, suicide, and addiction. Additionally, the source material uses an outdated term for Romani people.

Plot Summary

The book opens with a Prologue in which a heretical monk named Antonio becomes known as an origami surgeon because he fashions human organs out of folded paper. Ultimately, he uses this talent to create a woman of paper, later named Merced de Papel.

The first part of the novel includes seven chapters under the heading “El Monte Flores.” The story revolves around protagonist Federico de la Fe, his wife Merced, and their daughter Little Merced, who live in the Mexican town of Las Tortugas. Federico wets the bed nightly. Eventually, this causes Merced to leave the family. This abandonment is the source of sadness throughout the rest of the novel. Federico discovers that he can “cure” his sorrow by burning his skin. After Merced’s departure, he and Little Merced emigrate to El Monte, California, where he takes a job picking carnations. He becomes aware of an oppressive force in the sky watching his every move. The force turns out to be Saturn, later revealed to be the author of the novel, Salvador Plascencia. Federico enlists members of a street gang called El Monte Flores, generally referred to as EMF, to wage a war against Saturn and omniscient narration. The war provides the major conflict over the first part of the book. The EMF shield themselves in lead and practice controlling their thinking to hide themselves from Saturn’s view. By the end of the section, it appears that the EMF is winning the war as Saturn moves away from his observation post over El Monte and into deeper space.

Many narrators span the pages of these chapters. Plascencia uses experimental typography and visual elements in his identification of narrators. The planet Saturn serves as an omniscient narrator, generally in the first of the three columns that span the pages. Along with Saturn, Little Merced serves as the main narrator.

Plascencia usually frames their stories and those of the many other narrators in the third-person limited point of view; at other times, however, the characters tell their stories in a first-person limited point of view.

Early in the second part of the novel, “Cloudy Skies and Lonely Mornings,” the character Smiley discovers that Saturn is the author, Plascencia. Again, a plethora of characters take turns narrating the story, including, among others, Saturn’s former lover Liz and his most recent lover Cameroon.

The plot in this section involves Saturn’s love and loss of Liz, the source of his great sadness. Cameroon also suffers from sadness and can only assuage that pain by stinging herself with bees. Although Saturn tries to communicate with Liz, she rebuffs him. In her own chapter, Liz tells him that she does not want to be in his story and orders him to leave her out. She resents his lying and making the details of their affair available for public consumption. She accuses him of using their relationship and his sadness as a means of making money. Likewise, Cameroon leaves Saturn because of his lies. Some of these lies include writing a false biography of Rita Hayworth.

The last section of the novel bears the title “The Sky Is Falling.” In a metafictional turn, Part 3 starts with a new title page, identical to the novel’s title page, except for the absence of the dedication to Liz. This may be in response to her asking to be taken out of the novel, or it may be Plascencia erasing her as he does other female characters.

In this section, Saturn retreats so far from El Monte that he is initially absent from the narration; the sky separating the world of Plascencia from El Monte begins to crumble. The EMF believe that they have won the war, but that is not the case. They all fall ill due to lead poisoning. After being cured by Apolonio, a folk healer, the members of EMF, led by Froggy, decide that shielding their thoughts is not an effective strategy. Instead, they decide to speak out against the injustice of omniscient narration and the appropriation of their stories by Saturn. As a result, the narrators proliferate, and their stories multiply over the pages, pushing Saturn’s narration to the margins.

For his part, Saturn returns to observing El Monte and learns to control his anger with Liz and Cameroon for leaving him. Cameroon, however, discovers that Plascencia has killed her off in the novel, and she is angry about his dismissal. Plascencia also does away with Merced, writing a scene where she is killed in an automobile accident, offering more examples of women erased from the story. Little Merced, who suffers from an addiction to limes, also dies in this section due to an overdose. However, in the presence of the members of the EMF as well as a Catholic nun, she returns to life after five days. After her resurrection, and while Saturn is busy engaging in a fantasy in which Liz returns to him, Little Merced leads her father out of El Monte and off the pages of the novel.