The story: His espionage novel stolen by a celebrity ‘sweeper’ author, Archie Lees embarks on a helter-skelter odyssey seeking justice inside the dark worlds of Anglo-American publishing, the tale swinging from London to Barcelona, New York, Aigues-Mortes and back again over twelve months, November 2003 to October 2004.
The style: Louisiana Alba ransacks categories, voices and genres excavating plagiarism and influence, reanimating modernism, realism, magic realism, poetry, pop, drama, screenwriting and the postmodernist novel, defrocking the methods and madness of major and minor literary techniques and reputations in a century of writerly solitude.
Review by LiteraryMinded:
Can something be playfully and overtly postmodern and still be readable – driving you through a compelling plot? Louisiana Alba proves it can be done. Uncorrected Proof is a postmodern novel that entertainingly riffs on form, style, character, tense, person – but with an overall thriller/quest type plot appropriation, it folds you into its delicious bizarro metascapes and humorous oft-satirical, oft-homagical visions.
Somehow Alba (if that’s who she really is… death of the author etc.) incorporates stylistic elements of hard-boiled fiction, screenplays, cookbooks, metafiction, the spy novel, cyberpunk, the literary novel, A Clockwork Orange, Gaelic, intertextuality, memoir and so much more in a book that self-consciously satirises the entire book and publishing industry – authors, editors, publishers – literary celebrity, literary delusions, literary snobbery, literary stupidity and so on.
So what’s it ‘about’? Archie’s novel manuscript has been pilfered and plagiarized by Martyn Varginas, prolific mystery writer. Archie and his friend Cal plot a convoluted revenge through Archie getting work as an editor, and employing a re-plagiarisation of the book by a young hired-gun (or pen, as it were). What follows are kidnappings, political intrigues, sex, jaunts to New York and Paris (from London), Stake-outs, party crashings, a couple of book launches, boardroom drunkenness, author cameo appearances, mean streets, cop/spy banter, and a few disturbing murders.
I was completely absorbed in this book – somehow Alba makes it so easy to read, despite the switcheroos in style, and shifts in narrative drive and character motivation. The book’s title Uncorrected Proof displays irony – those not in bookselling or publishing may be unfamiliar with a ‘proof copy’ or ‘uncorrected proof’ – books that become available before release, oft-unedited versions of the final with spacing, grammatical and typing errors. This ‘published’ book, has a few (tongue-in-cheek) placed throughout.
Alba has worked in publishing, and is actually avoiding traditional distribution methods for the book, keeping in the uber-hip underground spirit of the novel – with a well-handled guerilla internet and out-of-hand distribution system. I came across the author through Facebook.
This book proves to me that extraordinary talent can be represented through shunning traditional publishing methods. This book is inventive, imaginative, and inspiring. It is a unique publication. If you enjoy Italo Calvino or John Fowles, or if you also work or have worked in the book industry, even on the fringes, you would get a great kick out of this novel. –LiteraryMinded
from http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Uncorrected_proof http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/en/Uncorrected_proof
Uncorrected Proof is the title novelist Louisiana Alba uses for his 2008 released novel, exploring themes of plagiarism and influence. The story is set in the publishing industry and following the conflicts and writing life of a writer whose novel is stolen by a celebrity author.
The uncorrected proof is the penultimate version of a literary work or book before final publication [1] [2]. An uncorrected proof is sometimes called a galley proof or an advance reading copy (ARC), and is used for book reviews, sent out by publishers to dedicated journals, newspaper and magazines. Many reviewers prefer, even insist on, seeing the uncorrected proof, not the final printed book.
Alba cites James Joyce’s parodic and myth-based technique in Ulysses by following Homer’s Iliad. But rather than follow the narrative poem itself as Joyce did with Homer’s Odyssey, Alba traces the prequel conditions in Greece before Helen’s flight with Paris to Troy parodying over one hundred modernist and postmodernist writers. Alba’s stated aim is to enface a portrait of the artist as a postmodern, reversing Joyce’s attempt at self-effacement from the text of Ulysses.
The wider relevance Alba intended in his use of uncorrected proof in the title of his novel is rooted in his belief that a literary work is not ‘bound in’ by a cover. In Alba’s view a novel never begins or ends with an individual work, the boundaries of influence and interdependence always crossed, with sources shared consciously and subconsciously between literary works and writers’ imaginations.
PUBLISH OR DIE! by Paul Duran
Pacific Rim Review of Books Fall/Winter 2009 Issue 12 – pg. 33
Review of Uncorrected Proof by Louisiana Alba – ElephantEars Press
Who is Louisiana Alba and what does she (or he) have against the publishing industry? It’s a rhetorical question since most authors inevitably have some gripe against the media giants they are forced to rely upon to shepherd their creative works to the masses. Yet usually, besides the odd drunken cocktail party diatribe or expletive-laden rant to one’s spouse, authors won’t, or can’t afford to, bite the hand that feeds them. Alba on the other hand has decided to go straight for their throats, going public with the writer’s eternal screech – the bastards have (add your own word here – ruined, stolen, fucked up, etc.) my book! – then framed it within a literary conceit so audacious and capricious, that to stumble just a little bit is to fall off the mountain completely.
It’s a high wire act that literally co-opts the style of dozens of literary untouchables and pop culture icons from James Joyce to Jimi Hendrix, Anthony Burgess to Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway to Quentin Tarantino (there are over a hundred authors and artists listed in the book’s acknowledgements starting with ABBA!). Alba (an obvious nom de plume) uses each successive voice in her vast arsenal to tell the story of Archie Lee, the plagiarized author who schemes to get his novel back from the people who stole it – the celebrity novelist Martyrn Varginas, his greedy publisher Menny Lowes, and his man-eater of an editor, Ellen Spartan.
Using The Iliad as a starting reference point (in a deliberate cracked mirror image to Joyce’s use of The Odyssey in Ulysses), the novel playfully winks at Homer not so much for his epic poem’s style as for its archetypal tale of love, abduction and revenge. The characters all are sly doppelgangers for their Greek counterparts; Archie Lee for Achilles; Ellen Spartan for Helen; Menny Lowes for Menelaus and so on. But the book does not rely solely on post-modern mimicry or clever homage to keep our interest. It more than holds it’s own as a thoroughly enjoyable pulp story about stolen manuscripts and deferred vengeance in the volatile, cutthroat world of publishing. Making publishing a life and death enterprise involving kidnapping, murder and the CIA is a nice conceit that no doubt will give even the crustiest of publishing execs a knowing chuckle.
The novel starts with Archie out to expose his literary theft at the Crocker Prize banquet (read Booker Prize). He gets cold feet when he comes face to face with his nemesis Varginas and Varginas’ attractive editor Ellen. She unexpectedly offers Archie a position at her new imprint when he stammers out that he’s “expert with espionage thrillers.” From there the story follows Archie’s desperate scheme to wreak revenge from inside the publishing mecca using his newfound influence to try to get his original novel into print under the name of an opportunistic young hustler he has hired for the part. Nothing goes according to plan as the novel ricochets from London to Barcelona to the South of France to New York and back; from pulp crime to spy thriller, memoir to meta-fiction, screenplay to redacted text.
It may sound like a daunting task for the narrative to constantly shape-shift from one disparate source to another but the effect is breathtakingly kaleidoscopic and in most cases wholly appropriate (even the few typos in the book seem correct given the title). In truth it would probably take a tenured literature professor with a vast music and DVD collection to decode all the stylistic shifts in Uncorrected Proof but that’s not really the point. Given all the literary byplay and conceptual ambition, the story is still amazingly accessible, so when you are able to pick up on a particular author or style, it just adds to its kicky pleasure.
In the end Uncorrected Proof is also a cautionary tale about ego and ambition run amok in a world where ego and ambition are the only character traits that seem to really matter. With no clear winners or losers it could almost be read as a twisted metaphor for our own troubled times, with the publishing industry standing in for Wall Street and the banks, where the “best and brightest” have had their way for too long and have grown fat on the bones of those crushed under their Gucci loafers and stiletto heels. Perhaps I’m reading too much into Alba’s remarkably varied prose, but the seeds of a revolution are there, if not on the economic front, then maybe just in the publishing house. —Paul Duran’s films include Flesh Suitcase and The Dogwalker.
See also: Pat Bertram Introduces Archie Lees, hero of Uncorrected Proof by Louisiana Alba
Dragon My Feet 