cover image COLLAGE

COLLAGE

Ted Wojtasik, . . Livingston, $25 (180pp) ISBN 978-1-931982-34-4

True to its title, Wojtasik's second novel is an assemblage of narratives told by Zeljko Matejcic, or "Zee" for short. Zee, a Yugoslav-American living in Washington, D.C., is himself an assemblage of things—an archivist for the National Archives; a young gay man negotiating romance and sex in the early to mid-1980s, just as AIDS rears its head; and, eventually, a successful artist who creates collages. He tells his story as he would assemble one of his collages—arranging scraps of narratives on a canvas to tell a disjointed but coherent story. Wojtasik's technique, if a bit studied and self-conscious, still manages to be effective, because Zee himself can only make sense of his world by piecing things together in a patchwork way. As Zee works at the archives, cataloguing the journals and letters from Robert Edwin Peary's 1909 voyage to the North Pole, he falls in love with a hustler named Mark. He also reflects on his grandfather's past—including the older man's troubling role in turbulent Yugoslav politics. When the world and its pressures get to be too much for him, Zee loses himself in his collages. Though the narrative doesn't quite gel in the end and some of the writing flirts with cliché, Wojtasik has crafted a compelling experiment that manages to pack some emotional punches. "What do you say to a young man dying?" Zee asks throughout the novel. His assorted memories and reflections are a noble attempt at an answer. (May 30)