Return to Circa '96

The book's title, Return to Circa '96', caught my attention right off. Themes of memory, time travel, and so forth were evoked. Then the visual appeal was quite marked (my professional and personal interests tilt in favor of scripto-visual works). The "data-base aesthetics" (Lev Manovich) aspect of the work gave it a very contemporary Web 2.0 kind of technological relevance, which meshed well with the book's meta-fictional construction. These conceptual art-ish and surfictional elements lured me into the book. The library-as-a-framing-device, situating events within a repository of texts, hit a responsive chord given my own autodidactic / academic propensities. I felt at home in the text. The producer's mixtures of modalities of writing, a "mulligan stew" of different textualities, were attributes of the kinds of works I read and re-read most often. Finally, the book was funny. It not only gave that "writerly" jouissance touted by literary theorist Roland Barthes, but also the plaisir of a "readerly" text. In short, in opening Mr. Sawatzki's book, it was as if I'd found a long-lost friend. -- James R. Hugunin