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In print once more, a maelstrom of a novel from celebrated author Robert Lopez
Part of the World is a canonical juggernaut of lyrical language—ever dissolving, devolving, shifting, then reconstituting itself into a new knowledge of reality. The nameless narrator, hyper-compulsive and seemingly on a Quixotic journey to understand what has happened to him, is burdened by a trauma for which he is either the victim or perpetrator or perhaps both. All of this is slowly revealed as he navigates a peculiar purgatory wherein this trauma seems to happen over and over again.
"Reading Part of the World by Robert Lopez felt to me like standing in front of one of those marvelous, mind-bending exhibits at the Museum of Jurassic Technology that seem at first glance to be doing exactly nothing and at second glance to be dissolving and reconstituting reality as we thought we knew it. Literary pleasures like this are all too uncommon." —Laird Hunt
"The prose found in Robert Lopez's new novel, Part of the World, is as flat as this piece of paper but as deep as the deepest well. The world this world is a part of is an affectless poetics planet caught in the black-hole gravity of a Stephen Dixon-esque free-falling narrative sink. Stranger than The Stranger, it is a relentless, droll, blinkless, book."—Michael Martone
"Part of the World is a gripping read, ominous, blackly hilarious and psychologically acute."—Jason Jones, from review in Mid-American Review
"Beyond any discussion of occurrence in Part of the World, though, the real treasure here is Lopez's writing. He's so in control of his character's voice and the layering of thought that to call him a more pleasantly imbibed Beckett seems precise. Part of the World is a book to be read with delight and wonder—and some slight miffing that it's over." —Blake Butler in Rain Taxi
"The narrator's neuroses are, at first, unremarkable, but they intensify and the result is a snowballing effect, an imperceptible building of madness and memory that takes on a distinctly sinister aspect that was only hinted at in earlier pages."—Jeff Waxman, from review in The Review of Contemporary Fiction