A.
MOLOTKOV'S
LITERARY PROJECTS
A Photocopy of My Soul
"A Photocopy of My Soul" is a book that took three and a half years to write. It may take a year to read, although this part is optional. It contains 52 short stories, one for each week of the year. It was started in Venice in the fall of 2002. It was finished in August 2006 in Portland, Oregon.
Just like all of my writing, the short stories in this book are rather laconic. An average story is about 3 pages long. I believe in an economical approach of an instant emotional punch over a long-term build-up.
In this book, I had several goals in mind. One was to present a point of view, a narrative, that does not require any special knowledge. What I mean when I say “special knowledge” is everything we know about the infrastructure of the world around us. The fact that there exists a place called New York City, and the fact that we use computers to store information. The unimportant things such as nationalities and religions. My goal was to create a literature that one could relate to even if they were from another planet, or the future, or the past.
Additionally, in the past years I have concluded with an utmost certainty that it is those works of art that end without revealing all of their secrets that I find most compelling as a reader, viewer or listener. These works stay in my mind and give food to my imagination. Consequently, many stories in "A Photocopy of My Soul" emerged as being rather mysterious, wherein the reader does not quite understand what has transpired. Nor does the writer. There are cliff-hangers without a resolution, and many questions are left unanswered. This continues the trend started in my recent novel “everything”, and takes some of its concerns to their conclusion.
At the same time, it is the emotional rather than intellectual impact of art that has always mattered most to me. This book explores some extremely emotional topics and deals with subjects such as death, loss, love and sacrifice. It is the most fundamental aspects of the human condition rather than the transient trends of the current time that I find to be worthwhile subjects of exploration.
"A Photocopy of My Soul" travels freely between such genres as detective story, realism, science fiction, fairy tale, and genres yet unnamed, and includes several true stories describing things that affected my own life. In this sense, the book is 90% fiction, 10% non-fiction.
Like most of my writing, this book relies on the two main characters, Goombeldt and Zungvilda. Despite their repeating names, they get a separate identity and separate history in each story. This is in line with what many writers of the past have done – I felt it was the most appropriate approach for me as well. Added to Goombeldt and Zungvilda are several other repeating characters, as well as the “I” character (in the case of stories written in the first person) and the “you” character. As far as the “you” character is concerned: another interest that I have had in the past few years is in involving the reader as one of the characters. It was used by S.B. Reda and myself in our 1998 novel “The Texture of The Sky”. I have used it in several ways in this book. By employing unusual combinations of “real” characters such as Goombeldt and Zungvilda with the “not-quite-characters” such as “I” or “you”, I feel that I have tapped into some strange universe in which the reader is bound to feel responsible for some of the things that happen in the book, at least on a metaphorical level.