Kwan Ann Tan is the author of the interactive story The Waiter, out this week from Union Square & Co. Below, she recommends three more interactive books.
An interactive story or a novel with an unusual structure is a difficult and unwieldy thing to pull off. But when it’s done well, you come away feeling like you’ve experienced something unusual, or the way that you see the text has changed.
Here are three books that invite you to interact with the text as a physical object to reframe the narrative, or piece together the full picture yourself through their unconventional structures.
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar: A book that conjures up smoky jazz in friends’ living rooms and circular conversations of bohemian intellectuals in 1950s Paris, Cortázar’s novel can be read in two ways: linearly, or as a recursive loop, according to the “instructions” that the author prints in the introduction. Depending on how you read it, the story unfolds quite differently, revealing different layers and answers to questions that might have been previously opaque.
The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu, translated by YZ Chin: Set in the humid, dialect-slinging environs of Kuala Lumpur, The Age of Goodbyes is a swirling metafictional piece where memory is questioned through literary structure. The novel starts on page 513, both a nod to the May 13, 1969 race riots in Malaysia but also to a story that “you”—the reader, but also the narrator—have arrived in the middle of, and are trying to retroactively piece together. Interwoven through this are not just one, but two versions of the mysterious figure Du Li An, inviting you to construct your own understanding of events.
The Employees by Olga Ravn: The farthest-flung of these recommendations, Ravn situates us in the far future on a spaceship, where the crew encounters a series of strange sensory objects. The novel is told exclusively through interviews, or “performance reviews,” of the crew over the course of 18 months, and these are non-linear, with some having missing or redacted sections. Through this, you can piece together a story of human and transhuman change, as well as a contemplation of the absurdity of the modern workplace.