Ok. So, not to get all English-professorial on us...but what do y'all make of the footnotes? Boyle certainly isn't inventing the technique, but it's interesting here. And the whole interplay between Tadishi and the translator (who we don't "know" at all, so we can't read his stake in all of this..except as T explains it to us).
The footnotes complicate the whole historical-biographical fiction thing. So much of the novel is based on "real" stuff (newspaper clippings clearly played a big role in the research). But Boyle takes us much further...do the footnotes lure us into a suspension of disbelief (you see--I do remember bits of my romantic poetry class in college!!).
Thoughts?
From Wik.: Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula devised by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge to justify the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literature. Coleridge suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.
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This is what I meant by "contrivances" in an earlier comment. I was never able to suspend my disbelief in this novel. The footnotes just drove me crazy... or maybe I was reading this a little too close to my dissertation...or I should have taken Romantic Poetry with Pagliaro
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