Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces

Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces is a rich combination of image and text — a study of place, time, and character, interwoven into a first-person story of lived experience. Fascinating and well done.

I wish people didn't say "laugh out loud funny" when they don't mean it because I literally laughed out loud with disarming-to-my-family regularity as I read this unique, delightful, hilarious novel. Even though it's January 1 as I write this, I have a feeling like this is going to be one of my favorite reads of the year.

Why it makes me laugh: I'm completely disarmed and surprised at how the darned sentences end! What happens is so unexpected. As I read along I kept feeling continuous leaps of delight. The humor is rueful and sly, and also true in the way only humor can be. I'm overwhelmed by this novel's sense of play about serious things. It felt like a cross between CANDIDE and THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUIN MURIETA by John Rollin Ridge--which you should also read, after you read PREPARATORY NOTES FOR FUTURE MASTERPIECES.

I loved everything about it and intend to buy the book and to recommend it to my library. My thanks to University of Nevada Press for allowing me an early look, and my sincere thanks to Maceo Montoya for writing this novel.

What can I say about this kunstlerroman? It was trippy and captivating and also really hard to explain to someone who hasn't read it as well! It reminds me of Paul Auster's City of Glass - which was then turned into an equally trippy graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Something about the descent into artistic chaos feels like a familiar story, and yet goes in some unexpected directions in Montoya's text.

"He killed himself because he loved you, because he believed in the world as you see it."

This is but one line of a novel that will change the way any creative looks at what they do, this is a story of wasted potential, of love and loss, of hope and sorrow, and throughout it all, the understanding that we have only the gifts that we have.

It is the story of an unnamed narrator who sought to be creative, who took what chances they could, and spent their life in quiet desperation, never knowing truly what they possessed till it was too late for them to enjoy it. There are notes written in the margins, much like JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst when they came up with S, and these sometimes put the truth, sometimes the lie to the story.

Throughout there are powerful words, that go beyond the telling of the story at hand and into a greater truth, that of creatives everywhere. I loved this, in ways I cannot easily articulate, the narrator is not a lovable character, they are not always honest, nor forthright, nor even good, but those around them give the perspective of what it is to be driven by demons you do not understand, to need to do something even as you don't understand how it is that you do it.

The Illustrations make perfect the story and make clear the scene even more than the writing that accompanies it, and while many think that adding pictures is only done when the prose cannot be relied on, in this book, not only are the illustrations useful for the story, they are necessary.

This story is not an easy read, and for many creatives, will be a harsh light upon which to look at life and how you live it, but it does not need preparatory notes to be a masterpiece.

I don't often hand out five stars, this is worth every one of them.