Tetra Nova comes with an editorial preface: “Multiple authors have attempted to rewrite this manuscript, which has become a collection of shadow puppets. There will be bold inconsistencies across time and setting, biographical details and costume design, laws of intermediate geometry, translator notes, citations, and overall plotlines, though every attempt has been made to fill in some of the gaps. Please forgive us.”
An operatic, polyphonic novel that follows Emi Terazawa/Lua Mater — a performance artist creating a text that maps Vietnamese intergenerational stories across genocide, psychosis, and the resistance that follows. As the boundary between novel and performance blurs, hybrid selves tumble across each other: the Vietnamese-Japanese poet (Emi), an assassin (Lua), sisters, Chrysanthemum, Jigglypuff, a tiny panda. Part investigative document, part dreamscape, this ambitious debut novel traverses space, the mythic and the profane, into a song of humanity beyond trauma. Voices become durational, staged, fragmented, and unabashed. Presented as one final production, whether by cinema or live music, the heart of performance art ultimately grapples with the language of plague on a cosmological scale.
