Thank you for providing me with an arc. I found the novel to be overall quite thoughtful and thought-provoking! I wasn’t sure this would be as good as it was and it exceeded my expectations. I am definitely looking forward to what this author is going to put our next! Thank you for providing me with an arc. I found the novel to be overall quite thoughtful and thought-provoking! I wasn’t sure this would be as good as it was and it exceeded my expectations. I am definitely looking forward to what this author is going to put our next!

I'm not sure what to make of this book. I requested it for a Committee because I thought it was a graphic novel, but it doesn't actually seem to be. Not the book's fault, just mine for misunderstanding.

Maceo Montoya: Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces

Like novels from other countries/ethnic groups, the Chicano novel has tended to follow a certain path – good vs evil, Bildungsroman, i.e. young man from poor background grows up and makes good. This has changed recently as, following the Latino>Latinx model, Chicano has now morphed into Chicanx and we are now getting more Chicano novels dealing with feminism and LGBTI issues. Author Maceo Montoya teaches Chicano/a – Chicanx literature so he knows a lot about this topic.

This novel can best be described as a gentle tribute to/spoof of the traditional Chicano novel. He has cleverly done it in a somewhat different way to make his point.

We start with a letter from Ernie Lobato. He does not say who he is writing to but it soon becomes clear. He states that his uncle died a year ago in a care home. Ernie’s mother, younger sister of the decased, instructed the home to destroy all his effects. However, they sent a manuscript to the Lobato home, saying the uncle had been furiously working on it for some time before his death. The mother wanted to destroy it but Ernie read it and said it should be kept. He passes it to a colleague, Lorraine Rios (they work in budgeting for the state) who is an avid collector of all things Chicano, or Chicanx.

Lorraine reads the manuscript , saying the uncle is a Chicano Forrest Gump and that it is interesting, as he met a few famous Chicano people and claims to have killed Oscar Zeta Acosta. Ernie has never heard of him. However, he is a well-known Chicano author (I have a couple of his books) and is said to be the model for Hunter S. Thompson‘s Dr Gonzo. His death has never been resolved nor his body found. The manuscript, as we discover, is being sent to Professor Pizarro, an expert on things Chicano (possibly based on Montoya himself?). The manuscript we read will be the uncle’s manuscript, with annotations by Ernie (on family history), Lorraine (on things Chicano from a younger person’s woke perspective) and Professor Pizarro (on things Chicano, from an academic point of view). Of course, all their comments add to Montoya’s mockery.

Our first commentary comes when we learn that the unnamed uncle/narrator comes from a seemingly well-to-do farming family. Chicano heroes do not, traditionally, come from well-to-do families. However, his father decides to go into shoe-making. This does not go well so he makes his workers buy his shoes and they all end up with sore feet. Father soon dies. Our hero, who is both an epileptic and clearly has some mental health issues, is convinced the workers murdered the father and then tried to murder him. It seems that the real story is that the father died of a brain aneurysm and the workers then tried to restrain our narrator who was having am epileptic fit. In any case, the father left massive debts and a pregnant wife. Mother son and newly born child had to sell the house and lost all their property, moving to a small boarding house in Albuquerque.

The mother gives birth to a girl and expects her son to earn his living to support them. He, however, is going to be an artist and go and live in Paris so he cannot waste his time with mundane activities like work. There is a compromise. She goes to work as a cleaner, while he looks after his young sister. However, he farms out the younger sister – the one that we have already met as Ernie’s mother – to local women while he focuses on his art. It is wartime (1943) but our hero has been declared medically exempt. However, he does learn one thing – Albuquerque also taught me that there were two kinds of people: there were decent white people, and then there were Spics, Beaners, Greasers, and Mexicans.

He has one (stolen) book – The Great Book of French Painting – and is inspired by Courbet, Millet, and Corot, not least as his family apparently has French ancestry. However, one of the clever tricks of this book is that our hero, though a would-be painter, neither paints nor draws. As the title tells us, he prepares notes for the works he plans to paint or draw. As a result, he has lots of notes but no drawings or paintings. He also has a disciple – Enrique Hurtado, a local boy who sells newspapers and who thinks our hero is a genius in the making. Enrique is also in love with our hero. Yes, homosexuality in a Chicano novel. Lorraine comments that gay novels have been rejected by Chicanos. John Rechy did write about gay issues but though he was clearly Chicano, he was rejected by the Chicanos and is generally considered a standard US writer. Enrique’s love is not reciprocated as out hero, as we shall see, is boringly heterosexual.

Mother soon finds out that he is not looking after his sister and moves out, later marrying a rich man. Our hero finds notes left by his mother that suggest that she thinks he is insane and should be interned. Yes, a mad hero in a Chicano novel. He therefore also moves out and moves in with Enrique, sending poor Enrique out to do three jobs, while he prepares his notes.

Finally, he goes to see his mother and stepfather where he is not particularly warmly welcomed. However, the new stepfather, Mr Buenrostro (= Good Face) offers him a studio in Guadalupe, a town thirty-five miles from Albuquerque. He accepts, dumping Enrique without so much as saying goodbye. However, though Mr Buenrostro gives him money, the studio is a shack in a very poor area. The house of the neighbours (husband, wife, ten children and wife’s orphaned sister Ella) is very close to his. Ella, however, becomes his muse and lover and he takes up drawing (finally) to draw her. She was expecting him to whisk her off to Paris. Instead he goes off with a preacher who had initially condemned our hero and Ella for living in sin.

The preacher is the first of the historial characters he will meet – Reies López Tijerina who later became an activist who led a struggle in the 1960s and 1970s to restore New Mexican land grants. However, López Tijerina is an ascetic and our hero becomes like him, barely eating, wearing ragged clothes, suffering and rejecting all gifts or giving them away, to the annoyance of López Tijerina’s wife.

This does not go well and our hero has to drop out and ends up in a mental hospital, where he will meet the fellow inmate and artist Martín Ramírez who our hero considers without talent. He will also briefly meet another fellow inmate, the writer Oscar Zeta Acosta. We know that he will kill him, as mentioned above but it does not happen here. While our hero was living in Guadalupe, he received lots of letters from Enrique. He did not open them but when he finally did, he realises that they are not letters but poems. When Zeta Acosta sees them, he says the they are brilliant. Our hero does not tell him that he himself is not the author.

Oscar Zeta Acosta turns up again, years later, when our hero is living with his mother. Zeta Acosta is now a published author and he wants to go on a wild ride with our hero (thinking he was the author of the poems), with the two of them writing as they went along. The ride involves alcohol (in large quantities), drugs and the opposite sex. However, our hero recovers his drawing ability and draws a lot. Some of these drawings are included in the text. (Montoya is an artist as well as a writer and academic). However, this, too, goes wrong, as we know he kills Zeta Acosta.

Apart from anything else, this is an excellent story. It is the story of a not very heroic hero. He is selfish, not helping his mother who has just lost her husband, given birth and is in huge debt. He is selfish toward poor Enrique. He clearly does have some artistic talent. His drawings of Ella sell like hot cakes and we can judge his later drawings. However, he is an artist reluctant to draw or paint, merely making preparatory notes, while sponging off Enrique.

Later, however, he seems to lose his spirit, as his mother later comments. He clearly has mental health problems, completely misjudging how his father died and seems happier, later in life, doing nothing – playing chess in the mental hospital and watching game shows and soaps when in his mother’s home.

What are we to make of him? Clearly Montoya is mocking the usual conventions by having a hero who is not a hero, a hero who has ambition but no drive to fulfil that ambition and, later, a hero, who essentially enjoys doing nothing. Even when he comes out of his shell – his passionate affair with Ella, his wild ride with Zeta Acosta, it is all led by someone else.

Moreover, it would seem that our narrator is our old friend, the unreliable narrator. Ernie comments on a blatant and presumably deliberate error and the Professor wonders if there are other such errors, to which the answer is that probably there are.

The professor comments Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” that “the nationalists pretend to venerate the capacities of the Argentine mind but want to limit the poetic exercise of that mind to a few impoverished local themes, as if we Argentines could only speak of orillas and estancias and not of the universe.” Are there Chicano themes? Certainly, but can we not also speak of the universe? Is our hero a man who is of the universe, rather than just Chicano. That is certainly a debatable question.

One thing for sure is that has does have mental health problems. Madmen only have themselves, and to be an artist is to be part or maybe entirely mad, and to be a Chicanx artist is to exist on the periphery, the margins, which means we are all madmen dangling at ends of the earth.

"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.

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.

This is a remarkable book! It's part graphic novel, part fantasist memoir, hilarious satire, and a window on growing up Chicano in New Mexico during World War II...also, time in a mental health facility and senior living "home". The book is supposedly an illustrated manuscript by the "author's" uncle that was found in a trash can after the uncle's death. It is the saga of a delusional, narcissistic artist who writes gracefully, and the manuscript is illustrated by the uncle's marvelous pen and ink drawings. Said artist describes very seriously what's going on around him without any recognition of what it means or why people are reacting as they do. I think it will be compared with Don Quixote and maybe Alice in Wonderland for its picaresque quality...and its insanity. Rather than spoil the adventures for the reader, I'll let this review just give you the flavor of what you're in for if you give this delightful book a spin.

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.

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.