The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma - 3 stars (Subdue)

[Joy D]

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma - 3* - My Review

The unnamed narrator starts writing at a young age while he waits in the airport for his mother, who is a flight attendant. The storyline follows him as he comes of age, goes to college, develops a relationship that does not last, and becomes friends with a fellow talented writer. He believes that writing is the equivalent of being good at telling lies. This belief bleeds over into his personal life, and he finds himself taking on different personas. He travels the globe and writes various manuscripts under different aliases. In each country, he adopts a different identity. His life becomes a series of adventures in North America, Africa, Asia, and Europe.

It reads almost like a series of short stories linked together by a common protagonist and supporting characters. The same (or very similar) story is retold in different circumstances. The protagonist is the quintessential unreliable narrator, and an accomplished liar. His continuous reinvention of himself means that we never really get to know him. As he says early in the novel, “These stories are all true, but only somewhere else.” It is intentionally disjointed and does not flow very well but the writing is witty and occasionally humorous. The author is riffing on the nature of storytelling. I found it reasonably entertaining, but it wears out its welcome fairly quickly.

“Maybe an idea, like love, cannot ever be stolen away, just as it cannot ever have belonged to me and only me.”