Queerskins

For this week, we got to week Illya Szilak's online digital novel Queerskins, which I'd been eagerly anticipating for weeks, ever since my friend and classmate Bree told me how amazing it was. Instead of trying to show you myself how cool and innovative it is, take a gander over to Bree's blog -- she already did a really helpful walk-through video that gives you an idea of what to expect from Queerskins.

Screenshot of Queerskins by Illya Szilak

In a nutshell, Queerskins is a novel that takes the form of diary entries, audio clips, and videos, making it a really unique and captivating experience. It's about a gay man who dies of AIDS in the 1980s (the novel starts with his death -- don't worry, I won't spoil anything for you in this post) and is tragic and innovative and all kinds of fascinating.

Also, fair warning, it's an online digital text, meaning that you have to view it in a browser; I had to use Firefox, because it wouldn't load properly in Chrome. (Sidenote: I hadn't used Firefox in years. That was a fun blast to the past!)

Next week in class we'll actually get to meet Szilak and ask all kinds of questions about Queerskins, which I'm incredibly excited about. Theoretically, we can also ask her about her first novel, Reconstructing Mayakovsky, which has been shown all over the world in film festivals. I'm not knocking that one, which is also really cool and innovative. But to me, Queerskins is so much stronger, maybe because it has more of a narrative through-line and thus is more applicable to the kind of work I do. (Honestly, I was only able to understand RM at all thanks to the description of the work over here on the Electronic Literature description page.)

Screenshot of Queerskins by Illya Szilak that shows a diary entry (left), audio clips (middle), and a video (bottom right)

Queerskins interests me because it's doing so many different things at once:

1. Diary entries -- Here we get to hear the voice of Sebastian, our protagonist, in first person as he tells little snippets of his life, often out of order. Sometimes his diary entries are clearly written the day of something happening, but other times he's remembering an incident years later. Sometimes the entries are in present tense, sometimes past tense. Sometimes he writes about other people, and a couple times, only a couple times, he actually writes to them in his entries ("you" looked at me, etc.). Sometimes we see him talking about the same story he's already told, but now a few of the details have changed because he's forgotten them as he's re-telling it years later. A couple times he even writes poems in his entries. This is all just SO interesting to me as a writer. Ordinarily the best writing has a consistent tense, consistent POV, etc. But when real people are writing real diary entries, they're not paying attention to that kind of stuff, and I think the way Szilak has mixed these up actually serves to make her writing more effective, to make it seem more real. Sebastian jumps off the page, so by the end of the novel you're left wondering if Szilak really made this up at all, or if this is a real person she knew whose story she's telling. 
2. Audio clips -- These are a fascinating second piece of the puzzle. It would have been enough for Szilak to just write all of the diary entries -- it still would have been a complete novel, would have told a complete story. But no: she also wrote these audio bits and then had (presumably) voice actors play out the parts for recordings that then appear alongside the diary entries. In the audio clips, we hear primarily the voices of Sebastian's mother and Sebastian's long-time boyfriend, Alex. Toward the end of the novel we also hear the voices of Bathilde and Jean-Marie, from Sebastian's later years after he moved to Africa. All of the audio clips are the characters recounting things from after Sebastian has died. So you get a diary entry, written by Sebastian while he was alive, and then alongside you'll often get two, three, four audio clips from the other characters reminiscing about him after his death. I mean, just how cool is that?! It's like watching a posthumous documentary and getting interviews with the other characters. It just adds a dynamic feeling that is unlike any other novel I've ever read. Often the other characters will remember a scenario just slightly differently from the way Sebastian wrote about it -- which is, of course, brilliant, because that's how real life works, too. 
3. Videos -- Many of the chapters, in addition to the diary entries and audio clips, include one or two videos. The videos are probably the "weirdest" component of the novel, and I'm putting "weird" in scare quotes because I think this is the feeling you're supposed to get -- that there's something weird going on here -- even though it's a very conscious, purposeful choice on Szilak's end. The videos often seem unrelated to the story -- for example, at one point there's a video clip of Cinderella singing "Someday My Prince Will Come"; at another point there's an entire bikini contest shot on someone's personal camcorder; at another, 3 minutes of just the clouds moving across the sky -- but I think that all of these videos do inform the reading of the novel by helping you feel immersed in Sebastian's world, whether through the time period, the feeling/mood, or even the politics. The few videos that are actual news clips from the time about the AIDS epidemic are, in a word, chilling.

If I haven't enticed you after all of this to go read Queerskins yet, then I think I've probably failed you. This novel will at times baffle you and at times break your heart, but ultimately, ultimately, it will captivate you.