Tristano, an experimental novel based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, was way ahead of its time:
First published in Italy in 1966, it has only been in the last decade that digital technology has made it possible for Tristano to be printed as its author Nanni Balestrini intended. Each of its ten chapters has fifteen pairs of paragraphs, arranged differently by an algorithm in each published copy. These are numbered on their covers by Verso Books, who have issued four thousand of its possible 109,027,350,432,000 variations in English for the first time.
In his foreword, Umberto Eco – a member of Italy’s Neoavanguardia movement with Balestrini and others, founded in 1963 – suggests that “originality and creativity are nothing more than the chance handling of a combination”. … Eco suggests several ways to approach Tristano: by reading a single copy and treating it as “unique, unrepeatable and unchangeable”; or “considering it to be the best … possible” version; or by reading several and comparing the outcomes.
Lizzy Davies elaborates on the project:
The first versions were published in Italy in 2007, and subsequently in Germany. Before the English-language editions, 10,000 copies were in circulation. Each has 10 chapters with 20 of a possible 30 paragraphs in different orders, with the paragraphs within the chapters also shuffled. “And from these two rules,” says Balestrini, “comes this number of millions, millions, millions of possible copies.”
When it was published in 1966, Tristano – named in an ironic homage to the hero of the Tristan and Iseult legend – was already an experimental hodgepodge. Needless to say, its digitally-reordered descendants are not novels- let alone love stories- in any traditional sense. Verso describe the book, in fact, as a “radical assault on the novel”; for Balestrini, it is a literary work- but also “a game” into the spirit of which the reader, if he is to appreciate it, must enter.
Holly Baxter wonders if the novel is “just an incredibly astute marketing ploy”:
At its core, as the foreword by Umberto Eco states, Tristano celebrates “an elevated number of possible outcomes”. Its beauty then is in the fact that, like a real life love story, you’ll never quite know what is going to happen. But is this romance, or is it just a kind of extension of the infinite monkey theory? In all honesty, I struggle to see this novel, which is also the anti-novel, as anything more than contrived.
Meanwhile, Brendan C. Byrne considers the novel in the context of other experimental literature:
Tristano is still, at least nominally, a novel, one where the voice and temporality can change not only every line but within every line. … It is tempting to compare Tristano to hypertext fiction, which seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence with Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories. And both do indeed seem to be interested in extracting and making visible the “rules” which govern modern and post-modern lit, breaking narrative down into its consituent elements. However, hypertext fictions places great value on “exploring” the possible sequences of these elements, while each iteration of Tristano is fixed, concrete. The computer has already explored; we merely have the path.
The Dish 