Could this be the craziest novel you’ll ever read in print?
The unconventional layout of Kapow!, from author Adam Thirlwell, features upside-down and spinning text. That’s intentional. It’s supposed to reflect the noisy confusion of stories from the Arab Spring, as they emerged online.
The novel Kapow! tells the story of Arab Spring in 2011. London-based writer Adam Thirlwell and the design team at publisher Visual Editions dreamed up the concept.
Thirlwell manages “to bring to paper how most of us digest on screen,” according to Visual Editions co-founder Anna Gerber.
The unusually formatted novel features large typography, pull-out pages and wordplay. The aim of these visual digressions: to represent what it’s like to follow the protests and demonstrations in the Middle East and northern Africa via links, tweets and YouTube.
Though the book is based on real events, it’s a work of fiction. The setting is clearly Cairo, Egypt, but the city’s epicenter Tahrir Square is never mentioned.
Thirlwell’s unnamed protagonist is semi-autobiographical. The narrator is also a London-based writer learning about the revolution in 2011. The story takes off when the narrator meets a taxi driver named Faryaq whose family lives in Egypt during the revolution. He comes to learn about a “marriage that’s hijacked by public events.”
The project took six months of planning, three months of writing and three months of editing to complete. “I found it fascinating to mimic the way one’s attention is constantly being distracted or changed by what you’re looking at,” Thirlwell says.
Thirlwell spent months looking at blogs featuring day-to-day updates from revolutions. He focused primarily on blogs and YouTube.
“Within the revolution they were using Facebook, Twitter and everything,” he says. “YouTube, I think, is in a way the most interesting because if you suddenly upload a video, it has an instant impact in a way that any article about that doesn’t.”
He wrote the story as the Arab Spring movement was unfolding last winter. Videos, images and blogs posts were available almost immediately after events happened.
“[The web] is working to mobilize a huge amount of people very fast,” he says. “To the bystander, like the American or British person observing the revolution, it becomes a way of actually seeing what you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see.”
Of course, Mideast revolution is still being documented online. Last week, news of Syria’s #HoulaMassacre spread widely across Twitter before news organizations were reporting about the incident. The U.N. reports 49 to 100+ residents of Houla were killed.
This Thursday, news from Egypt about the country’s presidential elections is expected to light up Twitter and other social networks.
