The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards: A Novel
*Starred Review* Online columnist Jansma performs a veritable circus act here, cramming his first novel with literary allusions until its like a small car stuffed with clowns, who then first burst forth to cavort and turn balloons into poodles. This canny, seductive, and utterly transfixing tale about the magic of storytelling and the misery of writing is told by an itinerant, chameleonic writer who calls himself Nobody. The fatherless son of a flight attendant, he relies on and cares for his rich, gay, and unstable best friend, who turns out to be a truly gifted novelist, and falls hopelessly in love with an actress so beautiful that princes propose marriage. Like a magician pulling a seemingly endless string of colorful scarves from a hat, Jansma streams stories-within-stories-within-stories, each a diabolically clever homage. As Nobody juggles false identities and survives near-catastrophes in New York, Las Vegas, Iceland, Luxembourg, Dubai, Ghana, and Sri Lanka, readers will detect riffs on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Truman Capote, Bob Dylan, Tolstoy, Salinger, Borges, Kipling, and many more. To add to the droll, romantic, and boldly creative sorcery of it all, Jansma riffs on plagiarism as “the new American art form” and ponders the paradoxes of literary fame. A first novel with the strength and agility of a great cat leaping through rings of fire. --Donna Seaman