Just finished reading this book and ended up really loving it, but had a question about one of the stylistic choices the author deployed. There are three names in the book that have letters replaced by stars:
* A\*\*\*
* Padre\*\*\*
* Saint\*\*\*
By the time I had finished reading it, I was unable to come to any sort of conclusion as to why those names were presented that way. My initial thought was that maybe they were gender-encoded – one of the formal constraints the author used across the course of the book was to obfuscate any markers that would gender the two main characters. This doesn’t seem to hold though – there are other names in the book (e.g. George, Michel), which are presented without having been obscured. So, while that may make sense for A\*\*\*, it wouldn’t make sense for the other two instances.
I’ve scoured the web as much as I could, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem like anyone else who has read the book has brought this up. For those who are familiar with it, do you have any thoughts as to the significance of this choice?
by epherma