"While we're talking about convention, this book classifies as poetry. It throws this claim to poetry, however, immediately into question:  the title informs us that it is a novel, and this novel is blue. This fact is no negligible, because if we agree that it's poetry, what we really mean is a superior sense of the term, all but forgotten nowadays: ever since Gilgamesh and the Iliad, and beyond,  poetry arises from the impulse to tell a story. That is its fundamental fact. This book, by calling itself a novel, tells us just as much, but in reverse. There is no language for story but what has its origin in poetry."