Mathews, Harry

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New York in Store
Valerie Weill , and Philippe Chancel
Manufacturer: Thames & Hudson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0500513392

Book Description

A charming, quirky look at one hundred New York shop windows and interiors. From Manhattan mainstays like Katz's Delicatessen and Macy's to idiosyncratic emporiums such as the 99¢ Store on East 14th Street or Dr. Rico Perez's drugstore in the Bronx, here are some of New York's most delightful and eye-catching shops and their display windows. Some of these windows feature collapsing heaps of merchandise, while goods in others are neatly stacked and arranged with a traditional shopkeeper's precision, creating geometric patterns out of everyday objects. Juxtaposed with each photograph is the store's business card, which details its name and location so the reader can track down his or her favorites. While chain stores do exist in New York, the city still offers a myriad of independent, one-of-a-kind shops. This delightful survey will appeal equally to New Yorkers and the city's visitors. 200 color illustrations.

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The Escape Hatch
zany literary fun
The Book of Ways
Please read this review.
Basic tool set for home, auto and brain repairs

Oulipo Compendium (Atlas Archive)

Manufacturer: Exact Change
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0947757961

Book Description

Anthology of prose, poetry and literary critcism. "OULIPO COMPENDIUM is a late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The editors have done an astounding job putting together this nutty, one-of-a-kind book. It is the definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic" -- Paul Auster. "Oulipo was--is--a seedbed, a grimace, a carnival. This is an indispensable book for everyone who cares about literature"--Susan Sontag. The OULIPO COMPENDIUM abounds in material for writers, teachers and scholars; it also offers a cornucopia of entertainment for curious readers. "Oulipans: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" -- Raymond Queneau.

Customer Reviews:

The Escape Hatch.......2006-10-26

What can I say of the Compendium, except that I wish I had known about it years ago when I was slogging through many a boring creative writing class asking, always, "Is this all we have?" Truly, there is another side to writing, a playful, divergent, fascinating side that gives the reader and the writer a world of untold possibility.

Reading this book was very like being allowed into the fold of the Ultra Cool Kids, finding them to be an evolved form of human, and being welcomed just the same. The history, writing, and exercises held in this volume should be read by everyone thinking of exploring experimental writing. If you are bored with the status quo--and how could you not be?--then this book is for you.

zany literary fun.......2002-05-23

Oulipo is great! This book is just so full of STUFF. What they did was just spend a lot of time thinking of wild ways to inspire & direct writing, & what we're left with is this labyrinth of experimrents. For me, the one of the greatest things gleaned from Oulipo is just the general sense that therec are sooo many more conceptual & logistical systems out there that you haven't even touched upon yet but that are waiting.

The Book of Ways.......2001-10-03

If you ever come across Arthur Brand's little article on the Oulipo, cherish it. I read it back in the late 80s, in an anthology somewhere, and I've never been able to find it since. It whet my appetite for these crazy masters of restricted composition, who spend their time devising totally new ways to write. This isn't a book for the "poetry of everyday life" set, or writing workshop clones. It's a book, as Brand said, for "mad scientists, mathematicians, monster-makers and angels." It's a writer's encylopedia, stuffed with ideas, strategies, graphs, games, machines, etc for making poetry and fiction.

Please read this review........2001-07-22

Before reading this book, I didn't know anything about Oulipo....do you? If not, here's the gist: Oulipo are a bunch of slightly crazy people who want to find new and fun ways to write stuff. So, they create all these interesting and zany techniques to generate their writing...to me, it seems similar to how modern composers generate notes and rhythms using tone rows and stuff like that. This book is a "compendium" of these techniques, Oulipo authors, their works, etc. I think it's great. I'd recommend it to writers who want to try something new (as opposed to just writing "from the heart", or whatever) and I'd also recommend it to people who like modern, formalist type stuff. Have fun.

Basic tool set for home, auto and brain repairs.......2000-07-27

Rather than individually buying a variety of basic tools, consider getting the Oulipo Compendium, which contains all the essentials: screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, detective-novel-plot-generation-cards, Raymond Queneau's sonnet matrix, etc. Part of the benefit of an oulipo compendium of this scope is that it comes with its own carrying case, includes just about everything you need for at-home brain surgery, and is organized alphabetically, in the form of a dictionary. Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie's home/auto/linguistic tool set meets all these needs and more. Fits both standard and metric sockets. Features basic Oulipo tool set, assorted sizes of screwdrivers and ice-picks, sestina modifiers, biographies of oulipo participants side-by-side with multiple permutations of the N+7 theorem, socket wrenches with 70 sockets and 5 fingers and toes, and an especially amusing photograph of Georges Perec wearing a saucy beard. Stores easily on bokshelf or in the trunk of your car for travel emergencies. Smite your enemy by inventing a law which turns "Y" into "A" whenever it is preceded by "ENEM". Recover language and see what it's like to not live as a slave to your mother's tongue.

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A review from the author of YEARS OF RAGE
a severely underrated masterpiece
a severely underrated masterpiece
De Sade's nephew gets all sociopolitical.
DEATH, SEX, AND REDEMPTION

Blue of Noon
Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: Marion Boyars Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, this twentieth-century erotic classic takes the reader on a dark journey through the psyche of the pre-war French intelligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the glamour of its victors. One of Bataille's overtly political works, it explores the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force, bringing violence, power and death together in a terrifying unity.

"Georges Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century"-Michel Foucault

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Customer Reviews:

A review from the author of YEARS OF RAGE.......2005-03-06

According to Georges Bataille's autobiographical note, LE BLEU DU CIEL ("The Blue of the Sky") was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.

The descending night darkens these pages.

Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann ("Too-Much-Man") and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman's supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.

Their only desire is to besmirch whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.

By muddying whatever is "sacred," they maintain the force of "the sacred."

As a historical document, BLEU DU CIEL is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the "red nun" Simone Weil (as Lazare).

It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, although not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.

As the night materializes, the blue of the sky disappears.

Joseph Suglia, the author of YEARS OF RAGE

a severely underrated masterpiece.......2004-06-12

I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's [illegitimate] children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with [prostitutes] and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

a severely underrated masterpiece.......2004-06-12

I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's bastard children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with whores and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

De Sade's nephew gets all sociopolitical........2002-12-19

"Blue of Noon" is the story of Henri, an amoral man living in Europe during the 1930s. He is supposedly married, but spends his time with similarly amoral women, lacking clothing, inhibition, shame, and even proper hygeine at times. He zips between London, Paris, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, and frankly, engages in nothing but immoral self-satisfying activities in every spot.

At various times, he agonizes over his relationships with his wife, his sexual partners, and his deceased mother. He becomes embroiled in a Communist revolutionary plot in Barcelona, with one of his sexual partners, a Jewish woman, involved in its planning and execution. He reveals his necrophilic obsession to two of his partners, further revealing the exact, even more sickening, subject of his obsession to one of them. He has sex, he gets sick, his women have sex, they get sick, everybody has sex, everybody gets sick. For the punchline, near the end of the novel, Bataille throws Nazis into the picture, showing us that all the depravity of fascism is comparable to the depravity he has shown us all along. Though published in 1957, the book was originally written in 1936.

This reviewer isn't buying it. Not a word of it. Not the story, not even the "1936" part. For one thing, the writing style is actually more mature than that of "L'Abbe C", published in 1950. Bataille is most probably trying to show off that he detected the evil inherent in the Nazis "way back when". I don't give him that much credit.

For another thing, I think he uses Nazis as an easy way to score "scary" points. One might intellectualize his choice by saying Bataille is trying to tell us that no matter how disgusting humans may act, at least we're not as bad as Nazis. Imagine a murderer begging leniency because he's not a Nazi. He's still a murderer. It seems Bataille is using Nazis to justify the pornography he just wrote, as if the world is such a horrible place that pornography is just another little bit of it, and tries to throw a philosophical wrench into the works, as if saying life is meaningless in the face of all the horrible things fascism is doing to us in Europe, but I suspect it was all done just for the hell of it. I frankly don't see any rhyme or reason to the thematic choices he makes.

I have nothing against the depravity or explicit nature of the book. "Been there, done that", right? It's not even all that explicit, there's probably less sex in this book than the average mainstream novel today, and he's certainly not advocating committing even the slightest harm to anyone. There are a few disturbing or distasteful ideas here and there, but one never gets the sense Bataille really means what he's writing. One gets the sense he's simply trying to come up with every juxtaposition of immoral behavior and social taboo he can, just to tweak the reader's moral compass a bit, trying to get a cheap rise out of his audience. Maybe this was an interesting exercise in 1957 (or "1936"), but given the state of depravity which existed in Germany during the 1920s, and the state of sexual liberation which swept Europe from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, I strongly doubt it.

Perhaps the target reader for this book will be the person interested in twisted versions of 19th-century literature (Bataille wrote like someone living 50 or 100 years before his time), or the works of De Sade (albeit in highly shortened format, this book being only 126 pages).

DEATH, SEX, AND REDEMPTION.......2001-07-17

I don't really know how to begin this review. There's not really a good angle to approach this remarkable and beautiful book. What do you do when the very things that attract you to a woman disgust you and yet they turn you on at the same time. In this novel Henri and his wife, whom he sometimes refers to by giving her the name "Dirty" are driving each other insane. They love each other but the very intensity of their personalities makes them fated to never be at peace. This is the root of their despair, that they both realize the futility of being with each other. Henri sinks into dissipation and having relationships with women he thoroughly despises. The first, a woman named Lazare, he refers to as a "raven of ill omen". She is so ugly and despicable but he loves her in a way simply because she reeks of death. He wants to surround himself with an environment that reflects his state of mind. Dirty is dying and you sense that in reality her spirit has already passed on and its simply her image dragging Henri into her own horrible hell. Most of the book takes place in Spain just as the Spanish Civil War is beginning and there are all kinds of portents of the coming World War which adds to the darkness of the characters. This book was brillantly done. The characters seemed so real because they did hurt each other, because they did have unhealthy obsessions which they revel in instead of hiding them within. They give full vent to their joys just as much as their miseries. This is the first book I have read by Bataille and I am curious to see what his other work is like.

Oulipo Laboratory: Texts from the Bibliotheque Oulipienne (Anti-Classics of Dada.)

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Reformatting The Muse
Absolutely Hilarious

Oulipo Laboratory: Texts from the Bibliotheque Oulipienne (Anti-Classics of Dada.)
Italo Calvino , Paul Fournel , Jacques Jouet , Claude Berge , and Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Serpent's Tail
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Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature
Oulipo Compendium (Atlas Archive)

ASIN: 0947757899

Book Description

The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, it still meets regularly some thirty five years later, making it one of the longest lived and productive literary groupings ever.

The Oulipo's original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, but this field of study was soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. Remarkable Oulipian works have been written by Queneau, Calvino, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews (to mention only those familiar to English-speaking readers).

The group publishes a series of small booklets for circulation among its friends. This anthology reproduces six of them in English facsimile, from among the earliest (no. 3, 1976) to the most recent (no. 70, 1995); it provides the English reader with a taste at least of one of the most sustained and intriguing literary investigations of recent years.

Customer Reviews:

Reformatting The Muse.......2000-11-19

Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo (The Ouvrior de LittÈrature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature)) expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems.

Potential Literature, to me, seems an extension of Surrealism, which used the methods of literary production to critique modernism's obsession with the literary artifact; instead of the myth of the artist alone in some garret painstakingly crafting a Work of Art, literature is automatically generated by timed writing, or mechanically generated by multiple authors with games like the Exquisite Corpse or pieced together in a collage of found text. The Oulipo extends this the critique of modernism by exploring ways that literature can be produced as a result of mathematical formulas, or by building complex rules that limit writer's potential choices, or by the construction of new literary forms.

This book serves as a short introduction to the methods of potential literature several reprints from the groups pamphlet series, including François Le Lionnais's Manifestos and Italo Calvino's essay "How I Wrote One of My Books," which served as the blue print for If On a Winter's Nigh a Traveler.

Oulipo is a body of generative ideas rather than a critical or analytical method. It does away with philosophical underpinning in favor of just generating writing. Raymond Queneau regretted that writer's didn't use tools like other craftsmen. With word-processors, they do and this text supplies a range of techniques for extending mechanical writing beyond spell check. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted.

Absolutely Hilarious.......2000-01-14

This book is a riot! I highly recommend it. All of the texts are funny but Fornel's Suburbia is the funniest produced yet by the Oulipians. In addition, this book is a good introduction to the aesthetics of Oulipo, a group of writers who are underappreciated by the American audience.

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A series of fetes for the one thing besides death...
Brilliant realization of high concept

Singular Pleasures
Harry Mathews , and Illustrations by Francesco Clemente Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The first paperback edition of Singular Pleasures, sixty-one vignettes on the sole subject of masturbation, records the imaginative varieties of this activity in prose that is playful, intimate, quirky and humane. The soloists range in age from nine to eighty; the locales from Australia to Zaire; the means of masturbation from the commonplace to the bizarre. The young man in Gaza with his hair dryers, the woman in Manilla with her cello bow, the long-eared bat, the charioteer, the candelabra--this swirl of unlikely individuals and objects is brought together in such a way that it floods a world born fresh once more. Illustrated throughout with watercolors by Francesco Clemente that offer an intriguing counterpoint to Mathewss fictions. The illustrator has also collaborated with such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and John Wieners.

Customer Reviews:

A series of fetes for the one thing besides death..........2000-05-27

...that unites us all. The sheer breadth of fantasy, mechanical aids and passive witness employed in these 61 tableux is staggering: hysterical, sad, inventive, invective, or finally just so blatantly quotidian you suddenly find yourself acknowledging your habituated pleasures in a similar light.

If you don't feel the need for the illustrations (I personally prefer it without), the complete text of "Singular Pleasures" is included in the Mathews prose anthology "The Way Home" published by the ever-trustworthy Atlas Press.

Brilliant realization of high concept.......2000-03-26

The concept, as I read it, is that most of us are bound by a common secret--masturbation--and that the lengths we go to in order to achieve release are what makes us distinct from each other as individuals--our imaginations. To prove it, Mathews, one of America's best unkowns, has written 61 vignettes of people of all ages and nationalities doing whatever it takes to express themselves. For example: "A man of thirty-five is about to experience orgasm in one of the better condominiums in Gaza. He is masturbating, but neither hand nor object touches his taut penis: arranged in a circle, five hairblowers direct their streams of warm air toward that focal point. He has plugged his ears with wax balls." Not all the vignettes are as funny; some are sad, some are touching, some make you tilt your head to one side, hoping for understanding; hoping in vain.

Cigarettes (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

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Life is short
Fascinating Look at Random Relations
one of the great novels of the 20th century

Cigarettes (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1564782034

Book Description

Fiction. Available again, along with TLOOTH, as part of Dalkey Archive's American Literature Series, CIGARETTES has been called "A brilliant and unsettling book ..." -- Tom Clark, Los Angeles Times Book Review. It is a novel about the rich and powerful, tracing their complicated relationships from the 1930s to the 1960s, from New York City to Upper New York State. "CIGARETTES has the delicate yet rigorous architecture of latticework: if we concentrate on the light streaming through its apertures we are still attentive to its carpentry; if we focus on its geometry the light is, of needs, a constant presence. It is a triumph of the imagination" -- Gilbert Sorrentino.

Customer Reviews:

Life is short.......2004-04-19

Cigarettes appears to be Harry Mathews' most conventional novel. That is only because Mathews' experimental devices and his far off, imaginary locations are not a part of this work. Surely this work is nothing like the previous work, but it is as artistic as the others. This is the literature of the salon, of Marcel Proust and, shall I dare say it, Jane Austen? And if one does not read the name on the cover, it does seem to be the work of a woman writer, say Djuna Barnes or Jane Bowles, and of course Two Serious Ladies is mentioned and read in Mathews' book. Two Serious Ladies may be used as a way into this complex, labyrinthine work.

Even though this novel may have some realistic qualities, (usually when we're dealing with Mathews, Realism is never a consideration, and language is of a main concern), it is a labyrinth of relationships of a group of people living in artistic New York in the 1950s and the 1960s. As opposed to Mathews' first novels, The Conversions and Tlooth where the imagination rules, the characters of Cigarettes do seem real, like a 19th century novel perhaps.

But I am willing to say that it must be that none of these characters are based on real people as much as they have been entirely invented "out of the whole cloth" by Mathews.

He has said good-bye to the days of adzes, stories in the arctic, Gypsies, bi-sexual baseball players, invented languages, Adrien Le Roi, Auerbach, and literary paper chases. Now Mathews is concentrating on more conventional means of writing, more realistic. It is not at all a defeatist work. One cannot write for that audience of 500 forever.

Each of the 14 chapters pair off two of the 13 main characters, and chapter by chapter we see the shape of relationships and the ever-changing extent of seriousness. Allen is married to Maud, and he has a relationship with Elizabeth. Priscilla, Walter Trale's lover, is Allen and Maud's daughter. Owen is blackmailing Allen for Elizabeth's portrait; he once found his daughter Phoebe, posing nude for the painter, Walter. Owen is married to Louisa, and he has another son, Lewis, who is a writer and the sado-masochistic lover of Morris. Morris is an art critic, and has a sister Irene, who is an art dealer. Irene owns a forgery of Elizabeth's portrait done by Phoebe, who also become an art dealer. The real portrait and the fake are exchanged at one moment, and only a few people are aware of this.

All through the novel parents misunderstand their children, and the other way around, children always misunderstand everyone, and lovers never have a clue. The novel ends with a moving meditation on death, and the fact that "we become the dead." Definitely, the ideal reader becomes more involved with this novel than with others; the reader who is passive may have too much trouble keeping up with the different people who make up this story. Mathews here has developed a few new structural devices. There are many questions. Who is the narrator? Is there a chapter missing? Is this story based around a secret palindrome?

This novel pretends to portray psychological depth, and tricks the reader into thinking so, but after it's all over it laughs at the possibility of depth. And the reader also laughs, or cries, for this novel suggest that personality or the other is always misunderstood. Everyone has friends or lovers that are like a puff of smoke and then gone, like a "cigarette." This is not a conclusion to the book, but just an aspect, a nuance, the real conclusion is that relationships and fiction remain inconclusive.

Fascinating Look at Random Relations.......2004-04-07

This is just a fascinating book - a study of how disparate people wind up being connected in some fashion. It is a much more literary approach to much the same concept in Six Degrees of Separation, yet the characters drive this book, and disturb us somtimes too, both in what we see in others and maybe in what we see in ourselves. Yes, this books is seemingly straightforward in that the prose is not especially dense, a la William Gaddis, but it is still very thoughtful, and not to be taken lightly. It is a shame that the book is not more widely known. It would make a great TV miniseries!

one of the great novels of the 20th century.......1999-03-11

a classic. a comedy of manners that gradually interconnects a milieu of upper middle class americans -- the most seemingly straightforward and accessible of mathews' novels.

Tlooth (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

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Take that, Oprah!
Playful and brilliant
Brilliant prose, or pretensious crap?
Glad it's back in print!

Tlooth (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1564781941

Book Description

Fiction. This classic text by Oulipo writer Harry Mathews begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game and goes on a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews' fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories within stories. "Harry Mathews' TLOOTH fits no category I can think of ... in his inventiveness and erudition he is like Pynchon, Barth, and William Gaddis"--Granville Hicks, Saturday Review.

Customer Reviews:

Take that, Oprah!.......2000-06-24

The imagination runs wild in this book -- rather like a chariot with a wheel slipping from its axis. A maddening read -- I couldn't finish this book in one sitting , as someone commented above. One chapter a night was all I could handle, and with the plot and locales veering all over the map, I had a hard time remembering what I had read the night before. And yet, I knew that I absolutely HAD to finish Tlooth, and when I did, I was glad; the end reveals what this book is about (and it is about something after all). Erudite, staggeringly digressive, subversive, dreamlike, pansexual: TLOOTH gives mainstream fiction a rousing slap on the behind. (Expand that metaphor into something more knuckle-y, and you'll get the gist of what I really mean.) It's not a book in the usual sense of the world. It's a disorientation. Either you are up to it, or you aren't. NOT an Oprah Book Club selection (thank God)!

Playful and brilliant.......2000-01-30

Wow! This is the first book in a long while that I sat down and read straight through in one sitting, and then read it again the next day. This book is layered and layered again, twisting through puzzles, puns and wordgames that revolve back into itself. It's wildly imaginative in its style and content, and the over the top humor would suit fans of Pynchon and Barthelme, but his control of the language and playfulness is even more extreme once you allow yourself to dig in. This is not a quick read for the subway, but a novel that will challenge your expectations and ideas on what a piece of fiction should and should not be.

Brilliant prose, or pretensious crap?.......1999-10-10

Damned if I know, but I'll lean towards the latter. Fascinating stuff; this novel is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, pieces from other puzzles thrown in, or maybe just a few too many pieces to make a cohesive whole. Is it genius? It certainly is one of the most unique books I've ever read, and one of the most difficult; the innumerous games spotted about the text almost makes me feel as if the author is challenging us. "Go on, you stupid idjit," he says, "Come along and figure me. If you can." It shure as hell beat me...but even if I can't figure it out, there are enough moments of Heller-esque lunacy to make this book worthwhile...such as the savage tribe whose numbers are dwindling because they believe the sun will not rise without a human sacrifice...or the mysterious bog which utters...er, well...or the ingenious baseball game played with a rigged ball set against the somber backdrop of a siberian prison camp. Lovely stuff...so, it comes highly recommended, but try not to get too frustrated when the book just seems to be written expressely for that purpose. One more game: how do you visualise the narrator? Are you so sure that's who the narrator is? Do you really know this character? (Note: those who finish the book fair and square should know what I'm talking about...Sure caught me by surprise. Hee...)

Glad it's back in print!.......1998-10-16

This, Harry Mathews' second novel, has been out of print for far too long. Translated by Georges Perec as Les verts champs de moutarde de l'Afghanistan, Tlooth is, like Gray's Lanark, a novel of incredbile and impossible occurences told in a deadpan manner. Set in a Russian prison camp, this novel begins at a baseball game featuring the Defective Baptists versus the Fideists... and it gets progressively stranger and more interesting from there.

Average customer rating:

fun, intelligent... and a great read
Erudite and unusual

The Sinking of Odradek Stadium
Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Domestic Life | Women's Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Tlooth (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
The Human Country: New and Collected Stories (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Cigarettes (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
The Conversions (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
The Journalist: A Novel (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

ASIN: 1564782077

Book Description

The Sinking of Odradek Stadium is a brilliant comedy composed of an exchange of letters between a husband living in the Miami of the not-too-distant future and his wife living in an Italy of the not-too-remote past. He is Zachary McCaltex, an overweight, emotional intellectual--or in any event a librarian. She is the charming Twang Panattapam, a woman discovered by Zachary in PanNam, a Southeast-Asian country that was once an Italian Colony. Together they are trying to make their fortune by tracing the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the sixteenth century. Once the epistolary convention is accepted, the novel unfolds with demonic logic. The two protagonists infect each other with enthusiasm and doubt, until a lost letter subverts their exchange. The native Twang gains confidence and independence, while Zachary little by little goes to pieces.

Customer Reviews:

fun, intelligent... and a great read.......2004-06-10

Probably the only work ever to use the title as a major plot point/punchline (and a damned effective one, at that), Mathews' novel turns the epistolary genre on its head, with a bizarre love story cum treasure hunt, all wrapped into a tight package of slapstick comedy, mystery, history, culture, and linguistic peculiarities.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mathews' work, he's a member of the Oulipo, a group (or groups) of writers, mathematicians, poets, painters, etc., etc. - who both rescue stylistic constraints from the past and create new ones of their own. So you can always expect that their works will be impeccable structured, rich in detail, language play, and erudition. On top of that, at least one of the characters (Twang) is beautifully written, with a wealth of puns and a generous heap of charm.

There are two minor concerns with the novel that forced me to downgrade it to 4 stars, instead of a perfect five. The first is that the big plot twist, while necessary to set up the game of gross misjudgments in the second half of the novel, comes across as a bit contrived. The second is that the style, while often flexible, fascinating, and outright hilarious, is sometimes uneven - there's none of the assuredness in his writing that you'd find in Cigarettes, for example.

Still, a great read, and highly highly recommended. I wish Mathews and the Oulipo gang were more widely read.

Erudite and unusual.......2002-09-15

This novel is about a man and woman hunting for sunken treasure of gold. The style is a bit abstruse and intellectual, and is not intented for mass audiences. Yet if you pay attention and are persistent, you will find lots of witty lines and some rather poetic phrasings. It is a very unusual book ... the best comparisons I can think of are Fowles' "The Magus" or Umberto Eco's stuff. And maybe John Barth. Stick with it, the ending will surprise you.

The Conversions (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

Average customer rating:

Curiouser and curiouser
a perfect book

The Conversions (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Tlooth (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
The Sinking of Odradek Stadium
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Compact

ASIN: 1564781666

Book Description

At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the coast of an uncharted French island.

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

Customer Reviews:

Curiouser and curiouser.......2000-12-10

This is a book that was meticulously planned - word play and images, false starts and unreliable history - all in an interplay that is both riveting and frustrating. Riveting because of the quality of the imagination; frustrating because reading is one long riddle requiring very intense concentration by the reader.

The book is filled with wordplay ... most notably beginning with a gypsy "game" of describing the scene on a ball filled with boiling water ...; the narrator wins the game in what is called "a new triumph ... of analytical poetry over descriptive prose". Songs seem to carry hidden messages. Horse pedigrees are given in exhaustive detail. A man writes and speaks backwards - two languages, in effect, for one reverses sounds, the other letter. Old manuscripts hide clues in the red letters at the beginning of each line - if you only know what to add and where to divide. Authors and titles of books seized at customs, nine civil servants each of whom distorts language more strongly than the predecessor.

Through all the word play is a plot that is entertaining - but not always sufficiently so to motivate one to put the work into reading that this novel demands.

In short, The Conversions has a fascinating use of language in a satisfactory plot; the author is in full control at all times. Well worth your time ... but chose your time well.

a perfect book.......2000-07-01

Harry Mathews is the most important novelist writing in the English language that no one reads. It's a pity, for he writes with a style and engagement that, if left in less talented hands, could be considered effete, but with his mastery of language and narrative comes off as pure genius.

The Conversions is essentially about solving a riddle, but the search for its answer allows Mathews to do what he's best at: telling stories, and in all respects displaying a love for and engaging with the potential of language.

If you've not read Mathews before, this book will get you hooked; you'll soon want to read his novels, his essays, poems and other pieces, and will soon recognize that he is an American master, one whose works will only grow in stature with the years.

The Journalist: A Novel (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Average customer rating:

Ambitious

Comfort for the obsessive-compulsive

Clever, thoughtful and most importantly, hilarious

Truly Unique

The Journalist: A Novel (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
Harry Mathews
Manufacturer: Dalkey Archive Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | 18th Century | 19th Century | 20th Century | African American | Asian American | Classics | Collections & Readers | Drama | General | Hispanic | History & Criticism | Humor | Jewish American | Letters & Correspondence | Native American | Poetry | Short Stories | Women Writers
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1564781658

Book Description

As an aid to recovering from a nervous breakdown, the narrator of The Journalist begins to keep daily records of almost everything that goes on in his life, from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he eats. As the diary progresses, the narrator's entries become more and more detailed and increasingly bizarre, especially as he begins to devise elaborate classification systems for his unwieldy materials. Since these entries require more and more of his time, he begins to withdraw from family and friends, entering a world perfectly ordered, organized, and utterly weird.

Customer Reviews:

Ambitious.......2004-04-26

One of Harry Mathew' most ambitious and strikingly original novels. His fifth novel, The Journalist, confronts our present day disillusionment with reality and the art of writing. I recommend this novel for its summoning back of all those delicious qualities that I havd found both attractive and mind-expanding when first encountering Mathews' work. The concept is simple: the narrator keeps a journal to help him organize his life. But nothing is ever so simple. His ordinary life as a European businessman receives amazing scrutiny as he becomes meticulous in recording his life's events, shrews details, and his daily thoughts. The characters of his journal include his wife Daisy, his mistress Colette, his son Gert, and his friend Paul. Those designations don't in his life don't last long as the journalist worries about relations between his wife and Paul and his mistress and Gert.

The journalist soon decides that his journal needs subcatergories: certain sections for the objective facts and other parts for his subjective thoughts. As he organizes the journal into more severe categories, the secret meetings around him proliferate. As an Oulipian, Mathews has emploed a poetical structive to create a world unto itself and has refined and updated his language with this novel which, in the context of contemporary Modernism, rivals both Nabokov's Pale Fire and Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

Comfort for the obsessive-compulsive.......2003-06-11

Have you ever worried about that thought that keeps running through your head, again and again? A line from a song that won't let go of you? A need to get into the details of the details of the details? If so, get yourself a copy of The Journalist. Read it. You'll immediately feel the tension draining away: You may be bad, but nowhere near THAT bad. What a relief!

Of course, it won't hurt if you're also a Harry Mathews fan like I am. And an Oulipo fan. And if you're not acquainted with either, this is as good a place as any to get started with both of them. Enjoy!

Clever, thoughtful and most importantly, hilarious.......2000-08-08

For several days upon completing this book, I found myself laughing uncontrollably at the memory of certain passages. Does this book poke fun at Mathew's strategies as an Oulipian? We don't know. We just have to laugh and pity the character's obsession with order and structure. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in observing how we write, think and react to a crisis.

Truly Unique.......2000-03-09

The plot of the story, interesting as it is, becomes secondary to how this book is written. Addictive and hard to put down!

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