Harry MathewsRezensionen
Autor von Oulipo Compendium
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The Solitary Twin
This bk's divided into 3 sections: "First Stories", "The American Experience: Stories to be Read Aloud", & "Calibrations of Latitude". Just from a writerly perspective, there's so much variety here, so many ways of creating a reading experience. From the incredible overkill of absurd detail in "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" to the evocativeness of "Journeys to Six Lands" to the more 'classically' OuliPoian formalist "Clocking the World on Cue: The Chronogram for 2001" Mathews' ideas are always very thought-out & realized w/ fantastic & subtle skill.
My first foray in Mathews (I've been meaning to get to him for some time now), and I am delighted. Very very satisfying.
My first foray in Mathews (I've been meaning to get to him for some time now), and I am delighted. Very very satisfying.
This is the story of an odd little town and two twin brothers who live there. There are four friends who get together and talk in the most pretentious dialogue ever and tell stories no one would ever tell. Nothing real about these people. They were insufferable, the book was insufferable.
I was curious about the lives of the twins, Paul and John, so I kept on reading. I did like the end so the stars bounced from one to two.
Audaciously eccentric storytelling, splendidly composed, vast but contained, motley and wry. Mathews makes a great go of it, from hints of a medieval medical feud in the faux footnotes of a forged letter, to an Afghan mustard bar to the soothsaying mudbogs of pornographic Venice and beyond. There’s probably something here for everyone, but too much for most.
Elysian SuperFuzz Blood Orange Ale
Evil Twin Sanguinem Aurantiaco
Romanen følger en velhavende vennekreds i New York fra slutningen af 1930’erne til starten af 1960’erne, og det særlige greb er, at hvert kapitel er bygget op om et par. Det kan være to unge elskende, en far og hans datter eller en kvinde og hendes mands elskerinde. Mulighederne er mange, historierne er indbyrdes forbundne og hver fortælling giver nye perspektiver på de personer, vi har mødt tidligere. En fortællekreds foregår i 1938, hvor den frigjorte Elizabeth forløser flere unge mænd seksuelt, inden de slår sig til ro med deres ægtefæller.
En anden fortællekreds foregår i 1963, hvor maleren Walter, der malede Elizabeths portræt i 1938, for alvor slår igennem som en af byens væsentligste kunstnere. De par, der mødte hinanden i den første kreds, har nu fået børn, og deres ægteskab er ved at være lidt slidte. Og så er der et par kapitler, der dækker hele perioden, bl.a. Louisas forhold til hendes søn Lewis, som fungerer mindre godt, fordi de bliver for fortællende.
Elizabeth er interessant, fordi hun som både ung og midaldrende lever sit liv fuldstændigt, som det passer hende. Hun forfører mænd og dropper dem igen, når hun har fundet noget bedre. Efter en affære med forsikringsmanden Allan har hun oven i købet den frækhed at flytte ind hos hans kone Maud, mens han må blive i pendlerlejligheden i byen. Hun opfører sig kort sagt som en mand, og det endda længe før seksuel frihed blev allemandseje.
Owens forhold til datteren Phoebe er også gribende. Hun dropper ud af college for at blive Walters elev og slå igennem som kunstmaler, og det har han svært ved at acceptere. Og endnu værre er det, at hun får sin egen hippe omgangskreds og i det hele taget lever et interessant liv uden hans deltagelse. Et øjeblik ser det ud som om han kan blive en del af det – men i sidste ende fungerer det ikke, og da hun bliver alvorligt syg er han hemmeligt glad for, at hun ikke er lykkedes.
Phoebes bror, Lewis er homoseksuel og masochist, og hans fortvivlede kærlighed til kunstkritikeren Morris udgør et tredje spor. Jeg kan ikke helt beslutte mig for, om det er befriende, at Mathews åbent skildrer homoseksuel kærlighed, eller om det er irriterende, at forholdet fremstilles så karikeret. Nok mest det sidste, selvom Morris og Lewis også er dem, der kommer tættest på at have et forhold, der ikke bygger på (økonomisk) egeninteresse.
Trods et par mindre gode kapitler, så var Mathews et interessant bekendtskab og ’Cigarettes’ et spændende eksperiment.
At a wealthy New Yorker's mansion the narrator is gifted a golden axe after winning a worm race - yes a worm race! The next morning the eccentric host mysteriously carks it, and according to his Last Will & Testament the person who is in possession of the antique axe gets the bulk of the rich guy's fortune, providing he/she can answer three riddles relating to the artefact's history.
This is how The Conversions by Harry Mathews begins, and it's a strange almost awkward tale, written in a chilled, concise style infused with wordplay and allusion.
The elegant (some might think "dry") storytelling follows the narrator's globetrotting antics as he attempts to provide answers to the three riddles.
The result is a sophisticated rigmarole of red herrings and odd encounters which seems to seesaw between the fascinating and the banal. Worth exploring if you have a fondness for peculiar fiction.
Written in short chapters, the narrative of TLOOTH is awash with absurdist digressions and surreal imagery. Halfway through I was somewhat confused. By the end I was pleasantly bemused. All in all I enjoyed the author's limpid style and the many dreamlike happenings. The point of writings like this isn't necessarily the story, more the incidental side-stepping and strange instances that occur along the way, and this novel is loaded with such deviations - "play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories" as it says on the back cover. I'd define it as elegantly mind-boggling. A curious creation.
This is Harry’s last novel. (He died in 2017 at the age of 86). He is at the height of his craft. Good fiction is art/ifice. Harry is pretending. Art provides a kind of paradise, says Harry. The milieu sounds real―Parisian street names, his artist friends. Events in the news circa 1973 jangle like an incantation: Le Pen, Baader-Meinhof, Pinochet. Is it dangerous? The stops along your itinerary are arranged in alphabetical order. Harry writes for fun. He says you can never trust a novelist. His mock infiltration is blocked when he is outed as an Oulipian. When Harry’s tryst with the seamstress is almost discovered, he hides in a rolled-up carpet and is accidentally delivered to a dinner party at the home of a notorious fascist thug where he is fingered as a patsy but escapes with the help of a nymphomaniacal dwarf twin who seduces him on the altar of Les Six Saints Jean, but at the last minute the sexton appears, his ultrawhite skin cultivated as a kind of inverse totemic shrine to an unconsummated affair with a dark black boy on Corsica. Perhaps things begin to unravel. Harry is at the height of his craft. He goes on the lam. Nabokov said that a writer’s greatest creation is his readers, and in the end Harry is saved by his. Goodbye, Harry.
I have decided to title all my reviews from now on, because I've found -- after 300 reviews -- that I tend to use books to open problems of writing. Each book tends to raises a different problem, so the titles are a way of keeping those in order.
That first paragraph is written in emulation of the narrator in Mathews's book. He has recently had a nervous breakdown, and is heading for another. He decides to control his experiences by keeping a journal, and as the narrative progresses the journal becomes more and more elaborate. I bought this book because I am interested in the idea of writing a novel that becomes stranger as it goes along, until eventually -- in the version of this idea that the Norwegian novelist Thure Erik Lund recounted to Karl-Ove Knausgaard -- the novel itself teaches the reader an entirely new language. In Lund's metaphor, the language is Chinese, and the book becomes so complex, and at the same time so compelling, that by the end the reader finds herself reading in Chinese. (I heard this story from Knausgaard in April 2016, and I posted the pertinent information on Facebook on April 29, including interviews in which Knausgaard has retold this story of Lund's.)
"The Journalist" is partly such a book. The narrator becomes increasingly agitated when he is off his medications, and he calms himself by starting a journal. The journal becomes "Chinese" when he has the idea of inventing categories for his entries. At first he classifies all entries "A" for public and "B" for subjective or private. Then he divides both A and B into I and II -- I for for events that involve other people, and II for those that concern only himself. Then he divides each of those subdivisions into two parts, and then each of those subdivisions into two or three parts (pp. 84-85). From that point on, the diary -- the text of this novel -- is indented, to make room for the narrator's classifications of each thought, which run along the left margin: B II/a.1, A I,II, and so forth.
For the first half of "The Journalist," the diary is not presented as a model for the novel, but only as a diary. There is a passage in which the narrator's description of his project has an uncanny resemblance to one of Knausgaard's ways of talking about "My Struggle":
"I know I'm not Plato, or even Boethius, not Diderot or Maganoff either. I haven't got profundity or clout, nothing but a devotion to the truth. So is my activity the pursuit of truth? It's a pursuit of the truth, a laborious, pedestrian, accumulative one, and not less than that. Not profundity but extensiveness (I escaped the lure of scope): establishing bounds as broad as I can imagine them, extending them day after day, and within them honestly gathering all I find." [p. 185]
(Perhaps this would fit Knausgaard better if "ambition" were substituted for "the truth.") But the diary concept works less well as the novel progresses. Increasingly, the narrator's project is an allegory of all fiction writing, especially when he reflects on the fact that it is an entirely solitary enterprise (p. 153), and also when he notes that he devotes "more time, thought, and passion to it than to anything else" (p. 191). The diary is less effectively proposed as an allegory of all fiction writing when the narrator has a fantasy that an editor might be interested in publishing the diary (p. 206); this isn't a convincing move on Mathews's part, because it makes a reader think of the author and his career, rather than the narrator, who is a generalized figure for a writer.
In theory, then, this could be an example of a Chinese novel in Lund's sense. One reason it isn't is that a reader of Mathews's book skips by the narrator's obsessive annotations. For the most part the narrator's diary runs continuously on past the annotations, making it unnecessary to learn, read, or remember them. (In the allegory: you can read this book without learning Chinese.) At one point the narrator decides to write an index, and he does, but we never see it, providing an additional reason not to learn the new language. He also thinks of turning his journal into a journal about writing (a "Journal of the Journal," p. 195), but again we don't see the results of that notion.
The closest the book comes to Lund's, and Knausgaard's, interest is on p. 191, when the narrator ponders his ramifying classification system:
"I imagine duplicating each existing category with its journalistic parallel: the first records an event, while the second records the even of its recording -- for every A I/b.2b, a J (for Journal): A I/b.2b (or it could be in quotation marks, A I/b.2b, and "A I/b.2b"). I know that won't work. Consider this question: how can I include what happens when I write about A I/b.2b (what is happening around me, what I may be thinking, what my body is feeling, what is experienced by whatever one calls the soul -- the self? the selves? the shelves?)? If I put a duplicating frame around my old system, then I would have to make a frame for the frame, to include what was happening while I make the frame, to include what was happening while I made the frame, and then another frame for that -- a discouragingly infinite regression: not only A I/b.2b and J: A I/b.2b but J:J:A I/b.2b and J:J:J:A I/b.2b (or A I/b.2b, "A I/b.2b," ""A I.b.2""...). [p. 191]
This is actually readable, and it is close to "Chinese." But it is the only passage of its kind. The book ends with a disjointed series of plot summaries, tying up the narrator's paranoid fantasies, making the entire book uncharacteristically, and unnecessarily, neat. I would rather have been compelled to read Chinese, all the way to the end, even if it remained, or even became, increasingly difficult, unrewarding, and incomprehensible. I agree with Lund and Knausgaard: there is something compelling in that model of a novel.
In the "Paris Review" interview, Mathews says he "didn’t use [Roussel's] methods specifically, but mine were similar in that they were based on relationships between words, often puns" -- which is the method Roussel describes in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books." Mathews also offers this, as a generalization: "The whole thing is based on misunderstanding language." (tinyurl.com/6d2m862)
"The Conversions" is a series of short chapters, each with a story involving a puzzle. Some are descriptions of machines, exactly as in Roussel; others are translations of texts, or stories told by people the narrator visits. Each chapter is different in style, historical references, and in the kind of puzzle. Mathews is closest to Roussel when he describes machines, like the undersea clock that incorporates a miraculous acid held in place by magnets (pp. 164-71), the wasps who "scorch" bacteria, producing a cure for an epidemic (p. 51), or the painter's machine that supposedly produces unusual colors (p. 119-28).
Mathews is more scholarly than Roussel, and he plays with Latin puns (pp. 110-18), German prose (there is a chapter in German, pp. 172-80), and French. He also knows more about some historical questions than Roussel may have -- especially medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, including a chapter on Orlando di Lasso. But those differences aside, much of the material in "The Conversions" could have been imagined by Roussel 40 years before Mathews's book.
But he is very far from Roussel in two crucial particulars.
First, he presents the solutions to each puzzle, or the impossibility of a solution, in each chapter together with the puzzle. In "Impressions of Africa," all the strange performances and machines are described in the first half of the book, and then "explained" in the second half, but the "explanations" prove to be as enigmatic as the expositions, and the overall "explanation" (that the performers are captives of the African king) doesn't come close to serving the ordinary function of an explanation, which is to dispel any sense of mystery or irrationality in the setting. But in "The Conversions," each chapter concludes with the narrator's summary. Most chapters yield a small insight, and the narrator continues on to the next puzzle, exactly as in a murder mystery. Roussel defers explanation, so that each new episode in "Impressions of Africa," "New Impressions of Africa," and "Locus Solus" accumulates a perverse and increasingly inexplicable--and for some, intolerable--opacity. Mathews writes more like a murder mystery writer, bringing readers along with partial solutions, promising clarity at the end.
Second, Mathews ends by declaring the puzzle is insoluble. He does this abruptly, but there are also clues that the book as a whole will not resolve. For me, the strongest of those is the throwaway comment, toward the end of the chapter on the painter's machine, that the mechanism doesn't actually produce unusual colors for the artist, but was "only a means of supplying him with material for the exercise of his talent" --exactly in the way the puzzles serve the book "The Conversion" rather than the truth of the narrative in "The Conversion" (p. 127). In the "Paris Review" interview, Mathews says:
"The ends of my books are also designed in a way that subverts any illusion that what you have become involved in is anything but the book itself. In The Conversions, as you approach the end of the book, you get to a part where the narrator doesn’t understand the last of three riddles. The whole quest falls apart. What happens next? You turn the page and are greeted with nine pages of German. This infuriated people."
This is very far from Roussel, for whom it would be irrational and misguided to admit, in the book, that the puzzles and mysteries are only there to serve the art of fiction. It's the exact opposite: Roussel writes from the other side of the mirror, as if everything he is saying is in earnest, and the created world he presents is utterly true. That is the crucial move that ensures enigma, as Michel Foucault observed in "Death and the Labyrinth."
So: as an object lesson in the dangers of emulation, "The Conversions" shows that the temptation to copy, or surpass, the effects of a writer can miss the forest for the trees. In Roussel, the trees are fascinating and strange, but nowhere near as strange as the forest, which remains as silent and free of "explanation" as a real forest. In Mathews, the forest is literature, and the rules that produce his text, even if they are "from Mars" as Perec said, are all in the service of compelling writing. Roussel had no idea about writing in that sense, because he was too deeply deluded.
1 
JimElkins | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 30, 2016 |
JimElkins | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 30, 2016 | Most of the book is about the protagonist’s investigation to decipher a riddle posed in the first chapters. Details of his point-to-point research are presented in lenghty passages and in such density that sometimes it feels like playing various parts of encyclopedia on fast forward, which tends to be involving in a strange way.
Some reviewers compare The Conversions to several other ‘experimental’ works, most notably The Crying of lot 49 , which is somewhat similar in style and plot. Indeed, Mathews uses entropy as a narrative device, a trait attributed to Pynchon, and he does this quite nicely. It’s fairly clear however, that this proliferation of excessively rich, often erudite descriptions and deeply buried allusions might be going more or less nowhere . Maybe that’s what should be expected of a story which begins with a worm race…
That early enigma-setting chapter is actually a good sample of what’s ahead: it’s quirky, overloaded with bizarre detail, and a bit too trippy to be taken simply as it is. Compared to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler , which has a similar premise, the stories forming a chain aren’t equally pretty but still some of them really grasp attention. Just as Calvino covers many styles, Mathews covers many fields of research. The protagonist listens to many stories, reads a novel, studies some documents. Like in Grady Tripp's novel from Wonder Boys, there's also a fair amount of horse genealogy in between. Mystery that emerges slowly concerns a religious sect and its female leader (the author points firmly at Graves’ White Goddess ).
All this is told in repeated bursts of facts, technical data, secrets, language games and occassional humour. For some, this is more likely to spawn growing indifference rather than continuous interest. I was eager enough to get through this novel in two sittings while on train – it’s relatively short and manages, for some 100 pages, to draw attention solely by being a literary oddity, which is not bad.
The Conversions is known mainly for it’s unorthodox ending and the author’s assumption that on completing the book his perfect reader would throw it out angrily, then think for a split-second and catch it before it falls to read again. Now I know I’m not the kind -- as much as I sometimes enjoy literature as a game to play, my curiosity and taste demand more than a riddle-fueled text machine bordering on a hoax.
One truly interesting thing about it is how many other literary efforts of similar kind it predates. So Calvino and Pynchon ‘are’ here. Pale Fire ’s playing upon appendixes is utilized here too. Dan Brown might be here as well, if you wish. The problem is that Mathews, having a concept and a considerable skill, didn’t seem to know exactly how to use them. Neither had he Nabokov’s grace nor Pynchon’s playful mastery. Oulipo's formal experiments usually seemed to have a purpose which is nowhere to be found here. What’s left is a puzzle, several pieces of which I was able to match together, yet unwilling to look closer for any others. Putting it simply, It might be clever enough, but it’s not fun enough. It’s still much better than Da Vinci Code, though.
1 raketemensch | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Aug 18, 2015 |
raketemensch | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Aug 18, 2015 | The Conversions is a multi-tiered treasure hunt, filled with the Oulipo projects of experimental writing and codification. But in the dismay of the overwhelming tease of yet jucier information in his (and now our) quest to translate the square plates on the blade of his gifted/won adze, the narrative and characters spring to life. No detail is left out, though the read is far from tedious.
1 ABAlexander | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Jan 7, 2014 |
ABAlexander | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Jan 7, 2014 | Written in the form of journal entries over a two-week period by a man recovering from some kind of psychological episode, The Journalist is an inside-out rendering of the writing life and a meditation on the web of linkages—both inanimate and intimate—that makes a life.
The recording of daily existence by the narrator/journalist requires ever more precise categories (matters involving people and matters involving things, matters that are outside me, the ideas and feelings of other people, dreams and thoughts about the future) and attention to ‘subcontinuities.’ He contemplates writing in different colors.
Dear journalist, stay boggled.
Descriptions get more and more elaborate, more absurdly detailed (a gray-green suit nurtured to floppiness, a large patchwork-chrome brooch apparently recovered from a plane wreck). He notices that his disgust with those around him grows milder when he writes down his thoughts as they occur. He begins to include entries for “things not done,” bits of dreams (standing on a pile of desert rubble, he hears himself say out loud, “I know it’s not spelled with a p, you fucking bedant”).
He is ashamed of old feelings, obsessed with the signs and warnings from his body: when leg straightened, clicks; right hand: ligaments of 3rd and 4th fingers strained (last week, but how? Pulling at something that wouldn’t give, but what?); right cheek: superficial numbness (when did I first “not notice” this?). He has 27 categories of “body omens” and looks forward to more,
…the relief of hopelessness preferred to boiling uncertainty.
He knows he is no writer; he’s not after profundity, but 'extensiveness.' He is saving each day to live again. The journal gives exceptional alertness of mind and sensibility. What is important is to record everything, including the act of recording. My life has not been wasted. Whatever I lose, I have this.
Mathews gives the impression of being fully in command of his prose. Pathos and black humor and shades of human thought reveal the nature of the world. Not a sentence is out of place. What seems to be at stake is the meaning of the narrator’s actions and therefore of his existence, and so it is his reasons, not states of mind, that confront each other—not feelings and passions but their logic (ref. Nicola Chiaromonte's Worm of Consciousness).
What you don’t know about the sloughs and bird’s nest inside you takes priority over being speechless when you face a mushroom.
In the last few pages the narration shifts to the third person, and the journal ends allegorically.
Bravo, Harry.
1 HectorSwell | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 14, 2013 |
HectorSwell | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Apr 14, 2013 | 
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