Tlooth by Harry Mathews

Tlooth by Harry Mathews

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.

"A brilliant book, in a very special way.. While the method of telling it is quite sober, and the language plain, what actually happens is bizarre and wonderful. The descriptions that are blandly handed to you show an imagination and an ingenuity that are often just as astonishing. The details are sometimes savage and scabrous... But the book has nothing to do with modish sick humor... It is, for all its incidental excesses, fantasy, pure and simple... If you can take it, this is a journey worth taking." -- Harper's "[Tlooth and Conversions are] comic extravaganzas that play mockingly with every device of fiction." -- Washington Post Book World "An imaginative free-form exercise in the best advanced style, one carefully planned with conventions of plot meticulously disregarded... with an emphasis on bizarre subject matter paramount... Here in brief is a literary "happening" not without some interest for its motivations in technique in a world evidently prepared to abandon the old and tried for the new and quite experimental, at least in prose fiction." -- Virginia Quarterly Review

Born in New York in 1930, Harry Mathews settled in Europe in 1952 and has since then lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, recent publications are THE NEW TOURISM (Sand Paper Press, 2010), Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Editions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), OULIPO COMPENDIUM (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781564781949
ISBN 10	1564781941
Title	Tlooth
Author	Harry Mathews
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Year published	1998-11-12
Number of pages	177
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable