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Title: Mawrdew Czgowchwz (New York Review Books Classics) by James McCourt, Wayne Koestenbaum ISBN: 0-940322-97-8 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 09 February, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Gorgeousness for gorgeousness' sake
Comment: After seeing blurbs on Mawrdew Czgowchwz in two magazines and an on-line newsletter, I said "I have to read this book!" Now I have read it and I didn't. The writing is gorgeous, but too much so. Brobdingnagian aggregations of rare multisyllabic verbiage traipse, saunter, stroll, galumph across the page-sometimes arm-in-arm with an idiomatic epigram or eponym-implying to the ophthalmic interlocutor notions of sylvatic artistry, ecstatic glamour and libidinous merriment. Do you know what I mean, toots?
McCourt's theme is the transcendent power of art. The problem I have with the book is McCourt makes you work too hard. His style and vocabulary get in the way of his message. Achieving transcendence in a spiritual sense takes discipline and stamina. But to be whisked away in the concert hall, all you have to do is listen.
Mawrdew Czgowchcz has engaging characters (with fabulous names) a terrific plot, wicked satire and many fun incidents all of which you will enjoy, if you can pry them out McCourt's thickly gilded sentences. Yes, it is very much like Firbank, but Firbank, for his baroque obtuseness, is still swift and immediate on the page.
I wanted to be engulfed and swept away by Mawrdew, instead I just bobbed along the surface, admiring but not fully appreciating. A little less gorgeousness would serve Mawrdew Czgowchcz much better.
Rating: 3
Summary: Dazzling but not enchanting
Comment: The comparisons that have made between MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ and the novels of Ronald Firbank are just... perhaps too much so. Part of the charm of Firbank's novels is their utter singularity; they seem so one-of-a-kind, that they captivate by their. In MAWRDEW, McCourt transplants the heady atmosphere of Firbank's faraway kingdoms and cities to the "Gotham" of the postwar era, but the effect seems a little derivative. Moreover, while McCourt attains the kinds of virtuoso effects of Firbank's prose you keep getting the feeling you're expected to admire the effort rather than be moved by it. There's nothing like the deep-seated anguish that makes the best of Firbank's novels (such as THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT) really transcend their glibness. Almost inevitably the foreword for this edition was written by Wayne Koestenbaum: the book seems to have been written exactly with him in mind as its audience.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Triumphant Return
Comment: It's lovely to have this brilliant novel back in print, easily the best novel on the opera milieu ever published. But it's the maximalist prose that is the true star here--half Firbank, half Joyce, as Wayne Koestenbaum points out in his excellent introduction. I envy anyone reading this for the first time.
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Title: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 by James McCourt ISBN: 0393050513 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum, Tony Kushner ISBN: 0306810085 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: 10 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake by James McCourt ISBN: 0394523628 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 25 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Homosexuality and Civilization : by Louis Crompton ISBN: 067401197X Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Time Remaining by James McCourt ISBN: 0679412662 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 May, 1993 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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