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Title: Reader's Block (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) by David Markson ISBN: 1-56478-132-1 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Thought provoking and readable
Comment: Markson discards the narrative form and focuses on what's interesting, the tidbits and anecdotes. The message of the novel is what he focuses on, the deaths, the misfortunes, the tabloid-like stories of the literary and philosophical giants. While throughly readable and engaging, I didn't find this work to be revealing or insightful in the way would stand up to some of their great ones. Perhaps I'm missing his allusions, but the insight of an anecdote is in its application, and in the stripped form of this novel many of those allusions read as if from a book of quotations.
Rating: 4
Summary: Looking for a new/ancient genre?
Comment: "Reader's Block" somehow manages to pick up where "This Is Not a Novel" left off, even though the latter was written later. This is managed by TINaN being more polished, more reader-ready, more "practiced," and is thus a good introduction to the genre; but Reader's Block is more true to the genre by being less "produced" and therefore more "honest." And yet, if you go back even further to "Wittgenstein's Mistress," the genre is exploited in the form of actual fiction-- biographical fiction, to be sure, but fiction nevertheless-- so that if one needs fiction as an introduction to the genre, one has it available, and again, Reader's Block will pick up where W'sM leaves off.
I can't speak to still earlier works by Markson, but I can say the "adventurous reader," the literary equivalent of the day-walker who sets out in strange cities with nothing more than a bottle of water and power-bar, will enjoy the adventure of discovering this genre. "This Is Not a Novel" is the packaged tour; "Reader's Block" is the nitty gritty.
Oh, by the way, the genre is called "zuihitsu." It's Japanese.
Rating: 3
Summary: Consistently engaging, but a step back for Markson
Comment: This book only got three stars primarily because I had already read Wittgenstein's Mistress, and had seen the emotional response that Markson's style could produce, a response that he doesn't really bring off here. The style still has a certain hypnotic momemtum, and most literate readers will have no desire to put the book down (mostly for the high level of interest one has in the anecdotes), but it lacks the sense of character that the previous book had. Although he tries to create the same sense of loneliness that Kate had in W.M., the lack of a consistent narrative voice never allows us to get any sense of Protagonist or Reader as people, which is perhaps the point but doesn't really allow us to have any emotional ties with them - so the ending is much less affecting than it could have been.
And while W.M. dealt deftly with complicated philosophical issues, the issues Markson deals with here - mortality, bigotry, etc. - seemed to be handled a little heavy-handedly.
Sentences like:
He's completely alone here now.
And passages like:
Four of Freud's five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.
Four.
struck me a little overblown and pretentious, while the allusions and references to isolation in W.M. never did.
So: the book is certainly a worthwhile read, but I would read Wittgenstein's Mistress first. Probably the high point of experimental fiction in our time.
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Title: This Is Not a Novel by David Markson ISBN: 1582431337 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 20 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Wittgenstein's Mistress (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) by David Markson ISBN: 1564782115 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Vanishing Point by David Markson ISBN: 1593760108 Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Springer's Progress by David Markson ISBN: 1564782182 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks ISBN: 0060599235 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 15 June, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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