MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

A translated interview with Raymond Queneau, on the idea that “novelistic activity” can be divided into two “poles”, that of the Iliad and that of the Odyssey. [From the Review of Contemporary Fiction] Includes references to two French novels I really love, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet.

My most recent read is Tom Harris by Stefan Themerson (1967), one of Dalkey Archive’s most recent reissues. I was attracted by an ad in the last Review of Contemporary Fiction which describes it as “an outlandish, highly unconventional detective story.” That is a fairly good way of summing up the novel. It is a [...]

I read E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (Project Gutenberg’s edition of the novel) in about a day. It’s a short early detective novel from 1913. I can’t recall now where I heard of it, but something about the description struck me as relevant to my detective story interest (that is, in unusual ones). Bentley dedicates [...]

Babel by David B. (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2004). The majority of Andre Breton’s prose works (Nadja, Mad Love, Arcanum 17, etc.) mix autobiography, dream, myth, the everyday, chance — all elements of the Surrealist project: the exploration and exploitation of the unconscious for the purposes of art, culture, and even politics (like Freud the [...]