MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Nufer, Doug. Negativeland. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004. I first heard of Doug Nufer online. He wrote an article in Seattle’s “The Stranger” about the Oulipo Compendium. Following some links and searches I discovered his novel Never Again at ubu.com and then this novel, Negativeland. With glowing blurbs by Harry Mathews and Gilbert Sorrentino, the gold standard [...]

Markson, David. Going Down (1970). Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. I always felt that David Markson’s novels were of a fairly consistent oeuvre. Rereading Going Down, his first “serious” novel (there were three pulp novels and one comedic western previous), has reaffirmed that feeling. This novel forms the narrative beginning of a distillation process [...]

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 by Harry Mathews. Dalkey Archive, 2005. “Harry Mathews” has a problem. As an unemployed writer living in Paris, seemingly of independent means, he has been mistaken as a CIA agent, not just by one person but by a whole number of them. The more he tries to [...]

A few quotes from Raymond Queneau on novels. The French quotes were found at this site. Translations are my own. It is insupportable to me to leave the fixing of the number of chapters in these novels [Witchgrass/Barktree (Le Chiendent), Saint Glinglin, The Last Days] up to chance. Le Chiendent is composed of 91 (7 [...]

Queneau, Raymond. Pierrot Mon Ami (1942). Translated from the French by Barbara Wright. Dalkey Archive, 1989. Calling an author sui generis is a cliché, but in the case of Raymond Queneau it is nothing but the truth. Pierrot Mon Ami, his eighth novel, is a fine introduction to the particular style of this French polymath. [...]

Gaddis, William. Agape Agape. (Viking, 2002). (Originally apperaed in (now defunct) The Readerville Journal (Nov/Dec 2002). William Gaddis is known — at least by those who have actually heard of him — for long, dense novels such as The Recognitions (1955) and J R (1975). If you were to remove from those the complicated plots [...]

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 [...]

Horn, Richard. Encyclopedia. New York: Grove, 1969. (Out of print.) I didn’t finish this novel, or rather, I didn’t read all of it. I really couldn’t get myself to, it’s not very good at all. So why I am bothering to review an out of print book that I didn’t like? Well, there’s an idea [...]

Dara, Evan. The Lost Scrapbook. FC2, 1995. So-called “experimental” fiction is often criticized for various reasons by both critics and readers: that it is somehow inhuman (i.e. unfeeling, cold) or too difficult or that only a realistic conventional plot structure can maintain a reader’s interest. Evan Dara’s first novel (and here’s hoping that there will [...]

Sorrentino, Gilbert. Little Casino. Coffee House Press, 2002. In a previous Sorrentino review (See here (off site)) I mentioned the difference in his works. The more I read though the more I begin to see the underlying sameness in content. The novels are consistently different in form, but beneath the ever changing structure lies a [...]

Scott, Gail. My Paris (1999). Dalkey Archive, 2003. I will begin by simply recommending this book, very highly. Gail Scott has written a novel that is decidedly else: memoir, diary, travelogue, social commentary, stylistic experiment; she pulls it off admirably. The book is structured in numbered (but undated) journal entries written by the narrator, a [...]

Sorrentino, Gilbert. Aberration of Starlight (1980). Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1993. For readers of this blog, it should already be evident that I think highly of Gilbert Sorrentino. I’ve been reading a lot of him lately, and it’s been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. While certain themes and motifs are becoming more evident across his [...]

Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. La Television (1997). Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002. English Translation by Jordan Stump forthcoming in November 2004 from Dalkey Archive. Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a Belgian author who has published 6 novels up to the present, La Television being his fifth. Warren Motte calls Toussaint’s body of work an “epic of the trivial” (179), [...]

Sorrentino, Gilbert. Crystal Vision (1981). Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1999. Gilbert Sorrentino is a novelist of fragments. From the unending, unanswered questions of Gold Fools through the mostly disconnected bits of story in Under the Shadow and Little Casino to the broken narrative of the Pack of Lies trilogy, many of his novels come in [...]

Sorrentino, Gilbert. Under the Shadow. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991. Under the Shadow, like many of Gilbert Sorrentino’s novels, is a novel of fragments, so much so that at first I was skeptical it was a novel at all and not just a collection of vignettes with some hidden relation to each other. The [...]

Terry, Philip. The Book of Bachelors. Special fiction issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction 19.2 (1999): 7-108. Introduction by David Bellos, Afterword by the author. Nine single men (bachelors, even) separated from the world, from people, separated from women by: windows, magazines, television screens, smoking, work. Philip Terry creates a series of stories about [...]

Sorrentino, Gilbert. Gold Fools. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001. This novel is funny, laugh out loud on the train funny. I put off reading this book for a number of years, as the constraint in effect seems like it would be extremely irritating. Gilbert Sorrentino has written Gold Fools in questions. Every single sentence is [...]