![]() The above excerpts, just to illustrate, have been pulled from not one but all four of the books, and put together via good old cut and paste. Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray. ![]() William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.Īnd was introduced as the winner of the Mobil Prize. Of course they are, though I’m not certain I can tell you why.Įmily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer. These facts or vignettes, culled from the pages of Markson’s extensive personal library - in notes and checkmarks, scribbled questions and underlined quotations, talkback - he would copy onto index cards which he kept in shoebox tops, and when he’d filled a certain number of these, he had a new manuscript.Īnd why do I say arranged, several lines up, instead of structured?ĭinnerplates are arranged. Stays in debtor’s prisons, hospitals, madhouses.Īnd artists’ deaths. Biographical notes, unattributed quotations, literary allusions. Nevertheless, that’s where we are with Markson’s Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel - a quartet arranged as a series of seemingly disconnected facts, anecdotes, and minutiae on famous artists’ lives, their financial troubles, their affairs and illegitimate children. So when a book comes along - in this case, four of them - that seems to’ve invented its own reason to exist, its own set of rules, and that seems so simply conceived and executed you wonder why no one has done it before, even as you realize that the work is inimitable, the result is a kind of ecstasy, a simultaneous lifting of spirit and sublimation of the skeptical mind that would tell you, This shouldn’t succeed, and of course you can’t explain ecstasy to anyone who hasn’t felt it for themselves without looking like a madman from the mountaintop. And as a critic, I need to intellectualize and make myself feel superior to the text, especially a text I admire, by being able to say, I see what you did there. As a writer, I need to understand how fiction is made, so I can steal from it. It’s rare that I get to review a book I would much rather just hand you, rarer still I’d have to hand it off while admitting, I have no idea why this works, it should fall apart, but it’s beautiful. I am considering abandoning this review of David Markson’s “Notecard Quartet.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |