The (Diblos) Notebook [Paperback]

James Merrill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1994

Best known as a poet, James Merrill is also an accomplished novelist, and in The (Diblos) Notebook artfully lays bare the process of writing a novel. A young American writer keeps a notebook that records at one and the same time a series of events on the Greek island of Diblos in which he is deeply involved, and his attempts to transform these events into a novel. Everything that might be found in such a notebook is used here with great cunning: the false starts that end in the middle of a thought; the endless revisions, canceled out in the search for the right word or phrase; the many approaches and backtrackings as the writer seeks an entrance to the materials through several possible doors; the musings on how the material is to be treated; and the wrestlings with the problem of appearance and assumed reality. The author has written an afterword for this new edition of his 1965 novel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in 1965, Merrill's novel tells of a young American writer living on the Greek island of Diblos; features a new afterword by the author.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Poet Merrill turned to fiction with this book that is both a novel and an analysis of the novel. LJ's reviewer praised the volume, saying it "sparkles with poetic dialogue and description and is full of wry humor" (LJ 4/15/65). This edition contains a new afterword by the author.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 151 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; Rep Sub edition (October 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564780643
• ISBN-13: 978-1564780645
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,407,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4 ½* Poetic Narrative, December 9, 2002

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The (Diblos) Notebook (Paperback)

Another gem from the Dalkey publishing house, this exploration of creativity reads beautifully. For the most part, it succeeds both as literary experiment and as narrative. Author James Merrill is a poet, and his imagery and poetic structure are the major attraction of this "book within a book."

Merrill's protagonist, Sandy, struggles with a novel he's writing about his family and their experiences on the Greek island of "Diblos." Merrill's conceit is that his (Merrill's) book is really the notebook of author "Sandy." There are two types of entries in this notebook: Sandy's draft of a novel, complete with edits, restarts, notes to himself, etc., and Sandy's journal about his "real life" and people and experiences from which he derives much of his novel.

I won't be giving away too much by providing a brief key to the names of characters in Sandy's novel and their counterparts Sandy's life. "Orestes" is the draft novel 's name for Orson, Sandy's half-brother. "Dora" (the older woman unnamed at the start of Sandy's novel), Orestes' friend and lover, is based on Dora, friend and lover of Orson on Diblos who later accompanies him to New York City. "Sandy" remains unnamed in the novel, but is Orestes' half-brother. "Arthur Orson" is Orson's godfather; his place in the novel is not yet resolved.

"The (Diblos) Notebook" is not as confusing as it may sound, and the writing is evocative and beautifully impressionistic: "The islands of Greece Across vivid water the islands of Greece lie. They have been cut out of cardboard and set on bases of at subtle odds with one another, upon bases of pale haze. Their colors are mauve, exhausted blue, tanned rose, here and there crinkled to catch the light. They do not seem It is inconceivable that they are of one substance with the warm red rock underfoot"

These fits and starts are especially prevalent in the beginning of Merrill's book, and (as he notes in his 1994 afterword) are his attempt to show that, contrary to the notions of some Beat writers, the first creative impulse is not always the best. Sometimes revision improves writing. What I found just as interesting, though, were the sentences in which the original sounded truer, as if the revisions were trying to hide certain emotions. The editing device, with the fragments that resemble poetry and the hints at repression get somewhat tiring after awhile, and Merrill focuses more on straightforward narrative in the well-paced second half. His presentations of brilliant, vain Orson, insightful but isolated Sandy, and the contrasts between Greece and New York read easily and are as insightful as the more overtly psychological revisions. It's an interesting book, rich with such pleasures. At times the book is challenging, and Merrill perhaps overplays his "experiment," but it's also one of those books that reveals more pleasures with each rereading (whether of the whole book or just sections). This book was well received by the critics; it was a final nominee for the National Book Award in Fiction in 1965. Definitely recommended.