Customer Reviews

20 Lines a Day (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

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Harry Mathews gave himself a writing assignment: before going to work on the last chapters of the novel he was writing at the time (Cigarettes), he would write at least 20 lines of something, anything. He mostly tried to avoid automatic writing and forced himself to stick to whatever subject he started out with, but he made no demands on himself of quality or insightfulness. The exercises produced surprising results, work of much better quality than he expected, and they are collected here in chronological order.

This is not the sort of book you will finish reading and say, "That was one of the great reading experiences of my life." The pleasures here are not earth-shaking or mind-blowing. But there are pleasures here, quite a few. The book reads like a journal, because many times Mathews wrote about what was going on in his life (a few people who were close to him had died just before he began the exercises), and the entries which stick to his everyday life can become dull and repetitive for a reader -- its when Mathews lets his imagination wander, or puts down some of his ideas about writing, that these pages really come alive.

The book is highly readable, whether you know Mathews's other work or not, because the exercises are short and the language clear. It's easy enough to skip around in the book, reading it on different days, looking for entries which appeal to whatever mood you happen to be in at the moment. Reading them in order produces a certain feeling of intimacy with the author, though, and the book is oddly moving by the end.