Customer Reviews

Mawrdew Czgowchwz (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not for everyone. The prose style is dense, there are far too many characters, and the novel requires at least a passing knowledge of opera. However, the cattyness of the observations, the rhythmns of the sentences and their unexpected twists and turns, make for delightful reading.

A sample of the prose is the best introduction.
"While His Scarlet Eminence and Msgr. Finneagle sat playing their esoteric version of Monopoly, the custom-crafted board for which could be seen to represent the several circles of Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, as well as the ground plan for the entire Vatican, both the above-ground palaces' apartments, closets, and chapels, and those labyrinthine catacomb reaches where Darkest Rumor is said on good authority to repose in thrilling reptile fashion. His Scarlet Eminence snickered in pixyish glee, having caught his opponent in the square of the seventh circle of hell (with four hotels). Monsignor trembled (livid), bankrupt of plenary indulgence."

Should you find this amusing and well-written, you'll love this book. If not, you'd best pass.

The comparisons that have made between MAWRDEW CZGOWCHWZ and the novels of Ronald Firbank are just... perhaps too much so. Part of the charm of Firbank's novels is their utter singularity; they seem so one-of-a-kind, that they captivate by their. In MAWRDEW, McCourt transplants the heady atmosphere of Firbank's faraway kingdoms and cities to the "Gotham" of the postwar era, but the effect seems a little derivative. Moreover, while McCourt attains the kinds of virtuoso effects of Firbank's prose you keep getting the feeling you're expected to admire the effort rather than be moved by it. There's nothing like the deep-seated anguish that makes the best of Firbank's novels (such as THE FLOWER BENEATH THE FOOT) really transcend their glibness. Almost inevitably the foreword for this edition was written by Wayne Koestenbaum: the book seems to have been written exactly with him in mind as its audience.

After seeing blurbs on Mawrdew Czgowchwz in two magazines and an on-line newsletter, I said "I have to read this book!" Now I have read it and I didn't. The writing is gorgeous, but too much so. Brobdingnagian aggregations of rare multisyllabic verbiage traipse, saunter, stroll, galumph across the page-sometimes arm-in-arm with an idiomatic epigram or eponym-implying to the ophthalmic interlocutor notions of sylvatic artistry, ecstatic glamour and libidinous merriment. Do you know what I mean, toots?
McCourt's theme is the transcendent power of art. The problem I have with the book is McCourt makes you work too hard. His style and vocabulary get in the way of his message. Achieving transcendence in a spiritual sense takes discipline and stamina. But to be whisked away in the concert hall, all you have to do is listen.
Mawrdew Czgowchcz has engaging characters (with fabulous names) a terrific plot, wicked satire and many fun incidents all of which you will enjoy, if you can pry them out McCourt's thickly gilded sentences. Yes, it is very much like Firbank, but Firbank, for his baroque obtuseness, is still swift and immediate on the page.
I wanted to be engulfed and swept away by Mawrdew, instead I just bobbed along the surface, admiring but not fully appreciating. A little less gorgeousness would serve Mawrdew Czgowchcz much better.

This has been one of my favorite comic novels ever since I first bought it in 1976. I re-read it twice. (The only other books that I regularly re-read are : "The Hamlet" by Wm. Faulkner, "Death on the Installment Plan" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, "The Magnificent Ambersons" by Booth Tarkington, the screenplays by Preston Sturges, "Virgil Thomson" by Virgil Thomson, "The Symphonies of Havergal Brian" by Malcolm Macdonald, "The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan" edited by Ian Bradley, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" by B. Traven, "Men Against the State : the Expositors Of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908" by James J. Martin, and "Topper" by Thorne Smith).
I lived 26 years in Newport, Rhode Island, so the fact that this novel's climactic hurricane occurs at a music festival in the island town of Neaport was a special treat.

P.S. It had been about 15 years since my last re-reading, and my opinion has somewhat changed. The characters now strike me as cartoonish. There are not enough simple sentences to provide relief from the relentless stream of overblown language (P.G. Wodehouse does this sort of thing better, and he confines his efforts at self-consciously pompous verbiage to dialogue, not to every sentence -- simple sentences are few and far between in "Mawrdew"). Nevertheless, I still enjoy the many patches of manic exuberance. If I were were writing a new review, I would probably drop the rating down to 4 stars instead of my original 5 stars.

It's lovely to have this brilliant novel back in print, easily the best novel on the opera milieu ever published. But it's the maximalist prose that is the true star here--half Firbank, half Joyce, as Wayne Koestenbaum points out in his excellent introduction. I envy anyone reading this for the first time.