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No-body: A Novel in Parts
 
 
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No-body: A Novel in Parts [Hardcover]

Richard Foreman (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)


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Hardcover, November 1, 1996 --  

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his first foray into long-form fiction, subtitled a novel in parts, theater director/playwright Richard Foreman takes the reader on a journey through the mind of a man attempting to be a poet in modern America, living as Ralph Waldo Emerson advised writers to: as a transcendental eyeball, observing the world and discovering its symbols as they reveal themselves. Foreman tells his story through a series of personas: Eddie, the Mind King, The Amateur Genius, The Suburbanite, The Hero Cadmus, Samuel, and Samuel II, each of whom has a different perspective on a surreal world, but each of which seems to be another facet of a single fragmented personality/point of view, accompanied by the same two long suffering women, Helen and Marie. The nonlinear writing style is a direct adaptation of Foreman's avant-garde stage style in plays like My Head Was a Sledgehammer. Adventurous readers are advised to just read through, and allow the effect to build cumulatively, like that of music. Then to read through again.

From Library Journal

Those who've thrilled to the theatrical work of this Obie Award-winning avant-garde dramatist over the past three decades will probably find his first work of fiction equally fascinating, disturbing, and, ultimately, liberating. For the many who haven't, though, these seven loosely conjoined prose improvisations?and the serial poems that permeate them?offer a literary experience only mildly more diverting than that available in the white pages of any phone book. Foreman's saving grace is that he explores his ostensible subject, which seems to be the nature of reality, with a deliciously offbeat comic touch. But readers who value such conventional elements as plot and character, not to mention quotation marks, would do well to look elsewhere.?David Sowd, formerly with Stark Cty. Dist. Lib., Canton, Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 212 pages
  • Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; 1st edition (November 1, 1996)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0879516216
  • ISBN-13: 978-0879516215
  • Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,706,856 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Taint no-body's business if I don't!, March 12, 1999
This review is from: No-body: A Novel in Parts (Hardcover)
How many hands has a body whose eyes can't see to write anymore than is necessary to the act sans actor--which adds 2 letters and eliminates 3 from the scene whose audience is always 1 times the "Times'" average readership, foundering, of and off course, on the brink of titanic revelation(continued inside, see pp.1-206) of unfolding what would otherwise be uncreased, unstapled, unmutilated were it not for the laws of success which prohibit such behavior in private but--oddly enough and evenly more--not in public. I,too,know Paris in the rain, which, drop by drop (i.e., i.e.o, letter by letter)accrues to my credit for having written my way from bank to banque, left or right, it doesn't matter which so long as the checks I've written (nos. 1-206) check the impulse to unbalance my cheque book('s the word, my word!) and bounce highger than the sum of all the parts of the stories that bind you (you, me, Marie, Anna, Eddie, et.al and sundry others' characters impugned beyond decency's claim check to a hat outworn outside, inwarn in to stay out. BEWEAR!) pages together against the reader's assault on senselessness. Quench who said what about water flowing to circumstances beyond radio's control of the dial wrested from fiddling fingers (poking violins until they sob for more strings attached) belonging to another time's other place-mattes the picture begotten for cheaply-covered territory, by foot possessed. Ownership's land-free at last, and liquidation's a solid investment in futures sure to be remembered for what past Master's test of survival. It's all too plain: prose enplaned, air crafted to currents, home truths left behind to fend for themselves, consciousness be damned to hell/heaven of never knowing what comes next in line after line, stretching beyond the horizon's merely horizontal level (plane?) of comprehension. And the pilot lights the way to turn on a gas stove is to turn off an electric pot-holder of prizes sought for their own sake and not for grandeur's late arrival in a departure lounge filled with dead beats lacking the price of a ticket out of here, there, anywhere is the wild blue yonder's thither? Thence. Hence. Interviewless. The publicist's unchecked claim to accessiblity eqwaits my blocked state of affairs with a heart hardened to, hardened into, but certainly not up against (for where there is no will there is no wall) the text. Therefore, I (aka CRIXEN) rush to judge what I mean to say, that is, "that" is, "that" is that--that chair, that fragment of lobe (ear or frohtal), that slice of cheese, Swiss--beholden to life's various support systems. To pull the plug or to plug the pull--the former is my concern, the latter the publicist's, and what is yours (dear reader/writer) is mine to have and beholeden as cheese, as fragment of lobe (ear or frontal) as chair. And that's "that". Come, then, let us couch our couch in no uncertain terms of disagreement to cause sleep to occur where least expected to arise from its bed of wormy roses/rosy worms and flower/flower in praise of liars that lack (Lilacs! I see! I see! said said man sighted for his bravenessness) nothing, because the space between words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, plays, eyes, breaths, teeth, gum up the work and down the travail that shyly/slyly draws a face into hiding its features, best out of none can tell what's heard to be seen, yet to transpire's enough to come (and come again, s'il vous plait). Boredom's rife with inertia is well-documented. Its rift less so. But it's its rift that makes a breach of confidence secretly impossible. For between the whisper and the bellow falls shadow's fill of pumped-up trees shededing their leaves furrily, furrily, life is but a scheme wrapped in a reverie inside a yaw(e)n. NO-BODY (title) knows the trouble Eddie (Chapter 1) aka The Mind King (Chapter 2) aka The Amateur Genius (Chapter 3) aka The Suburbanite (Chapter 4) aka The Hero Cadmus (Chapter 5) aka Samuel I (Chapter 6) aka Samuel II (Chapter 7 Chapter 7)'s's's's's's's seen but I (aka I) know a hyphen when I see one keeping NO apart from BODY, not an enviable state in which to reside without a license to practice, practice, practise, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, the poetics of spacelessness (see above paragraphs below the the threshold of vision) in the crowded aisles of your nearest grocery store school,hospital, church, or a maze ing grace how sweet the sound of your voice that commands me to turn the page on which these words--these very words--have written themselves free of their writerly type PER-SON (enTITLEment), PER-SUN on a still (absolutely) more crowded field of the possibill(hyphen)at(hyphen)ease...-...
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