Customer Reviews

Reader's Block

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you read one book this year, read David Markson's new novel. Whether or not you've read any of his previous novels--which, by the way, represent one of the finest and most innovative bodies of work of the last thirty years--Reader's Block will astound you. A beautifully crafted condensation of language, Reader's Block is the poetic novel for century's end, recalling those great Modernist novels at century's beginning. Concerning the struggles of a writer named Reader, who tries to write about a character named Protagonist, Reader's Block is Markson's most refined example of his telescopic and allusive style. The reader enjoys an indelible language, told in terse, paratactic sentences, and it is my opinion that Markson has always written an absolutely tactile prose. I felt each word with my fingers. I found myself eating this novel. The book is also downright fun--for it is a collage of anecdotes from literary and art history, anecdotes that reveal the struggles of ALL writers and artists. This business of art is not a casual affair. Reader's Block is one of the purest books ever written, not a novel to taste but to ingest. We owe Markson everything, for he is more than gifted and we, struggling readers, are more than blessed.

Markson's remarkable book is a novel in disguise. It resembles Julian Barnes' "Flaubert's Parrot." That novel was supposedly an encyclopedia of trivia about Gustave Flaubert, but if you read between the lines, you could discern that the narrator was describing his betrayal by his own wife. Here the Reader (the narrator's only name) is, behind a screen of quotations and historical detail, depicting his own threadbare life and contemplating suicide. The remarkable thing is that Reader assembles hundreds of facts that only convince him that he should kill himself. Markson seems to be saying that the whole literature of the West, which is thoroughly represented in the collage-like body of the novel, is a tale of despair and death. This is certainly a gloomy conclusion and not really warranted, in my opinion. But Markson tells his dark tale with style.

"Reader's Block" somehow manages to pick up where "This Is Not a Novel" left off, even though the latter was written later. This is managed by TINaN being more polished, more reader-ready, more "practiced," and is thus a good introduction to the genre; but Reader's Block is more true to the genre by being less "produced" and therefore more "honest." And yet, if you go back even further to "Wittgenstein's Mistress," the genre is exploited in the form of actual fiction-- biographical fiction, to be sure, but fiction nevertheless-- so that if one needs fiction as an introduction to the genre, one has it available, and again, Reader's Block will pick up where W'sM leaves off.

I can't speak to still earlier works by Markson, but I can say the "adventurous reader," the literary equivalent of the day-walker who sets out in strange cities with nothing more than a bottle of water and power-bar, will enjoy the adventure of discovering this genre. "This Is Not a Novel" is the packaged tour; "Reader's Block" is the nitty gritty.

Oh, by the way, the genre is called "zuihitsu." It's Japanese.

I anticipated a slow and perhaps even difficult read. Instead, I found Reader's Block to be one a the most purely entertaining novels I've read in a long time.So long as you aren't a reader enslaved by narrative expectations (as perhaps Reader, the central "character" of the novel, might be enslaved by narrative expectations?) this book is a literary joyride, a feast of anecdotes, details, ephemera, and hesitation.While I'm not sure the conclusion is, actually, as devastating as the blurbs would have us believe, it IS remarkable in its "resolution."I have recommended it to friends with great success, and I will surely continue to recommend it. I suspect that it has a much broader potential appeal than one would expect of such an experimental novel.

This book only got three stars primarily because I had already read Wittgenstein's Mistress, and had seen the emotional response that Markson's style could produce, a response that he doesn't really bring off here. The style still has a certain hypnotic momemtum, and most literate readers will have no desire to put the book down (mostly for the high level of interest one has in the anecdotes), but it lacks the sense of character that the previous book had. Although he tries to create the same sense of loneliness that Kate had in W.M., the lack of a consistent narrative voice never allows us to get any sense of Protagonist or Reader as people, which is perhaps the point but doesn't really allow us to have any emotional ties with them - so the ending is much less affecting than it could have been.

And while W.M. dealt deftly with complicated philosophical issues, the issues Markson deals with here - mortality, bigotry, etc. - seemed to be handled a little heavy-handedly.

Sentences like:

He's completely alone here now.

And passages like:

Four of Freud's five sisters were incinerated by the Germans in 1944.

Four.

struck me a little overblown and pretentious, while the allusions and references to isolation in W.M. never did.

So: the book is certainly a worthwhile read, but I would read Wittgenstein's Mistress first. Probably the high point of experimental fiction in our time.

Reader's Block is a fiction, although not necessarily a narrative, of an author (Reader) determining the protagonist of his new work. (Potential) bits and pieces of the character, environment and history of the protagonist are interspered with 333 unattributed quotes of literary trivia. These quotes provide a repeating insertion of anti-Semitism into the fiction.
Sound like an intellectual playground? Perhaps, expecially given the breadth in space and time covered by the quotations. However, this is a fiction that works - that keeps the reader interested in the text and provides a significant character study of Reader through the potential choices regarding the protagonist.

A work of experimental fiction, Reader's Block does not present itself in a traditional, linear way, but instead as a series of short, sharp sentences. They are rememberances and thoughts and come at you in a way not unlike your own brain delivering random thoughts when staring out the window on a rainy afternoon. But before long a narrative presents itself in a most subtle way and by the end you appreciate the richness of the book. So the experiment works, in a most remarkable and original way Readers Block is a wonderful book.

All of Markson's mature work is worth reading, but especially from Wittgenstein's Mistress on and *especially* Reader's Block. A collection of allusive fragments referring to the lives and deaths of artists, writers, musicians and philosophers, Markson weaves a haunting, sparse narrative through the fragments that leads to a startling and heartpounding conclusion. Markson wrote three more books in this style (This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel) and they're all great, but this is the one with the most immediacy and, in its own unique way, humor and sadness and grandeur.

This book will scrape the gray matter off the inside of your skull. That's what it does: it goes inside and roots around. And inside an operating mind turns out to be a disorienting place, littered with a yard sale of remnants, anecdotes, facts, allusions, all the fragments shored up from a lifetime taking things in. Markson gives us what it's like for a writer, but really anyone, to make sense of the influences and memories that linger with us over the years. Sorting through so many discrete parcels of "information," his narrator can't help but feel stunted, made to feel existentially alone by the ostensibly disjointed, isolated, and wholly disembodied collection of parts. This book captures the heroic (but despairingly ordinary) daily effort to make sense of all we've taken in through what we read, see, hear, and do. The assembly of these bits and pieces seems jarring, even random at first, but by engaging his readers to collate them together, to build webs and patterns where before there were merely miscellaneous parts, he provides us a narrative cohesion and pull you'll be hard pressed to find anywhere--except of course in his other books.

This book is definitely out of the ball park. It is a very interesting read while being a bit unusual. The writing style is experimental and informative. I am currently reading it, and I am glad I made this selection.