The Sinking of The Odradek Stadium [Paperback]

Harry Mathews (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1999

A brilliant comedy in the form of letters exchanged between a husband, living in Miami of the not-too-distant future, and a wife, living in Italy of a not-too-remote past, as they try to trace the whereabouts of a treasure supposedly lost off the coast of Florida in the 16th century.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This comic novel unfolds through correspondence between Zachary McCaltex, a librarian, and his wife, Twang, who is living apart from him in Italy. The two are trying to unearth the exact location of a 16th-century treasure somewhere off the Florida coast. As the story develops, it is evident that more than water separates these two.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A comic masterpiece, as funny as Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, as intricate as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. . . . In The Sinking of Odradek Stadium, he has created a seamless fabric, as tense, light, and strong as stretched silk." -- Edmund White, New York Times Book Review, 5/18/75

"An imagination and an ingenuity that are often just astonishing. . . . This is a journey worth taking." -- Harper's

"Harry Mathews has few, if any, equals in modern fiction." -- San Diego Tribune

"Harry Mathews is the only American author I know whose utter originality does not erode his heart and his content." -- Ned Rorem

"I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing--John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon--but none so strong as this, none that bear so clearly and deliciously the tang of spring." -- Thomas M. Disch

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Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; First Edition edition (November 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564782077
• ISBN-13: 978-1564782076
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,157,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inventive Fiction at its Best, March 31, 2009

By 

Sturmey Archer - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Sinking of The Odradek Stadium (Paperback)

In a sense, society can be considered the connections between individuals, instead of the individuals themselves. This book explores one such connection, in the form of a series of letters between a married couple. Their connection is exposed as a frail and tenuous thing, buffeted by confusion, frustration, and yearning. Make no mistake though, this is not simply a novel about a relationship. This is avant garde literature of the highest rank. Mathews' wordplay is exceptional and he spins tales, in turn tragic and comic, in and out of the main narrative. The plot is less an arc than a contrail, tightly focused at one end and disturbingly hazy at the other. This is an exceptional novel for lovers of language who like their fiction unconventional. Also, I give Mathews high marks for one of the most imaginative uses of a title for a novel I've ever encountered.

2.0 out of 5 stars "...on a bed of black swan feathers Mallarme's left ulna reposed.....", January 7, 2010

By 

adorian - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Sinking of The Odradek Stadium (Paperback)

I found this novel to be unreadable. We alternate between letters written by a man in Miami mixed up in treasure-hunting schemes and his "wife," whose early missives are written in some kind of pidgin English that is too difficult to interpret. As we move along, her writing eventually loses its primitive qualities, but it's not worth the struggle to get through the first two-thirds of the book.

Yes, as long as Zachary is doing the narrating, it's interesting. Yes, there is bizarre poetic writing. Yes, there are arcane vocabulary words that will send you to the dictionary. Yes, there is splashy local color about the Carnival celebrations in Miami. Yes, there are amusing details about some secret cult and its rites and initiations. And lots of intrigue about old maps and missing Medici gold. But it's just not worth it. You have to force your way through Twang's subliterate phrasings, and I found it so easy to just skip her letters entirely. And, yes, there is some kind of triple or quadruple twist in the final pages, but I just didn't get a sense that the payoff was worth it.

4.0 out of 5 stars fun, intelligent... and a great read, June 9, 2004

By 

picotheman "Pico" (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sinking of The Odradek Stadium (Paperback)

Probably the only work ever to use the title as a major plot point/punchline (and a damned effective one, at that), Mathews' novel turns the epistolary genre on its head, with a bizarre love story cum treasure hunt, all wrapped into a tight package of slapstick comedy, mystery, history, culture, and linguistic peculiarities.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mathews' work, he's a member of the Oulipo, a group (or groups) of writers, mathematicians, poets, painters, etc., etc. - who both rescue stylistic constraints from the past and create new ones of their own. So you can always expect that their works will be impeccable structured, rich in detail, language play, and erudition. On top of that, at least one of the characters (Twang) is beautifully written, with a wealth of puns and a generous heap of charm.

There are two minor concerns with the novel that forced me to downgrade it to 4 stars, instead of a perfect five. The first is that the big plot twist, while necessary to set up the game of gross misjudgments in the second half of the novel, comes across as a bit contrived. The second is that the style, while often flexible, fascinating, and outright hilarious, is sometimes uneven - there's none of the assuredness in his writing that you'd find in Cigarettes, for example.

Still, a great read, and highly highly recommended. I wish Mathews and the Oulipo gang were more widely read.