Customer Reviews

Springer's Progress

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

 

 

An amazing book. As Lucien Springer lurks anent the maidens' sh**teries, so should we all. Totally unlike anything written before it, by a Lowry/Gaddis/Joyce scholar. Rewards rereadings, giving pleasure on every page. And did I mention that it's a love story? Markson will have you playing 'spot the literary reference' even as he has guessing at the inhabitants of the Lion's Head (?) Bar...and readers can't help but want to meet a Jessica for their own ramblings.

A book that deserves to be read. Repeatedly. And did I mention that it's laugh-out-loud funny?

This book was enjoyable - some of the time. It was annoying - some of the time. It was funny - some of the time. It was clever - some of the time. The only things it was about all of the time were sex, redundancy, and obsession.

Summary: think about sex; have sex; drink; lie about sex; think about sex while drinking. Repeat for 234 pages.

I am glad I read it and will read more Markson for the cleverness. I won't read this book again. I got it the first time.

This is a placeholder review until I finish this (possibly in an hour), but I saw an average of 3 stars because some moron gave a 1 star review and this is not the most widely read book. It should be. Every page reads like the happy moments of Ulysses. Five stars are too few, this is perfect, and yet it breaks 3 of my cardinal rules for novels.

1. Do not put the protagonist's last name in the title in some sort of lame pun (e.g. Last of the Savages)
2. The main character cannot be a writer himself (e.g. everything by Stephen King)
3. Cheating on the spouse is not to be dismissed out of hand as the only obvious course of action.

And yet, who can put this down? Vote for Springer!

An erotic... no, that sounds too simply pornographic...

A bawdy... no, this isn't "Tom Jones" for god's sake...

A tale of sexual (well, that's too clinical, but get on with the review, dammit) pursuit, success, failure, futility, jealousy, and ultimately triumph. A patently hilarious novel whose jokes run the gamut from Joyce to baseball. That's perhaps a smaller gamut that it appears at first look, but it hits my intellectual sweet spot for sure.

Comic novels are strange beasts, and this is no different. The syntax is bizarre, the protagonist hard to warm up to, the object of his affection alternatingly fetching, unsanitary, witty and aloof. But I fell in love with the whole unholy mess. If I remember right, there's a five page stretch that has laugh out loud jokes about anal sex, Aquinas remembered from *Ulysses*, and Mel Ott. (I may be wrong about Mel Ott. But it was some baseball player. I've lent the book out or I'd check it now). There's really nothing else like this.

A randy and bibulous middle-aged author with writer's block who lived in Greenwich Village had a glorious inspiration: to write a novel about a randy and bibulous middle-aged author with writer's block who lives in Greenwich Village. (Excited yet?) Then, because he's such a swashbuckling modernist, he buried this threadbare conception under the thickest compost of stale literary in-jokes and mincingly precious archaisms that you've ever mucked through. The result is like being cornered at a cocktail party by a garrulous drunk with artistic pretentions who simply will not shut up, no matter how disinterested you act.