This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This, Harry Mathews' second novel, has been out of print for far too long. Translated by Georges Perec as Les verts champs de moutarde de l'Afghanistan, Tlooth is, like Gray's Lanark, a novel of incredbile and impossible occurences told in a deadpan manner. Set in a Russian prison camp, this novel begins at a baseball game featuring the Defective Baptists versus the Fideists... and it gets progressively stranger and more interesting from there.
By Black Glove
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Enter here if you enjoy peculiar fiction.
Written in short chapters, the narrative of "Tlooth" is awash with absurdist digressions and surreal imagery. Halfway through I was somewhat confused. By the end I was pleasantly bemused. All in all I enjoyed the author's limpid style and the many dreamlike happenings. The point of writings like this isn't necessarily the story, more the incidental side-stepping and strange instances that occur along the way, and this novel is loaded with such deviations - "play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories" as it says on the back cover. I'd define it as elegantly mind-boggling. A curious creation.
Written in short chapters, the narrative of "Tlooth" is awash with absurdist digressions and surreal imagery. Halfway through I was somewhat confused. By the end I was pleasantly bemused. All in all I enjoyed the author's limpid style and the many dreamlike happenings. The point of writings like this isn't necessarily the story, more the incidental side-stepping and strange instances that occur along the way, and this novel is loaded with such deviations - "play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories" as it says on the back cover. I'd define it as elegantly mind-boggling. A curious creation.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By K. S. Angus
Format:Paperback
I suspect there may be a lot going on in this book that I didn't spot - then again perhaps it's just a bit of a jumble. The "plot" is severely disjointed, and the discursions don't seem to connect up in the end. I expect some of the odd bits add up to games and puzzles, but it's not obvious where some of them begin and end, assuming they are there at all! Someone with a more literary brain than mine may well make sense of it all, but I don't see enough sense in it to make me want to work hard to find the rest.
If it's simply intended to be absurd and confusing I don't need it - I've got the news for that!
If it's simply intended to be absurd and confusing I don't need it - I've got the news for that!
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