Product Description
This selection of Harry Mathews’s longer prose writings attests his innovative genius in sevenradically differing works:

Country Cooking in Central France is perhaps the longest, most demanding and surely the most extravagant recipe ever concocted. (Mathews’s best piece — The Guardian). Singular Pleasures: 61 pungent demonstrations of masturbation by both sexes, from Almaty to Zizanga. The Orchard is the author’s memorial of his close friend Georges Perec, composed in startlingly succinct and revealing glimpses. Armenian Papers, a sequence of prose poems that recounts a glittering epic of servitude, love and war in a land remote both in time and place. Translation and the Oulipo: the Case of Preserving Maltese, an essay that establishes with persuasive guile a context for the practices of the Oulipo or, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for potential literature), the provocative group of writers and mathematicians of which Mathews is the only active English-speaking member. The Way Home, a story derived from a series of drawings by Trevor Winkfield (incorporated here in the text) that! explores the dreamlike life within an ordinary man’s ordinary day. Autobiography, an exceptional example of the genre in which the author tells his own story entirely in terms of the people who have marked his life.

This is a revised edition of a collection first published in the UK in 1988 and not previously available in the USA. The London Times described the original collection as an almost pugnacious demonstration of his talents. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Translation
Here we have a short collection of shorter stories that runs the gamut from brilliant to mundane.At their best, Mathews' stories are amazing, hilarious, and autonomous works of genius.At their worst, they can become a bit pedantic."Dialect of the Tribe" is Mathews at his Oulipoan sharpest, gleaning his wit on the act of translation."Country Cooking" is a recipe that few will have the stomach for."The Network" is either an act of artifice so clever that I cannot begin to guess what it really contains or a banal experiment in the use of adverbs.This collection is certainly worth reading, if you can find it, but might not be a good starting spot for new readers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating Look at Random Relations
This is just a fascinating book - a study of how disparate people wind up being connected in some fashion.It is a much more literary approach to much the same concept in Six Degrees of Separation, yet the characters drive this book, and disturb us somtimes too, both in what we see in others and maybe in what we see in ourselves.Yes, this books is seemingly straightforward in that the prose is not especially dense, a la William Gaddis, but it is still very thoughtful, and not to be taken lightly.It is a shame that the book is not more widely known.It would make a great TV miniseries! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Don't Waste Your Money
I hated this book.It is a mishmash of purported autobiography and fantasy, without plot or any point, as far as I could see.Dada fiction.

Somerset Maugham meets Austin Powers
In 1973 Harry Mathews was an American writer living in Paris. With sufficient means so he did not have to work, Mathews's days were apparently filled with operas and ballets, erudite conversations with the local literati, the occasional bit of writing, and innumerable sexual encounters with any number of women, some of them married, who seem to have fallen on him after little more than a handshake. The picture that emerges is part Somerset Maugham, part Austin Powers, the expatriate shedding his "snug black velvet bell bottoms" for the odd sexual romp.

Mathews explains that he had a reputation in Paris for being gay, rich, and CIA--none of which was true. The last misconception particularly irked him, and he habitually attempted to convince people that he wasn't an agent. Finally, unable to quell the rumor, he tried a different approach: he pretended that he was CIA. He took every opportunity to behave mysteriously, going so far as to fake dead drops and to adopt as cover the job of secretary in a fictional travel agency for which he had stationery made up. Mathews took the whole spy game rather further than was sensible or ethical, and he wound up exciting the attention of people who ultimately decided that he'd be better off eliminated.

Mathews's adventure is certainly an interesting one--the sort of thing one might like to try oneself--but one reads the book not knowing whether it is fact or fiction, or rather, how much of the story is fact and how much fiction. That, apparently, is the point: the book, billed oxymoronically as an "autobiographical novel," plays with truthfulness and credibility. Certainly some of what Mathews has to say seems impossible, as for example his account of one particular sexual escapade in an Oriental rug emporium: when he and the woman are interrupted, she rolls him in a carpet to hide him, and he is then carried off by ostensibly unwitting laborers, who load him in a truck and deliver him across town; emerged from the carpet some time later, he insinuates himself into a dinner party and soon runs off for another bit of (unfortunately also interrupted, but in its early stages interpedal) intercourse on a nearby church altar with a woman he's just met. Part of the game for readers is deciding whether and when to believe what the authors is telling us.

Mathews's book is not all as compelling as the above story would suggest: the author writes a lot about the little engagements that made up his (character's) life in those days, down to guest lists and meals consumed, and these slow down his narrative--though they add to the story's verisimilitude, which, again, may be the point. In short, My Life in CIA is an odd but interesting book about an unlikely game that became--maybe--for a time disturbingly real.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)

rich, cocky liar enjoys oysters in Paris...
After 30 pages I started getting into this book, and I was into it for a while, but before long you realize that it is fiction.Which negates the best aspects of the book.

This book would be much better if it was either written as straight non-fiction, or straight fiction, but Mathews blurs the line, probably because some aspects of the story are true & interesting, but I'll bet not enough of it was interesting enough to warrant a book.So he throws in some improbable events to add the mystery his story was probably lacking.

As memoirs this book fails because we don't know what's true and what's a lie, and as a work of fiction this book fails because it's not interesting or substantial enough--if you want to read about the blurring between fact and fiction and what can happen when others take your lies for truth, then read Umberto Eco's _Foucault's Pendulum_ instead.

After finishing it and reflecting back over my impressions, this book strikes me as some egotistical memoirs of a cocky elitist.So much of the book's focus is on snooty, elitist, boring details of superfluous luxury such as all the fancy wines & meals this guy ate while hob-nobbing in France and seducing women with his good looks and suave self-confidence.BORING.So he knows the names of Parisian streets and what restaraunts are good and he's interested in fancy rugs, etc.BORING.

I was interested in it for awhile there due to the realistic/non-fiction aspect it had me believing for awhile, but there's just not enough of the material that would make it really interesting, and the fact that it seems to include a substantial amount of fiction devalues the more interesting aspects, because it leaves you wondering how much of it is actually realistic and reliable information.

If you know more about Mathews than I do, or have the luck to be rich and familiar with the decadence of living "the good life" in Paris, then maybe you can curl up with a bottle of expensive wine in front of a fire place, and feel cozy and special and inrigued while you read this book.But to someone just interested in literature or the CIA or espionage or just a good story, I can't recommend this book.Probably the best audience for it would be the author's own personal friends and family.Otherwise the book just seems incomplete and kind of pointless.

The best spy novel since Harlot's Ghost
It's also the funniest spy novel since Our Man In Havana. And like Peter Cary's "My Life As A Fake," the book is a thrilling exploration of what happens when fictions take on a life of their own. Matthews is known as a literary avant gardiste, but there is nothing mannered about his prose. It is lean but elegant and never gratuitiously calls attention to itself. The story on the other hand demands, deserves, and gets a reader's attention. It starts off in a light and chatty vein. We learn about Mathews' friendships with George Perec and other members of the Oulipo literary movement. Mathews' economically but effectively evokes political and cultural scenes of the early 1970s: the overthrow of Allende in Chile, Cold War paranoia, thesingers and movies and ballet performers who were in the news back then. For the longest time the story seems like a pleasant trip through Paris circa 1973 with a witty and literate tour guide constantly on hand to help with the translating and the recommending of restaurants and wines. But as Mathews' masquerade as a CI agent becomes more and more outlandish, ironically it becomes more convincing, until he finds himself the target of a potentially deadly manhunt (unless of course it is all just a joke perpetrated by his Oulipo friends). The irony, of course, is that Mathews began impersonating a CI agent specifically for the purpose of convincing people that he wasn't CIA. Surely no one in the CIA would be stupid enough to behave like a CIA agent in public -- would he? The ending is both thrilling and beautiful. Every word of it is true, even if it turns out to be nothing more than fiction.

A fascinating story
Harry Mathews is known as a member of OuLiPo, a group of writers that subject their narratives to non-literary, and often unintended, sides of structures. Thus, one could hesitate and think that this novel need to be read with paper and pen. It is rather the opposite, a page-turner. Deeper things will come as a bonus. His life in CIA, is a story of the writer living out the accusations of being a CIA agent, maybe unaware of Vonnegut's maxim: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" (Mother Night). When acting this way, his cogwheels clasps with other, and more sinister, ones and he enters purportedly naively into the world of mirrors. Where autobiography stops and fiction starts, we do not know, as he is a good stylist. Everything is quite consistent with true accounts of the intelligence world, so the accusations may linger on. He torpedos our ambition of knowing the truth, bringing us into the same uncertainties as his character's. It's a good thriller, unless you are looking for violence, and a very good read. ... Read more

Product Description
Georges Perec, the celebrated author of Life: A User's Manual (Godine, 1987) and A Void, was working on this "literary thriller" at the time of his death. He had fully completed only eleven chapters of a planned twenty-eight, but left extensive drafts and notes supplying the rest of the mystery, as well as numerous twists and subplots. From these notes, his friends and fellow novelists Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud have assembled the elements of the unfinished mystery, along the way providing the reader with a fascinating view into the author's mind as he constructed his literary conundrum.

Absorbing, allusive, and joyously playful, "53 Days" is the ultimate detective story. The narrator, a teacher in a tropical French colony, is trying to track down the famous crime-writer Robert Serval, who has mysteriously disappeared. Serval has left behind the manuscript of his last, unfinished novel, which may contain clues to his fate. From this beginning, Perec lures the reader into a labyrinth of mirror-stories whose solutions can only be glimpsed before they in turn recede around the corner.

In the tradition of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Perec's "53 Days" is a supremely satisfying, engrossing, and truly original mystery. Like his previous work, it is also "a kaleidoscope of ingenious juxtapositions" (Le Monde) from one of the century's most inventive and important writers. As Harry Mathews has commented, "If death had not prevented Georges Perec from completing this book, we would today be reading a masterpiece, one in the mold of Nabokov's Pale Fire." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A coda to a variegated career
Perec's literary output was as varied as anyone's, comprising everything from encyclopedic novels to comic couplets, but he was consistent in one way--the quality of his writing was always excellent. Each of his works revelled in the myriad delights of language, whatever its subject. In this novel, published posthumously in an unfinished form, he uses the generic elements of the mystery novel, confounding and fulfilling them at the same time. A writer disappears from a fictional French African colony, and an unwilling acquaintance is drafted to study the vanished man's final manuscript for clues. The usual dangerous woman makes an appearance, and there are plenty of veiled warnings that the search should be dropped, but at each turn the narrator, well-versed in fictive custom, recognizes the conventions and turns them on their heads. The chapters abound with references to other works, classics and potboilers alike, and the plot in fact begins to hinge on them. Perec scholars or fans will additionally note a host of allusions to his own oeuvre and coded biographical details. Mystery aficionados will be disappointed that "53 Days" was never completed, but its editors have included the outlines and notes that wrap the story up; anyone with an interest in the writing process should find that these appendices more than make up for what's missing. ... Read more

Product Description
Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, this twentieth-century erotic classic takes the reader on a dark journey through the psyche of the pre-war French intelligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the glamour of its victors. One of Bataille's overtly political works, it explores the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force, bringing violence, power and death together in a terrifying unity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
According to Georges Bataille's autobiographical note, LE BLEU DU CIEL ("The Blue of the Sky") was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.

The descending night darkens these pages.

Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann ("Too-Much-Man") and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman's supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.

Their only desire is to besmirch whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.

By muddying whatever is "sacred," they maintain the force of "the sacred."

As a historical document, BLEU DU CIEL is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the "red nun" Simone Weil (as Lazare).

It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, although not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.

As the night materializes, the blue of the sky disappears.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

More languid than arousing
Not nearly as memorable as the surrealist pornography of "The Story of an Eye," nor as thought-provoking as his study of the tangling of the great death and the "little death" of orgasm in his sex-and-mortality, violence-and-the sacred exploration "Erotism," this slim novel, as the author's uncomfortable tone betrays in its afterword, appears half-finished and abandoned rather than meant as it is for publication.

Lazare's fanatical devotion to the Left and especially Dirty's penchant for decadent and unsanitary lifestyle choices remain the most powerfully characterized moments, but too much of the novel remains as jittery and haphazard-- albeit Bataille argues in the afterword he meant it to be read as such-- as comparatively mundane next to the strong opening vignette of Troppmann and Dirty in one of literature's most effectively rendered dives, even by Parisian standards.

As one who has read plenty of Céline, a bit of Sade, and some of Sartre's fiction, this novel held some interest. Yet, it seems too slack, too dragged down by ennui. Far less erotic than a reader of "The Story of An Eye" might expect, this instead recalls Bataille's protege, Pierre Klossowski (his novels have been reviewed by me on Amazon; he's the brother of the painter Balthus) and his philosophical protagonists who also are prone more to shuffling about rather than coupling energetically. The extravagant claims left by readers here appear unfounded, given the turgid pace of its pages and the uneven tone of the narrative.

a severely underrated masterpiece
I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's [illegitimate] children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with [prostitutes] and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

a severely underrated masterpiece
I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's bastard children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with whores and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

De Sade's nephew gets all sociopolitical.
"Blue of Noon" is the story of Henri, an amoral man living in Europe during the 1930s. He is supposedly married, but spends his time with similarly amoral women, lacking clothing, inhibition, shame, and even proper hygeine at times. He zips between London, Paris, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, and frankly, engages in nothing but immoral self-satisfying activities in every spot.

At various times, he agonizes over his relationships with his wife, his sexual partners, and his deceased mother. He becomes embroiled in a Communist revolutionary plot in Barcelona, with one of his sexual partners, a Jewish woman, involved in its planning and execution. He reveals his necrophilic obsession to two of his partners, further revealing the exact, even more sickening, subject of his obsession to one of them. He has sex, he gets sick, his women have sex, they get sick, everybody has sex, everybody gets sick. For the punchline, near the end of the novel, Bataille throws Nazis into the picture, showing us that all the depravity of fascism is comparable to the depravity he has shown us all along. Though published in 1957, the book was originally written in 1936.

This reviewer isn't buying it. Not a word of it. Not the story, not even the "1936" part. For one thing, the writing style is actually more mature than that of "L'Abbe C", published in 1950. Bataille is most probably trying to show off that he detected the evil inherent in the Nazis "way back when". I don't give him that much credit.

For another thing, I think he uses Nazis as an easy way to score "scary" points. One might intellectualize his choice by saying Bataille is trying to tell us that no matter how disgusting humans may act, at least we're not as bad as Nazis. Imagine a murderer begging leniency because he's not a Nazi. He's still a murderer. It seems Bataille is using Nazis to justify the pornography he just wrote, as if the world is such a horrible place that pornography is just another little bit of it, and tries to throw a philosophical wrench into the works, as if saying life is meaningless in the face of all the horrible things fascism is doing to us in Europe, but I suspect it was all done just for the hell of it. I frankly don't see any rhyme or reason to the thematic choices he makes.

I have nothing against the depravity or explicit nature of the book. "Been there, done that", right? It's not even all that explicit, there's probably less sex in this book than the average mainstream novel today, and he's certainly not advocating committing even the slightest harm to anyone. There are a few disturbing or distasteful ideas here and there, but one never gets the sense Bataille really means what he's writing. One gets the sense he's simply trying to come up with every juxtaposition of immoral behavior and social taboo he can, just to tweak the reader's moral compass a bit, trying to get a cheap rise out of his audience. Maybe this was an interesting exercise in 1957 (or "1936"), but given the state of depravity which existed in Germany during the 1920s, and the state of sexual liberation which swept Europe from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, I strongly doubt it.

Perhaps the target reader for this book will be the person interested in twisted versions of 19th-century literature (Bataille wrote like someone living 50 or 100 years before his time), or the works of De Sade (albeit in highly shortened format, this book being only 126 pages). ... Read more

Product Description
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Harry Mathews (born February 14, 1930) is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Born in New York City to an upper middle class family, Mathews was educated at private schools there and at the Groton School in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton University in 1947. He left Princeton in his sophomore year for a tour in the US Navy, during the course of which (in 1949) he eloped with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, a childhood friend. His military service completed, Mathews transferred to Harvard University in 1950; the couple's first child, a daughter, was born the following year. After Mathews graduated in 1952 with a B.A. in music, the family moved to Europe; a second child, a son, was born in 1955. Mathews and de Saint Phalle separated in 1960. Together with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, Mathews founded and edited the short-lived but influential literary journal Locus Solus (named after a novel by Raymond Roussel, one of Mathews's chief early influences) from 1961 to 1962. Harry Mathews was the second American chosen for membership in the French literary society known as the Oulipo, which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in literature, in particular through the use of various constraints and algorithms. The late French writer Georges Perec, likewise a member, was a good friend, and the two translated some of each other's writings. Mathews considers many of his works to be Oulipian in nature, but even before he encountered the society he was working in a parallel direction. Mathews is currently married to the writer Marie Chaix and divides his time between Paris, Key West, and New York. Mathews's first three novels share a common approach, though their sto... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1741689 ... Read more