The Last Novel
The latest engaging, indefinable work from Markson (Vanishing Point) proves to be something between a writer's commonplace book and La Rochefoucauld's satirically aphoristic Maxims. A set of absorbing factoids and musings—from and about a variety of literary and historical notables—comprise his narrator's last novel. With a delight in experimentation, Markson manages to insinuate a sober narrative voice between and among the words of the greats. After a quote from Eugene V. Debs (Nobody can be nobody) comes a telling moment of clarification about his own text's aim: Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referenced and of cryptic interconnectivity syntax. Indeed, the quotations, separated by a poetic amount of white space, read smoothly one after the other. Most are only a few lines long, and they range from bons mots by famous writers (Rousseau: The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief) to the writerly non sequitur (Napoleon was five feet six inches tall). Old age, defeat and death emerge as leitmotifs, underscored by statements of the places and dates of various authors' deaths, and, slowly, of the narrator's own poverty and loneliness. Markson's dark fragments are, paradoxically, a joy to sift and ponder.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.