The (Diblos) notebook
By: James Merrill.
Edition: 1st Dalkey Archive ed.
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Normal, IL
Language: eng
Number of pages: 151
Subjects: Novelists -- Fiction.; Fiction -- Authorship -- Fiction.; Americans -- Greece -- Fiction.; Greece -- Fiction.
Description: "Best known as a poet, James Merrill is also an accomplished novelist, and in The (Diblos) Notebook artfully lays bare the process of writing a novel. A young American writer keeps a notebook that records at one and the same time a series of events on the Greek island of Diblos in which he is deeply involved, and his attempts to transform these events into a novel. Everything that might be found in such a notebook is used here with great cunning: the false starts that end in the middle of a thought; the endless revisions, canceled out in the search for the right word or phrase; the many approaches and backtrackings as the writer seeks an entrance to the materials through several possible doors; the musings on how the material is to be treated; and the wrestlings with the problem of appearance and assumed reality. The author has written an afterword for this new edition of his 1965 novel."--BOOK JACKET.