The (Diblos) notebook
By: [by] James Merrill.
Edition: [1st ed.]
Publisher: Atheneum
Published: 1965
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 147
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.