Thomas Wharton, The Logogryph
If Thomas Wharton's novel The Logogryph isn't the strangest book you've read in a little while, you can just keep your unconscious to yourself.
At bottom, it's a fragmentary narrative that depends on its reader both to surrender to the fragmentation and to persist in teasing together the threads, thus celebrating not just fragmentation (yay, postmodernism) but also something like a old-school sense of connectedness (yay, Victorian fiction). There are some 30 pieces here, many of them seeming unrelated to each other, but several touch on the story of the Weaver family from Jasper, Alberta.
One of the little delights for me in this novel flows from how Wharton handles the inevitable worry about the relative priority we place on world and text. The caricature about postmodernism is that it privileges the textual over the material, the intellectual game over the business of life: that's a diminished, cartoonish version of such a powerful literary mode, but you hear it regardless. Anyway, this book works from all kinds of postmodern strategies, and yet as the "I" of the recurring stories looks out at the Rockies from a library window, "In some way it seemed that the inaccessible heights out there were intimately connected to the mysterious depths of these unknown books" (p.14). The world is implicated in the novel, and there's a clear pleasure taken in the depiction of a sensually experienced world.
The Logogryph is fun even for those of us who find themselves reading an awful lot of nonfiction lately, is what I'm saying.
The longish chapter/section on Atlantean fiction was terrific, with the quiet joke that its great proponent was Rupert Brooke, the poet who in this chapter survived WWI and wrote movingly about Atlantis and its complicated culture (three genders, an intense focus on indigeneity, alternate history inside an alternate history, etc).
And the selections from the lost journals of Da Vinci; a tale about the invention (in China) of paper; a character who falls out of a novel into the world; two readers who annotate books subsequently deposited in second-hand bookstores to torment each other; entries under "A" in the index for an imaginary book ("Albacore tuna, 724-29; mention of in Proust, 738"); the mention of a novella published with a 27-volume appendix of everything edited out before publication….
And yet for all the games and technique, this is a sweet, open novel. Don't try to figure it out, because if you spend the necessary time with The Logogryph, it'll just come to life on its own. Or as Wharton's now-deceased alter-ego on Twitter might have said:
At bottom, it's a fragmentary narrative that depends on its reader both to surrender to the fragmentation and to persist in teasing together the threads, thus celebrating not just fragmentation (yay, postmodernism) but also something like a old-school sense of connectedness (yay, Victorian fiction). There are some 30 pieces here, many of them seeming unrelated to each other, but several touch on the story of the Weaver family from Jasper, Alberta.One of the little delights for me in this novel flows from how Wharton handles the inevitable worry about the relative priority we place on world and text. The caricature about postmodernism is that it privileges the textual over the material, the intellectual game over the business of life: that's a diminished, cartoonish version of such a powerful literary mode, but you hear it regardless. Anyway, this book works from all kinds of postmodern strategies, and yet as the "I" of the recurring stories looks out at the Rockies from a library window, "In some way it seemed that the inaccessible heights out there were intimately connected to the mysterious depths of these unknown books" (p.14). The world is implicated in the novel, and there's a clear pleasure taken in the depiction of a sensually experienced world.
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| Best. Author photo. EVER. |
The Logogryph is fun even for those of us who find themselves reading an awful lot of nonfiction lately, is what I'm saying.
The longish chapter/section on Atlantean fiction was terrific, with the quiet joke that its great proponent was Rupert Brooke, the poet who in this chapter survived WWI and wrote movingly about Atlantis and its complicated culture (three genders, an intense focus on indigeneity, alternate history inside an alternate history, etc).
And the selections from the lost journals of Da Vinci; a tale about the invention (in China) of paper; a character who falls out of a novel into the world; two readers who annotate books subsequently deposited in second-hand bookstores to torment each other; entries under "A" in the index for an imaginary book ("Albacore tuna, 724-29; mention of in Proust, 738"); the mention of a novella published with a 27-volume appendix of everything edited out before publication….
And yet for all the games and technique, this is a sweet, open novel. Don't try to figure it out, because if you spend the necessary time with The Logogryph, it'll just come to life on its own. Or as Wharton's now-deceased alter-ego on Twitter might have said:
Humans used to have another eye in the top of their heads, just for cloud-watching. Over time it fell into disuse and withered away.
— Imaginary (@ImaginaryBooks) January 23, 2015
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