Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera - Hardcover

John Barth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340617276 ISBN 13: 9780340617274

Publisher: Sceptre, 1994

Synopsis

From the National Book Award Winner and author of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor comes a novel about a middle-aged writer setting off on a voyage with a sole crewmate--his lover, friend, and wife. Reprint. NYT. PW. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

In a reprise of old themes, haunts, and ideas, metafiction master Barth (The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, 1991) returns to himself and his native Chesapeake Bay in this fictional memoir of a middle-aged writer embarked on an autumnal cruise. The story is told in the Barthian way, within a frame of another story--in this case, the voyage of the writer's sloop, US, south into the ``Chesapeake Triangle'' on the Columbus Day weekend of October 1992. And the chosen form in which the author revisits his past and his vocation, writing, is no less structured--an opera in three acts with an overture to set the scene, arias for explication, and a concluding ``episong.'' The author/Barth is accompanied by his beloved second wife, his ``Reality Principle,'' as he sets sail on the fine Saturday afternoon, but as the cruise continues, the writer accidentally loses his beloved pen, ``Pumblechook,'' bought years ago in Charles Dickens's birthplace. Then the weather deteriorates, moods darken, and the US runs aground in an unfamiliar marsh. Seeking help, Barth comes across his twin sister, Jill; his lost pen; and his ``counterself,'' invented guide, and childhood friend, Jerry Schreiber, aka Jay Wordsworth Scribner, who's there to ``goose things along and frame and distance the whole show.'' Virtual reality takes over as the writer, claiming not to be writing an autobiography, but ``a kind of ship's log of the Inside Passage,'' revisits his childhood in Cambridge, Maryland; his first marriage; his college teaching; his writing successes, beginning with The Floating Opera; and his encounter with the woman who became his second wife. What's fiction and perhaps what's not is as tangled as the marsh grasses of Barth's native Dorchester County--and that's part of the fun, but the heavily schematic form, as well as the frequent literary one-upmanship, is more threatening to the venture than any fall storm. Very vintage Barth, and disappointingly so, despite the occasional reminders of a talent once new and stunningly inventive. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

In Barth's 12th book, a middle-aged writer and his wife sail into a time warp in the "Chesapeake Triangle," a Tidewater version of the Bermuda Triangle. Presented as "a memoir bottled in a novel," the book focuses on Barth's development as a writer. Highlights include his childhood on Maryland's isolated Eastern Shore, his introduction to literature as a book-shelver in the Johns Hopkins library, and his pivotal role in the burgeoning postmodernist movement. Several chapters are devoted to Barth's influential early novels, especially The Floating Opera (1956), whose nihilistic ending was changed at the publisher's insistence, then later restored when Barth's career took off. Apart from its documentary value to literary historians, the book's main strength is its evocation of life on the Eastern Shore in the Thirties and Forties. Recommended for larger collections of postmodernism.
--Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sceptre
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0340617276
• ISBN 13: 9780340617274
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 398