A Table of Green Fields: Stories - Hardcover

Davenport, Guy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811212513 ISBN 13: 9780811212519

Publisher: New Directions, 1993

Synopsis

A Table of Green Fields includes ten stories, variously about the painter Henry Scott Tuke, the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, Kafka, Thoreau, along with some imaginary Frenchmen and Scandinavians, among others. Calculating the infinite in the finite, tracing geometries of desire, placing the obdurate world in an uncustomary light, each of these stories opens out its own world. Without giving up the plot or character of the traditional short story, Guy Davenport's inventions are complex events in which ideas and cultural history are a kind of music to which the characters dance. Despite the fractal, syncopated collage of his narrative style, Davenport's prose is objective, terse, and transparent. A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff's dying vision of "a table of green fields," probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to "he babbled of green fields," a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.

About this title

About the Author

As Bruce Bawer wrote in Bookforum, "the late Guy Davenport (1927-2005) left behind an oeuvre that is one long lesson in the history of civilization, and to read any part of it―story, essay, or translation―is to be enthralled by his unflagging intellectual energy and engagement." His books include The Geography of the Imagination, The Death of Picasso, Herakleitos and Diogenes, A Table of Green Fields, The Cardiff Team, DaVinci's Bicycle, and many more.

From Kirkus Reviews

Davenport's literary intelligence can be stratospheric, and when he aims it high, he's able to make an inimitable sort of constructivist sculpture from it (Tatlin!, recall, was the title of his first collection in 1974): part quotation, part commentary, part reimagination. The feat can be electrifying--as is very much here: in ``The Concord Sonata''--considering a phrase of Thoreau's- -and ``The Kitchen Chair''--off a sentence in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal. From both he takes a bit of wordwork that we believe we merely can decode and elevates it into mystery and subtlety and diamond-like style. But, unfortunately, in order to be astonished by Davenport of late means having to endure what once again here is a surfeit of the soft-core gay kiddie-porn (masquerading as Arcadian idylls) that he puts so much of his effort to. Danish teenagers cavort and jut and spurt in tiresome displays of riggish (and etymological) energy: ``I rode the foreskin full stretch with a swirl of tongue deep on the downstroke. Shallow with a flicker on the up. I put a thraw into the treadle. For style. A thropple dive plumb to the bush. A slow ripping passage''). A frustratingly mixed bag. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0811212513
• ISBN 13: 9780811212519
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 149