The Last Novel - Softcover

Markson, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593761430 ISBN 13: 9781593761431

Publisher: Catapult, 2007

Synopsis

In recent novels, which have been called hypnotic,” stunning,” and exhilarating,” David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as Novelist”) announces that since this will be his final effort, he has carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases.”

Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.

As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The latest engaging, indefinable work from Markson (Vanishing Point) proves to be something between a writer's commonplace book and La Rochefoucauld's satirically aphoristic Maxims. A set of absorbing factoids and musings—from and about a variety of literary and historical notables—comprise his narrator's last novel. With a delight in experimentation, Markson manages to insinuate a sober narrative voice between and among the words of the greats. After a quote from Eugene V. Debs (Nobody can be nobody) comes a telling moment of clarification about his own text's aim: Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referenced and of cryptic interconnectivity syntax. Indeed, the quotations, separated by a poetic amount of white space, read smoothly one after the other. Most are only a few lines long, and they range from bons mots by famous writers (Rousseau: The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief) to the writerly non sequitur (Napoleon was five feet six inches tall). Old age, defeat and death emerge as leitmotifs, underscored by statements of the places and dates of various authors' deaths, and, slowly, of the narrator's own poverty and loneliness. Markson's dark fragments are, paradoxically, a joy to sift and ponder.
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From Booklist

"Is there one major Dostoevsky novel in which no one commits suicide?" "Lenin played tennis." These trivia bits and much more fill the pages of Markson's latest experimental work, a hybrid novel and fun-fact compendium that will have many rushing for their Bartlett's and others clutching their skulls in despair. There is an aged protagonist named Novelist who periodically pops up among the anecdotes and quotations, often to comment wearily on his depression, and Markson uses this sort-of character to create a sort of tension--who is Novelist, and why is he or she obsessed with gossip, coincidences, facetiae, and death? Literary sleuths might find satisfaction in Markson's sporadic clues, but some will find that the book too closely resembles a cleverly sequenced quote-a-day desk calendar. Most intriguing (and problematic) is Markson/Novelist's tendency to anticipate reader complaints, a tactic that could engage fans of meta-lit but aggravate those tired of blog-style self-consciousness. There's a lulling beauty here--and a crackling wit, too--but readers will have to ask themselves: Does the end of this "seminonfictional semifiction" justify the means? Daniel Krause
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1593761430
• ISBN 13: 9781593761431
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 200