List Epithetical Books Mantissa
| Title | : | Mantissa |
| Author | : | John Fowles |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 208 pages |
| Published | : | August 4th 1997 by Back Bay Books (first published 1982) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Literature. European Literature. British Literature. Classics. Novels. Literary Fiction. 20th Century |
John Fowles
Paperback | Pages: 208 pages Rating: 3.2 | 2083 Users | 91 Reviews
Narration To Books Mantissa
I love John Fowles' other novels like The Magus but there is a reason I had never heard of this book before stumbling across it at a used bookstore. This is like a meta-novel, reflecting on the muses and post-modernism, and I think probably only interesting to John in the moment he mused on muses, and not for long after. The self-aware characters! "She looks at him over her glasses. 'I'm supposed to be a twentieth-century woman, Miles. By definition I'm in despair.'" The self-referential descriptions of writing! "Our oblique and tentative dialogue counterpointed by those vistas of thousands of detumescent vegetable penises." (Well, bonus points for the use of detumescent.) Musings on literary movements! "The reflective novel is sixty years dead, Erato. What do you think modernism was about? Let alone post-modernism. Even the dumbest students know it's a reflexive medium now, not a reflective one." Critiques of literature! "Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction. First, it has fully accepted that it is only fiction, can only be fiction, will never be anything but fiction, and therefore has no business at all tampering with real life or reality.... The natural consequence of this is that writing about fiction has become a far more important manner than writing fiction itself. It's one of the best ways you can tell the true novelist nowadays. He's not going to waste his time over the messy garage-mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper." Self-awareness of what this very book is trying to do! "Obviously [the novelist] has at some point to write something, just to show how irrelevant and unnecessary the actual writing part of it is." And the usual Fowles misogyny, which comes across as far more clever in a character than spelled out here: "Then be a woman, and enjoy it. But don't try to think in addition. Just accept that that's the way the biological cards have fallen. You can't have a male brain and intellect as well as a mania for being the universal girlfriend." Yeah.... ugh. Stay away.Identify Books As Mantissa
| Original Title: | Mantissa |
| ISBN: | 0316290270 (ISBN13: 9780316290272) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Epithetical Books Mantissa
Ratings: 3.2 From 2083 Users | 91 ReviewsJudgment Epithetical Books Mantissa
Mantissa, is a meta-fictional curiosity that makes for an interesting read. I enjoyed the symbolic room which brought the reader into the fictional writer's brain. There he conversed, warred and made love with his fictional female character in ping pong fashion. One minute he had the upper hand, the next moment she did; back and forth it proceeded until, in the end, they both fell helplessly into each others arms. Her character changed repeatedly, from a Goth boi to a demur, sensitive youngwhile clever, it was writing at its most self indulgent, and that can alienate the reader. i enjoy a book that pulls the rug out from under me to a point, but an author can only do that so many times before trust is lost and you don't care about the characters anymore. plus i'm not big into the breaking the fourth wall trend that swept the arts in the 80's. i like the fourth wall where it is, it's why i read fiction!
Mantissa is a novel where a writer ostensibly meets his muse and this is quite symptomatic because Mantissa is a book in which his muse had left John Fowles. And Ill tell you what a modern satyr is. Hes someone who invents a woman on paper so that he can force her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would, a hypothetical muse quite knows what she is talking aboutThe reflective novel is sixty years dead, Erato. What do you think modernism was about? Let alone
MANTISSAAuthor John Fowles quotes the OED in defining a mantissa as .an addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse. I would say that was a correct judgment of the book. This is a short novel (~200 pages), composed of an argument between Miles Green, alias John Fowles, and Erato, Greek goddess of amorous poetry and other small works, concern the depiction of women in his writings.The book opens with Green immobilized on a bed in a padded room. Green
So, ever since reading The Collector, I've been intrigued with Fowles's work. I bought a couple of Vintage editions of his most well-known novels. Last Tuesday, I wanted something to read on the train, so I grabbed this one from my bookshelf. I read the first two sentences of the synopsis - "Miles Green wakes up in a mysterious hospital with no idea of how he got there or who he is. He definitely doesn't remember his wife, nor his children's names." - and decided this was OK to read on the
This is a proper curio which I picked up after reading The Magus. The story of a writer with amnesia talking (and otherwise interacting) with his muse, the bad reviews and relative obscurity of the book tempted me and I wasn't disappointed. This is a bad novel, full of awful, seventies sexist crap; plenty of waffle and beardy intellectual verbiage too - but it's also hilariously, sometimes even seriously, fascinating. For me it fitted right into a catagory of books which I love - junk by
MANTISSAAuthor John Fowles quotes the OED in defining a mantissa as .an addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse. I would say that was a correct judgment of the book. This is a short novel (~200 pages), composed of an argument between Miles Green, alias John Fowles, and Erato, Greek goddess of amorous poetry and other small works, concern the depiction of women in his writings.The book opens with Green immobilized on a bed in a padded room. Green
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