Oulipo

jenks

jenks

thread death
I wouldn’t start with A Void. Life a User’s Manual is a good one for Perec, if you like that then fill your boots on W, Things, A Man Asleep, Species of Spaces and all the rest.
Zazie in the Metro by Queneau is very good and, again, if you like that then there’s much more where that came from.
I’d also put in a mention for Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers which has lots of Oulipolian touches
 
version

version

Well-known member
What sort of restrictions did they place on themselves, besides Perec writing a novel without using the letter 'e'? Were they all language-based?
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
The wiki on Life A User’s manual gives a pretty comprehensive list - starting with the idea of the knight’s movements round a chess board, a series of pairs, various literary works and a bunch of other constraints. What makes it so good is you don’t need to know any of that for it to work, whereas with La Disparition ( A Void) you do need that info for you to appreciate what he’s up to.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
jenks said:
The wiki on Life A User’s manual gives a pretty comprehensive list - starting with the idea of the knight’s movements round a chess board, a series of pairs, various literary works and a bunch of other constraints. What makes it so good is you don’t need to know any of that for it to work, whereas with La Disparition ( A Void) you do need that info for you to appreciate what he’s up to.
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Wasn't there a reviewer who didn't notice?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I really enjoyed all the Harry Matthews stuff such as Tlooth, The Conversions, The Sunking of the thingy... I think you would enjoy @vershy versh, loads of conspiracies and secret societies etc, reminds me of Pynchon in a sense, I'm sure I've discussed elsewhere
 
version

version

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
I really enjoyed all the Harry Matthews stuff such as Tlooth, The Conversions, The Sunking of the thingy... I think you would enjoy @vershy versh, loads of conspiracies and secret societies etc, reminds me of Pynchon in a sense, I'm sure I've discussed elsewhere
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Yeah, you've recommended some of them before. @woops said Cigarettes is another good one. The CIA one's my first.

Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part.​
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My Life in CIA documents Mathews's experiences as a would-be spy during 1973, where amid charged world events—the coup in Chile, Watergate, the ending of the Vietnam War—he found himself engaged in a game that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies decided he was a presence that should be eliminated.​
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Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a spellbinding thriller where the line between fact and fiction gets relentlessly blurred.​
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
At the outset of his first novel, The Conversions, the narrator is invited to an evening's social gathering at the home of a wealthy and powerful eccentric named Grent Wayl. During the course of the evening he is invited to take part in an elaborately staged party game, involving, among other things, a race between several small worms. The race having apparently been rigged by Wayl, the narrator is declared the victor and takes home his prize, an adze with curious designs, apparently of a ritual nature, engraved on it. Not long after the party, Wayl dies, and the bulk of his vast estate is left to whoever possesses the adze, providing that he or she can answer three riddling questions relating to its nature. The balance of the book is concerned with the narrator's attempts to answer the three questions, attempts that lead him through a series of digressions and stories-within-a-story, many of them quite diverting in themselves. The book has some superficial affinities with Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the reader, like the narrator, is never sure to what extent he has fallen victim to a hoax. Much of the material dealing with the ritual adze, and the underground cult that it is related to, borrows from Robert Graves's The White Goddess. Mathews's novel concludes with two appendices, one being in German.
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The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, like The Conversions, is the story of a hunt for treasure, this time told through a series of letters between a Southeast Asian woman named Twang and her American husband, Zachary McCaltex. The couple are researching the fate of a vanished cargo of gold that once belonged to the Medici family. As in the earlier novels, there are various odd occurrences and ambiguous conspiracies; many of the book's set-pieces revolve around a secret society (The Knights of the Spindle), which Zachary is invited to join
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I've not read the CIA one, Cigarettes is good but it's quite different from the three I mentioned above
 
version

version

Well-known member
Every woman he meets wants to sleep with him, does sleep with him, has already slept with him.
 
version

version

Well-known member
He mentions Oulipo in this one. He goes to the meetings and hangs out with Perec, later gets kicked out of a Communist meeting because they learn he's a member and say Oulipo aren't sufficiently materialist.
 
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