Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Logogryph: A Bibliography Of Imaginary Books (original 2004; edition 2004)by Thomas Wharton (Author)
Work InformationThe Logogryph: A Bibliography Of Imaginary Books by Thomas Wharton (2004)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Original Content and Plot I kept bouncing back and forth between feeling that the Logogryph was transcendent, and the feeling that it never quite lived up to its potential. I think I will like it better on a second read, where I can leave my expectations behind and just experience the narrative. The Logogryph reminds me quite a bit of Calvino's Cities and various Borges stories, but has its own form and feel. Recommended only for readers who don't mind a narrative that wanders like a river, or hops about like a frog. Wharton's prose is lovely and his ideas very inventive. If you don't mind riding the winds, check this out. A bibliography of imaginary books and "a sort of a riddle" as defined on one of the first pages of the book. I could end my review here, and state that enough is said already. Maybe adding that the book was lovely, enjoyable and thoughtful, even though I'd understand if someone said it is merely annoying. Logogryph consists of stories or passages of text that mostly seem to be unrelated - they mostly are about stories or books, though - even though there always is a feeling of the presence of the big plan, that there is something that puts the writings together. In the beginning a boy gets lost, and ends up in a big garden of a big house where he befriends with the family that lives there, an English lady and her two children who are slightly older than the boy, an mostly absent father. He returns there time after time - until something happens in the family and things start to change. On one his last visits to the family he is presented a big old suitcase full of old books, English classics & some historical texts. This storyline is dropped for a while, and other kind of stories follow: the story of the inventor of paper, one about a travelling fransiscan who collects stories of the Mexican indigenous people soon after the conquest, an essay on Atlantean literary fashions, story of two avid readers who wage a verbal war in the margins of second-hand books, there are lists, stories about stories (in a very Borgesian way), stories about more books, and once in a while a short passage about the later life of the boy, who has become a writer, a father, an ex-husband, a dreamer... and then you get it: there is a big picture. no reviews | add a review
Awards
"The particular volume I’m looking for is nameless, lacking a cover, title page, or any other outward markings of identity. Over the centuries its leaves have known nothing but change. They have been removed, replaced, altered, lost. The nameless book has been bound, taken apart, and reassembled with the pieces of other dismembered volumes, until one could ask whether there is anything left of the original. Or if there ever was an original." So begins Thomas Wharton's book about books. What follows is a sequence of variations on the experience of reading and on the book a physical and imaginative object. One tale traces the origins of a fictional card game. Another tells of a duel between two margin scribblers. Roving across the globe and from parable to mystery, Wharton positions his reader between the covers of a book that is not. How are we to read the pieces that follow? As extraneous to the nameless book, as parts of it in its original form or perhaps as evidence that it has relocated to other existing volumes? The Logogryph takes its cues from magic realism and the techniques of cinematography. The result is a mind-bending caper through the process of reading, the relationships we establish with fictitious worlds and the possibility of worlds yet unread. Wharton indulges his reader with tales of fantastical cities where the only occupation is reading and of the plight of a protagonist suddenly dislodged from his own novel. And what becomes of the reader who reads all of this? This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with a jacket and full sleeve. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Caslon types and printed on Rolland Zephyr Laid paper. The jacket was printed letterpress. The inside features illustrations by Wesley Bates. No library descriptions found.
|
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |