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The Art Of Cartography
Offers an ironic look at young men and women going through changes in school, work, love affairs, and marriage
- GenresShort Stories
129 pages, Hardcover
First published April 16, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 24, 2025
From the flyleaf of the jacket from the 1991 hardback edition from Alfred A. Knopf:
"The young men and women who inhabit these mordantly alive stories move around - as do the stories themselves - from city to city, country to country. The characters are in and out of graduate schools, apartments, love affairs, marriages. They go from New York to London to Los Angeles, compulsively studying the facts of their own lives and the facts they can guess at the lives of those around them, as a way, perhaps, out of their solitude, as if they could map themselves into the world. They long for perspective, permanence - truth - although what they find is often somewhat different.
"A young American working in a London bank is propelled by a random happening - he gets off his train one day because an unexploded bomb from World War II has been discovered on the tracks - into a series of chance meetings and invitations that illumine the nature og his loneliness.
"A New Yorker, the author of 'unpublished travel books and eight-millimeter documentaries,' while visiting a South Pacific island famous for archaeological dig, accidentally brings together, and then less accidentally puts at odds the people at his hotel.
"A woman named Sheila, who appears - at various periods of her life, and in and out of a relationship with a music critic - in several of the stories, is last seen in southern California, holed up in a mansion, smoking grass with the maid, and expecting to end where she began: back with the critic, as if the best she can do is 'shift weight'.
"In all twelve stories, we see people in motion, in flux - again and again deflected by the succession of chance encounters that has become their way of life.
"A remarkable collection of stories, a memorable debut."
This novel collected some high powered pre-publication praise
"Dozens of perfectly observed vignettes - the stories within these stories - areamplified when Marcus pieces them together..." - Amy Hempel
"Deadpan, dire comedy about the labyrinth of modern life." - Mark O'Donnell
"This is a nervy book. After reading these stories, you look around you and see - it's a start from here planet. Open borders, no boundaries. Everybody is on the move, located, re-located..." Janet Kauffman
Open borders? No boundaries? Everybody on the move? How impossibly ancient all that sounds. One of the only GR reviews says, "I can't help but feel that in some ways this book anticipates the 1990s..." and that is probably true but also what dates these stories so terribly. The 1990s have come and gone and we are a quarter century into the new millennium and the zeitgeist these stories describe? predicate? illuminate? seems more distant and lost than tea time chatter of Saki's etiolated young men and 'new' women. Perhaps it will take another generation for these stories to come into their own?
It is not that they are poorly written, Marcus is a brilliant writer and I adored his account of Berlin in the post wall 1990s but Berlin was a tableaux were he was taxonomising history, people, religion, culture and the future - there is not enough substance to these stories to anchor them in anything. But maybe that is Marcus' great talent, he should have been, but isn't, the voice of 'generation X' and maybe he will be in the future because he didn't become Douglas Coupland making a career out of pontificating nonsense.
Should you read these stories? Why not? the book is 129 pages in a beautifully little hardback which should make you weep for the days of such production values. The book you must read, but probably won't, is 'The Captain's Fire'. That is the real novel of generation x.
"The young men and women who inhabit these mordantly alive stories move around - as do the stories themselves - from city to city, country to country. The characters are in and out of graduate schools, apartments, love affairs, marriages. They go from New York to London to Los Angeles, compulsively studying the facts of their own lives and the facts they can guess at the lives of those around them, as a way, perhaps, out of their solitude, as if they could map themselves into the world. They long for perspective, permanence - truth - although what they find is often somewhat different.
"A young American working in a London bank is propelled by a random happening - he gets off his train one day because an unexploded bomb from World War II has been discovered on the tracks - into a series of chance meetings and invitations that illumine the nature og his loneliness.
"A New Yorker, the author of 'unpublished travel books and eight-millimeter documentaries,' while visiting a South Pacific island famous for archaeological dig, accidentally brings together, and then less accidentally puts at odds the people at his hotel.
"A woman named Sheila, who appears - at various periods of her life, and in and out of a relationship with a music critic - in several of the stories, is last seen in southern California, holed up in a mansion, smoking grass with the maid, and expecting to end where she began: back with the critic, as if the best she can do is 'shift weight'.
"In all twelve stories, we see people in motion, in flux - again and again deflected by the succession of chance encounters that has become their way of life.
"A remarkable collection of stories, a memorable debut."
This novel collected some high powered pre-publication praise
"Dozens of perfectly observed vignettes - the stories within these stories - areamplified when Marcus pieces them together..." - Amy Hempel
"Deadpan, dire comedy about the labyrinth of modern life." - Mark O'Donnell
"This is a nervy book. After reading these stories, you look around you and see - it's a start from here planet. Open borders, no boundaries. Everybody is on the move, located, re-located..." Janet Kauffman
Open borders? No boundaries? Everybody on the move? How impossibly ancient all that sounds. One of the only GR reviews says, "I can't help but feel that in some ways this book anticipates the 1990s..." and that is probably true but also what dates these stories so terribly. The 1990s have come and gone and we are a quarter century into the new millennium and the zeitgeist these stories describe? predicate? illuminate? seems more distant and lost than tea time chatter of Saki's etiolated young men and 'new' women. Perhaps it will take another generation for these stories to come into their own?
It is not that they are poorly written, Marcus is a brilliant writer and I adored his account of Berlin in the post wall 1990s but Berlin was a tableaux were he was taxonomising history, people, religion, culture and the future - there is not enough substance to these stories to anchor them in anything. But maybe that is Marcus' great talent, he should have been, but isn't, the voice of 'generation X' and maybe he will be in the future because he didn't become Douglas Coupland making a career out of pontificating nonsense.
Should you read these stories? Why not? the book is 129 pages in a beautifully little hardback which should make you weep for the days of such production values. The book you must read, but probably won't, is 'The Captain's Fire'. That is the real novel of generation x.
August 29, 2022
Booooooooring
June 21, 2009
This is a great collection of short stories that used a very interesting structure of nested stories. Although this isn't case for every paragraph in every book, many of the paragraphs in the book are self-contained, and then fit into self-contained sections, in self-contained vignettes. The characters, too, are often forced into defining themselves and often very articulate about who they are. I can't help but feel that in some ways this book anticipates the 1990s a decade of articulation, where self help was less letting it all hang out or whatever but more about definition. These are all characters enclosed by definition.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews