Misterioso

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Misterioso is the final work of Gilbert Sorrentino's trilogy, the first two volumes of which, Odd Number and Rose Theatre, attempted to discover the shifting, evasive truth concerning a myriad of characters, all vaguely connected with "the arts," whose lives become more contradictory and unaccountable the more we learn about them.

In Misterioso, set on the last Sunday of August 1982, an encyclopedic survey is made of all the people, places, and objects from the first two novels. Beginning and ending at an A & P supermarket, the novel spontaneously generates out of the store's rack of "magazines which promise stories of action," a trashery of ludicrous and perverse exploits and ads well suited to the actions of the novel's large cast of ludicrous and perverse characters and the trashy culture they inhabit. All hope of discovering the truth behind the apparent death of Sheila Henry (in Odd Number) is finally abandoned in this hilarious attempt to organize the facts, a task made hopeless by new information that contains further facts and incidents, scenarios and conversations, as isolate, mysterious, and ambiguous as ever. The charactersdespite the candor of their presentationremain unknowable. A masquerade of the substantive, Misterioso is a comic inquiry into details that are, at once, revelatory and enigmatic, and concludes a major fiction series of the 1980s.

Genres: Novels

342 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1989

About the author

Gilbert Sorrentino was one of the founders (1956, together with Hubert Selby Jr.) and the editor (1956-1960) of the literary magazine Neon, the editor for Kulchur (1961-1963), and an editor at Grove Press (1965-1970). Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X are among his editorial projects. Later he took up positions at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, the University of Scranton and the New School for Social Research in New York and then was a professor of English at Stanford University (1982-1999). The novelists Jeffrey Eugenides and Nicole Krauss were among his students, and his son, Christopher Sorrentino, is the author of the novels Sound on Sound and Trance.

Mulligan Stew is considered Sorrentino's masterpiece.

Obituary from The Guardian

Interview 2006

Reviews

[Brian Washines · Rating 3 out of 5]

The literary equivalent of a Winston Smith collage, Sorrentino's Misterioso operates on fragmented pop art imagery rather than a coherent thread in which an idea or ideas tend to form. Instead we get racial caricatures, scatalogical word salads, and raucous carnival voices spewing out from a lack of center. Sorrentino is the kind of writer who operates in the confines of materials, his arcane books and periodicals of his time, rather than anything worldly or tacit, or else he wouldn't attempt voicing the kind of underrepresented people who would one day be allowed to speak in their own voices. Just not his day, in the early 1980s. This isn't a novel about life, it's a novel about magazine clippings that claim to portray our life and times and prejudices. A lampoon doomed to become the thing it's lampooning. Experimental thrash at its best, which wasn't much to begin with.

[Geoff]

Forgone Inconclusions: Misterioso by Gilbert Sorrentino, from the LA Times:
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-1...

My "like new" hardcover is en route to my house (I know what you're thinking, but good luck intercepting that postal worker and snatching up my copy!)

What Gilbert Sorrentino are YOU dear Goodreader, planning on reading next?

[George Bieber]

Unlike any other book I’ve read. Brilliant connection of words.