Reader’s Block

Notecard Quartet

by David Markson

In this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Literature, The United States Of America, Books About Books

193 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Markson was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He is the author of several postmodern novels, including This is Not a Novel, Springer's Progress, and Wittgenstein's Mistress. His most recent work, The Last Novel, was published in 2007 and received a positive review in the New York Times, which called it "a real tour de force."

Markson's work is characterized by an unconventional approach to narration and plot. While his early works may draw on the modernist tradition of William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, Markson says his later novels are "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage."

Dalkey Archive Press has published several of his novels. In December 2006, publishers Shoemaker & Hoard republished two of Markson's early crime novels Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat in one volume.

In addition to his novels, he has published a book of poetry and a critical study of Malcolm Lowry.

The movie Dirty Dingus Magee, starring Frank Sinatra, is based on Markson's first novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee, an anti-Western. He wrote three crime novels early in his career.

Educated at Union College and Columbia University, Markson began his writing career as a journalist and book editor, periodically taking up work as a college professor at Columbia University, Long Island University, and The New School.

Markson died in his New York City, West Village apartment.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Magic Theatre, for Madmen Only, Price of Admission Your Mind
Reader’s Block is exactly like this magic theatre of Steppenwolf.
Reader’s Block reads literally as a baedeker to misfortunes and calamities lying in ambush for a creative mind on its way to the fulfillment of its pursuits.
Like a perfect thing-in-itself Reader’s Block contains its own perfect self-definition:

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.

I’ve spent hours and hours in this literary old curiosity shop cracking the bookworm’s riddles of names, titles, quotes, implications and insinuations and thoroughly enjoying its inkhorn delights.

…a stairway climbs to the floor above. Because of the subdivision, the entrance at the top of the stairs has been sealed. In effect, the stairs now mount to nowhere. Protagonist has set up the first of his unpacked books on some of the steps.

The books abundant on steps of the stairs that lead to nowhere are a fine metaphor of an absolute reader…
“Joyces write. Readers read.” This is the way of literature.

[Fionnuala]

In the beginning, there is Writer/Narrator, an 'I' voice in any case, and he begins by creating a world in which the main character is called Reader, neatly turning 'I' into 'He' by the bottom of the first page of the book entitled 'Reader's Block'.

On the second page, amid a scatter of unrelated quotes and snippets from histories, biographies, memoirs, literary works, the 'I' voice returns:
"I am growing older. I have been in hospitals. Do I wish to put certain things down?"
Followed by: "Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that. Presumably in most others he will not be the I at all, however."

From that point on, there is no more 'I' or 'me' except if those pronouns occur in quotes from the many books being consulted by Reader who seems to spend all his time, yes, reading, and copying quotes, and scribbling notes related to all those books.

On the third page a second character named Protagonist appears.

I, that is, Reviewer, smiled when the second character appeared (and scribbled a happy face in the margin) thinking Narrator has decided Reader cannot live totally alone in his book-filled Eden, and that he must provide him with company.

But by page four, it becomes clear that it is Reader who has created Protagonist:
"How much of Reader's own circumstances or past would he in fact give to Protagonist in such a novel?"

Aha, Reviewer thinks (scribbling an exclamation point in the margin), so Reader is a writer too, and the circumstances spoken of must also be Narrator's circumstances since Reader seems to resemble Narrator in so far as he described himself on the first page: growing old and having been ill, and with his mind full of clutter.

At this point, you, Review Reader, may be wondering if Reviewer is going to talk about every page of Reader's Block, or at least share all the marginalia that Reviewer has scribbled on each page, because it's true, Reviewer inserted themselves into the pages of this book by means of pencil marks of many types ranging from
—approval ticks ("Matisse, questioned about green flesh: I am not painting a woman, I am painting a picture")
—to arrows, connecting related but separated items on the same or the facing page
—to exclamation marks and question marks
—to little drawings such as happy faces and comical faces and other kinds of 'think' drawings (a cat here, a stick figure on a bicycle there)
—to square brackets [all the references to Reader's own circumstances]
—to curly brackets {all the references to antisemitism}
—to music notes (eg, Là ci darem la mano)
—to comments in short phrases and long sentences, (eg: So Beckett's 'Company' may have been inspired by the ten days he lay on his back in the dark under a false floor in Natalie Sarraute's apartment while hiding from the gestapo!)

Reviewer even copied onto the end pages of their secondhand copy of 'Reader's Block' an entire poem they looked up after it was mentioned casually by Reader while he's thumbing through one of his own secondhand books—about which book he remarks:
"Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me?"
If anyone thumbs through Reviewer's edition in the future they will know it was owned by a keen David Markson reader as well as an admirer of Raymond Carver's poetry.

Reader's books reference Picasso, Michelangelo, Vasari, Swift, Ishmael, Milton, Maggie Tulliver, Emily Dickinson, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Sylvia Plath, the Lady of Shallot, Mersault, Pedro Páramo, Shakespeare, Ingeborg Bachmann, Dickens, Sebastian Dangerfield, Thomas Hardy, Raymond Carver, Dulcinea del Toboso (stop listing now, Reviewer hears a voice say).
The referencing is possibly, to use Reader's own words, "Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like?…Also in part a commonplace book?"
(Reviewer has always liked the notion of a 'commonplace book', the kind of (sometimes homemade) notebook in to which keen readers in past centuries copied their favourite book thoughts and passages—Reviewer has often wished they had kept one).

As Review Reader will have noticed, literary characters' names occur nearly as often as real people's names in the snippets Reader has scribbled down in what Reviewer imagines must be a very big notebook or 'block-notes', hence the title of the book perhaps, Reader's Block, because it surely can't mean that Reader has a block when it comes to reading, although it begins to be implied that Reader may have a block when it comes to his writing project about Protagonist because Reader rarely mentions his plans for Protagonist, devoting nearly all his attention to, yes, reading, and copying, and note-making.

But Reader does mention on page 19 that Protagonist might also be a writer, one who doesn't write anymore, so possibly suffering from writer's block—like Reader and Narrator?
And by page twenty-seven, Reader has possibly given Protagonist another character to interact with, so that Reviewer realises this book is a mirror within a mirror within a mirror—and that Reviewer is well and truly inside it, reminded constantly of their own reading history, remembering characters' names and book titles, remembering, for instance, a previous book by David Markson, 'Wittgenstein's Mistress', about a protagonist who reads and makes notes continually, and who may or may not own a rescued cat called Rembrandt (Reviewer is reminded of that cat particularly by the following snippet in Reader's Block: "If forced to choose, Giacometti once said, he would rescue a cat from a burning building before a Rembrandt").

By page fifty, Reviewer has refined their use of marginalia considerably:
—S for references to writers and philosophers who committed suicide, eg: "Romain Gary committed suicide. As had his wife Jean Seberg a year earlier"
—D for other ways famous people died, eg: "Gerard Manley Hopkins died of typhoid in 1889. One of his brothers would live until the 1950s" (the 1950s!)
—V for those believed to have died still virgins, eg: Isaac Newton
—L for those believed to have been born illegitimate
—M for those who lived a long time with their mothers
—B for the many indirect references to Beckett's work in so far as Reviewer can spot them, especially any to 'Company' and 'Ill Seen, Ill Said' which Reviewer read very recently
—J for Joyce references, some of which are very easy to spot: "Joyces write. Readers read"
—H for hilarious, eg: "From Rabelais's will: I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor" Or this one: "Literate people who can spend hours in one's home without a single glance at the titles on the bookshelves"
—F for family connections, eg: "Sartre and Albert Schweitzer were cousins"
—C for criticism by writers and artists of each others' works, eg: "As a writer, he chews more than he bites off. Said Whistler of Henry James" Or this one: "Nothing odd will last long; Tristram Shandy did not last. Said Johnson. Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on such as Fielding." And who further noted: "A man will turn over half a library to make one book" Or this: "An enormous dungheap, Voltaire dismissed the sum of Shakespeare as"
—RS for Reader's unusual syntax, eg: "Reader's mental wastebasket, a thought for"

Review Reader may be relieved at this point to know that Reviewer is giving a thought to their own mental wastebasket and considering that they might use it for the remainder of their marginalia indexation system...

But Reviewer is also thinking that Review Reader can take a few more snippets from the book itself?
This quote, for instance, which got five approval ticks! Five!
"Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?"

One last one, from none other than Raymond Chandler: "I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing."

But 'last' is a word Reviewer doesn't much like.
So here's another snippet:
"Why does it sadden Reader to realize he will almost certainly never know what book will turn out to be the last he ever read."

And there's one more Reviewer just has to share: "Evelyn Waugh was found dead on a bathroom floor." Reviewer read that line on the anniversary of their father's death. He was found dead on a bathroom floor.

And in case anyone is curious about the poem Reviewer took the trouble to copy into the end pages of their well-thumbed edition of Reader's Block, here's how that odd bit of marginalia happened. At the top of page 109, Reader suddenly said: "Mystified by the ear of the poet who would call a volume 'Where Water Comes Together with Other Water'."
Reviewer, who grew up where a river meets the sea, and understands very well the special atmosphere of places where water comes together with other water, was not at all mystified by the ear of the poet who composed that title, and immediately looked it up. Those water lines are currently Reviewer's favourite poem.

Before Reviewer wraps this up, perhaps Review Reader would like to hear Reader's own possible assessment of his book?
"A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak, minus much of the novel....Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts? Not to add avec 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?"

To the bit about 'cross-circuited schematism', Reviewer is tempted to respond in the words of a famous character, mentioned several times by Reader, and who is well used to having the final say: "O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words."

[BlackOxford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard Slogging

Reader’s Block, like its successor, The Last Novel, reads like a collection of author’s notes, random ideas that come his way which might be useful in a future narrative to be written by the subsequent Novelist Who pulls things together.

In Reader’s Block, Reader appears as a magpie collecting fragments of mostly literary opinion and gossip. Reader is rapacious and has no clear filter for what is relevant - a sort of literary omnivore - tittle-tattle, biographical detail, prejudices (particularly anti-Semitism), and apocryphal anecdotes.

Reader's companion, Protagonist (perhaps the prospective Novelist in reflective mood), presents questions about himself - his background, motivations, elements of character, etc. These are a sort of probiotic questions, preparing the mass of material for subsequent digestion. Presumably Protagonist is attempting to give some structure to Reader’s random acquisitions.

Perhaps because I read them in the wrong order, I found Reader’s Block less interesting and less witty than The Last Novel. The individual factoids were less impressive and the whole appeared a sort of groping in the dark for a theme. Perhaps that was Markson’s intention. Writing of any quality is a messy business.

If so, he captures the tedium of an author’s business exceptionally well. It’s undoubtedly a grind and a drone finding material and inspiration. But then there is a definite element of watching paint dry in observing Markson’s ironic portrayal of himself.

[Jenn(ifer) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it.

Markson’s short work of experimental fiction weaves together strings of historical facts (Frederick Delius was paralyzed and blinded by syphilis.), quotations (Pouring out liquor is like burning books. Said Faulkner.) and endless references to the horrors of humanity and human suffering (Two of Thomas Mann’s sons committed suicide. As did two of Marx’s daughters.), with the patches of a novel the Reader is trying to write.

Sometimes a paragraph is nothing more than a word…

Bitburg.

… which meant nothing to me until I looked it up and found that Bitburg, on Christmas Eve 1944 was almost entirely destroyed by air raids, earning it the grisly nick-name the dead city.

Markson knows how to pack a wallop using sparse language. But understanding what he’s doing takes a lot of time and patience and research. Unless of course you’re a brilliant trivia wizard who knows the significance of St. Martin’s Churchyard or the name of Caligula’s favored horse.

Incitatus.

For me, not a page went by where I wasn’t baffled by the endless references to people and places I’d never heard of. Imagine having this wealth of knowledge! And Markson wrote this before the days of Wikipedia!

Did you know that Milton was paid five pounds for Paradise Lost? That Isaac Newton died a virgin? That there’s no mention of Ockham’s Razor in anything that Ockham wrote?

Did you know that Hemmingway was an anti-Semite? Voltaire? Heiddegger?

American poet John Berryman committed suicide by jumping from a bridge. Austrian physicist Ludwig Botzmann committed suicide by hanging. French painter Constance Mayer committed suicide by slashing her throat with a razor. We are all familiar with the mad genius, the tortured artist, but never are we confronted with it quite as boldly as we are here.

I couldn’t read it. The human mind isn’t that complex. Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann. Ah, but it is!

This book could easily be read in one sitting, but researching the endless names and places could take an eternity. I could spend an eternity reading and rereading this book, always finding something new and interesting. Markson’s genius is unparalleled. Yet go to a Barnes & Noble and it is unlikely that you will find his books on the shelves. Surprising?

Fifteen years after ‘Moby Dick,’ Melville had to pay to publish ‘Clarel.’ With borrowed money.

And we wonder why so many brilliant men and women eliminate their own maps. I don't mean to trivialize here, but there is just so much wrong with the world...

[Fernando · Rating 4 out of 5]

"El mundo es mi idea" dice David Markson...

El título del libro pareciera pareciera corresponder a un borrador que Markson está ideando para un cuento o una novela.

El Lector y el Protagonista son parte esencial de todo ese asunto.

Datos biográficos.

Curiosidades.

Citas de libros.

Frases en latín.

Títulos de novelas.

Personajes de libros.

Mujeres que engañan.

Fechas reales. Y otras que tal vez no.

Padres desconocidos de artistas famosos.

Críticas despiadadas.

Celos profesionales.

Innumerables datos biográficos.

Muertes inconcebibles.

Suicidios ejemplares.

Fosas comunes.

Ediciones rechazadas.

Cuadros sin terminar.

Reminiscencias de Rabelais.

Marginalia.

Dante Alighieri.

James Joyce.

Ulises.

Platón.

Aristóteles.

Wittsgenstein.

Pintores famosos.

Ideas para el Protagonista.

Un collage. Un assemblage.

Al final del libro descubro que el Lector no está tan solo.

David Markson era antisemita.

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...

“Si interpreto correctamente su carta, está usted ignominiosamente casada; si aún no se ha concretado, hablemos aunque sea una vez.”

Esta cita, elusiva, esquiva, misteriosa, es un ejemplo perfecto de lo que nos vamos a ir encontrando en esta novela de David Markson, que realmente no es una novela, tal y como él se encargará de ir clarificando a lo largo del texto. Y digo que es un ejemplo perfecto, porque forma parte de una cita aparentemente inconexa en relación al resto del texto salpicado de citas igualmente independientes unas de otras, pero que sin embargo, y si nos tomamos la paciencia y el tiempo para ahondar en ellas, podremos ir averiguando que ni son inconexas, ni que siquiera van por libre, son enigmáticas en el más puro sentido de la palabra, pero son hechos y citas que están ahí si rebuscamos más allá de la pista que nos lanza Markson, y a partir de aquí el lector podrá ir formando la historia. Todo está relacionado si hacemos una pausa para buscar: citas, nombres, frases formadas por una única palabra. ¿Dónde está la conexión?

"La Dama de Elche. El muslo de Perséfone donde Plutón la agarra en el Bernini. La mano derecha del David de Miguel Angel.
El éxtasis de Santa Teresa."

Cuando David Markson escribió este texto absolutamente maravilloso, experimental, arriesgado y misterioso, no sé si su intención fue precisamente que el lector se parara e hiciera el esfuerzo de ir hilvanando ideas, investigando más allá del mero texto para ampliar unas historias que Markson se limitaba solo a dejar ver esquivamente.

"Durante cuarenta y pico de años, Valéry se despertaba a las cinco de la mañana para tomar notas sobre lo que consideraba el amanecer de la conciencia."

Así que podemos abordar este libro de dos formas: leerlo de una sentada y dejándonos llevar por un texto que parece tanto poesía como música sin pararnos a investigar y quizás una vez terminado reconstruirlo de una manera más pausada… pero también se puede abordar haciendo parones, investigando nombres e intentando encontrar las conexiones entre frases y nombres usando quizás la wikipedia o la red, como si de un juego se tratara. Sea como sea, David Markson ha creado un libro que me ha fascinado porque aunque ya venía de leer "La Amante de Wittgenstein" el año pasado, no estaba preparada para que Markson volviera a repetir la fórmula pero en esta ocasión estableciendo una conexión más íntima con el lector. Dicho esto, solo puedo añadir, que igual que en cuanto me encontré con Vollmann supe desde el primer momento que se iba a convertir en una debilidad, después de La soledad del lector, sé de sobra que Markson se ha convertido en otra debilidad ya para siempre.

"Un obispo de Yorkshire convocó una reunión para la quema pública de Jude el oscuro.
Seguramente ante su desesperación por no poder quemarme a mí, dijo Hardy."

[…]

"Boticelli, que nunca se casó, una vez soñó que se había casado.
Y recorrió las calles de Florencia hasta el amanecer, para no volver a soñarlo."

La soledad del lector está compuesto de una serie de párrafos cortos, otros formados por una única palabra, algunos párrafos algo más largos, separados por espacios dobles en una especie de pieza poética. Estas entradas están formadas por citas o notas relacionados con novelistas o poetas, casi en su mayoría occidentales; algunos de estos párrafos repiten temas recurrentes relacionados con estos autores y como ya digo aunque parezcan iconexos, si nos tomamos la molestia de investigar, se irá abriendo una conexión entre estas ideas.

"Pietro Torrigiano golpeó con un martillo una Virgen que había esculpido en Sevilla cuando no le pagaron lo que pretendía.
Y fue acusado de sacrilegio por la Inquisición y llevado a la cárcel.
Donde en una obra cumbre de escupir contra el viento se dejó morir de hambre."

Entre este cúmulo de información desbordante, y adictiva, David Markson entra en la metaficción pura y dura a través de otra capa argumental que se camufla entre tanto dato erudito porque la novela realmente se refiere a un escritor al que llama el Lector que está construyendo una novela sobre un personaje al que llamará Protagonista. Es cierto que este dato solo aparecerá de vez en cuando pero será justo el momento en que el lector se verá obligado a detenerse y reorganizar esta información tan enigmática que nos va colando Markson. Y aunque el libro en su mayor parte esté formado por estas anécdotas o citas en torno a escritores y artistas, la reflexión en torno a la construcción de una obra es lo que de verdad interesa a Markson porque realmente, y estoy convencida, el autor está hablando de sí mismo. El tono melancólico, algo desesperanzado del autor en plena creación no puede ser otro que el del propio David Markson hablando de sí mismo dando a luz una novela, a corazón abierto.

"Está larga enfermedad, mi vida
Aquel largo malestar, mi vida."
[…]
"El motivo de tu queja reside, me parece, en la limitación que tu intelecto le impone a tu imaginación.
Le dijo Schiller a un amigo que tenía dificultad para escribir."

A lo largo del texto iremos percibiendo que hay temas recurrentes que salen a colación una y otra vez: el suicidio o la locura como una especie de salida a este suicidio… David Markson lo expone a través de citas y hechos contrastados en la literatura pero en el fondo está exponiéndolo para que el Lector y el Protagonista construyan esta obra aunque realmente David Markson puede que estuviera hablando de sí mismo y pone continuamente ejemplos de este fracaso a través de otros hechos recurrentes en torno a toda esa cantidad de obras (ahora de culto) y que en su momento fueron rechazados reiteradas veces por los editores (La Amante de Wittgenstein es un claro ejemplo, rechazada cincuenta y tantas veces), y no solo como rechazos de editoriales sino además autores que tuvieron que pagar para ver publicados pocos ejemplares de sus obras, de los cuales se vendían a su vez muy pocos.

"El Protagonista ha venido a este lugar porque allá no tenía ninguna clase de vida."

Tengo que confesar que La Soledad del Lector me ha fascinado por lo que va formándose en la mente del lector a medida que vamos avanzando en este cúmulo de información adictiva sobre personajes que están entrelazados unos con otros. Porque en una obra donde no hay argumento, ni personajes que vayan construyendo una narración, donde no hay trama, ni se indique el paso del tiempo…, consigue que el lector se vea atraído por leer y seguir pasando páginas en una especie de hechizo literario. No hay argumento pero David Markson ha creado en mi opinión una obra de metaficción totalmente avanzada en su tiempo. La soledad del lector forma parte de una tetralogia que se completa con This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point y The Last Novel, una reflexión en torno a al arte y a la creación artística usando la misma estructura entre poética y experimental. Novela sonámbula. Una maravilla.

"Tengo un relato. Pero tendrás que esforzarte para encontrarlo."

 

 

[Vesna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nonnovel "novel" composed of anecdotal fragments from the lives of others and literary fragments from the works of others left to a reader to construct the story of a Protagonist observed by his alter ego, Reader. Recognizing some elements from Markson's life, I believe it is also autobiographical with an open end, gazing into a "vanishing point"... hope to write a review when I am less pressed for time. Meanwhile, Markson's allusive suggestion (among many other allusions) of what a reader is reading:

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Or of no describable genre?

A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?

Also in part a distant cousin innumerable times removed of "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake"?

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.

And as an incidental personal challenge, letting none of its intellectual mishegaas be material Reader has ever used anywhere else.

And this:

[...] does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Not to add avec exactly 333 interspersed unattributed quotations awaiting annotation?

And this:

In the end one experiences only one's self.
Said Nietzsche.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Wastebasket.

Life, that is. Or, the legacy of our culture? Both...

David Markson is simply brilliant. Must read the rest of his Notecard Quartet. Soon. Sooner.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not your father's Oldsmobile, as they say of novels. All it is, then, is unusual. A series of facts being written down under the conceit of an old man/reader who wants to write a novel but suffers "Reader's Block." That is, he can't stop himself from reviewing all the literary trivia swimming in his head.

So how is it a novel, you ask? Well, embedded in this 193-page "list" are snippets from Reader (would-be author) and Protagonist (would-be author's would-be main character). All well and good, and I suppose if you were to pull out these nuggets alone, there might be some semblance of narrative, but really, for me, all the useless knowledge proved most entertaining. The Reader and Protagonist were Greek Chorus--background vocals, dish running away with the spoon.

I posted the first of three sets of some of these facts on the link below. If they entertain you, click on to the second set and the upcoming third. If you like it, chances are you'll like this book.

https://www.kencraftauthor.com/one-ma...

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel of literary trivia. Markson's knowledge of biographical curios is far and wide, far beyond his desire to tell his own stories, so he uses this richness of detail to weave an unconventional narrative. The trivia is interrupted by an attempt by Reader to create his Protagonist, who gets swallowed up in a bog of anti-semitic and suicidal writers. The story is never told: the idea is the anecdotes tell the story. (Though precisely what that is is beyond me. The tone is one of oppression and sadness. With a dash of Latin/Greek pretension).

Quite like David Sheilds's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto in its Barthesian plagiarism-is-the-future approach.

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

All praise to Fionnuala, who has introduced me to the works of David Markson!

I feel an intense connection to Markson, whose writing is itself full of connections, the meanings of which a reader must infer because there is nothing linear or transparent within them. It may be that at this latter stage of my life (I am reasonably healthy but do not have "long genes") I have come to the awareness that there is little about living that is easily understood.

Like Wittgenstein’s Mistress, this book lacks a strong narrative form. In Markson's own words, "Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage." Also, "A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, minus much of the novel." And yet there is an underlying sense of very gradual movement forward.

Each page consists of scattered quotations (333 all told, some attributed, some not), references to odd facts that have become embedded in the author's consciousness, and names of persons both real and fictional, periodically interspersed with single sentences describing a possible plot in a possible novel the author may write. The author is considering two potential settings for this possible novel, both of which have distinct but related auras.

Markson refers to the author of this potential book as "Reader", a reflection, I believe, on the fact that all those things that cloud the author's brain are the result of his reading. Clearly he is struggling with digressions.

As was I. Since I am far less erudite than Markson many of the references went over my head, and I frequently interrupted my reading to track down something intriguing. Eventually I just flagged these and pursued them later. Had I not been selective I would not have finished the book for a year, there was so much richness to explore in his references. A prime example: In looking for the operatic source of Che faro senza Euridice I came across of performance by Jakob Josef Orlinski that brought tears to my eyes. And also made me wonder why I listen to so little music these days. (Sadly, the only aria names I identified were both from Don Giovanni.)

There are themes to Markson's quotations and facts. Well known individuals throughout history who were anti-semitic (which of course raises the art vs. artist question, another rabbit hole I am prone to pondering). The literacy or lack thereof of famous authors' parents, siblings and offspring. The possibility of illegitimacy, incest, impotence or virginity in these renowned persons.

And critical comments by authors regarding other authors. Amidst so many of them there was this unattributed one, which I actually knew and love. "Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the"." Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman.

More generally, this from Hannah Arendt: "We cannot know if there is such a thing as altogether unappreciated genius, or whether it is the daydream of those who are not geniuses."

Tucked in on page 165 is this quote from Schiller, addressed to a friend with writer's block: "The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint your intellect imposes on your imagination." Could Markson be reflecting on his own situation when including this?

I will continue to treasure and explore this book. Perhaps Markson's technique for conveying the impossibility of understanding the world validates my own confusion. But I also want to explore more of those references!

BTW, in researching a reference in the book, I came across this piece in the NY Daily News of January 12, 2019: Novelist Jogs His Memory. Markson enthusiasts might find it illuminating.

[Franco Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gustó mucho. Original, asfixiante, no me dio descanso. Una obra como nunca había leído antes, que recomiendo leer de corrido. También funciona como una curiosa alegoría a las miles de entradas de información que recibimos día a día. ¿Cuánto te quedará de este libro? ¿Cuánto, al menos, para darle un sentido?

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because my first was not enough, and any good thing must be driven into the ground until dead and decomposing from the blunt-thwack of transparency's shovel.

Then again: What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care, per Blake.

Adolf Hitler was an anti-Semite.

Though, it can be argued, that this self-referentialism, no matter how poorly executed, is the point entire—imitation being the sincerest of forms.

So they say.

This hyper aware free-association, impossibly-moving, in fact the first of a non-contiguous four movement piece that throbs against the cerebellum like water against a pier's pylon.

HG Wells was an anti-Semite.

A careful study of anti-Semitism, prejudice and accusations might be of great value to many Jews, who do not adequately realize the irritation they inflict, he said.

Incinerator.

[Jim Elkins]

Representing Ruined Minds, And a Note About How Google Spoils Reading

[Note: this is the first of Markson's books I read. After the masterpiece, "Wittgenstein's Mistress," I read "The Last Novel," a book so poor that it made me uninterested in reading any more Markson. See the reviews of those two for balance with this.]

This book is a series of short paragraphs, some a single word, few more than five lines. The paragraphs are separated by double spaces, so the book looks like poetry, or Wittgenstein's Tractatus, or Rochefoucauld.

There are, principally, two kinds of entries: miscellaneous notes about artists (mainly novelists, some poets, virtually all North American or European); and author's notes about a novel he's thinking about writing. This second kind of note divides the author into at least three voices:

1. Markson, the real author, insofar as we glimpse him
2. Reader, the principal narrator, who thinks or writes "Reader's Block." He's called Reader because he's spent his life reading, and his mind is filled with thoughts about novelists.
3. Protagonist, the character in the novel that Reader is contemplating writing.

In the second kind of note, Reader imagines a Protagonist who lives next to a cemetery, near a beach, in winter, with no friends. It seems there wouldn't ever be much of a story there: it's quite Beckettish in its stasis and emptiness. As "Reader's Block" proceeds, a contrast develops between these notes and the ones about novelists. The desultory notes about Protagonist's empty life, to which he's been driven by a lack of events, people, and meaning in his actual life, begin to seem terminally vague, uninteresting, lacking in imagination (always the cemetery, always the beach), and, for me, bathetic. They seem unintentionally more sentimental and self-indulgent than they may have been intended: I have the impression Markson thought of them as desolate, existential in the Beckett mold, with a paralysis brought on by Reader's inability to energize his imagination, which had been ruined by the "clutter" of anecdotes about novelists from his lifetime of reading. But the notes come across slightly differently--more as a reliance on a uniform kind of desolation, a weakness the author prefers to ascribe to a mind ruined by reading.

These Reader's notes on his unwritten novel have potential: in a couple of places he imagines characters, and then effectively drops them, and those moments can be as poignant as the deaths of characters in more developed narratives. But Markson doesn't play on that theme. He seems not to really notice it.

On the other hand, the notes about authors are consistently interesting. I think they cannot be imagined simply as "clutter" (p. 42), because they come in three or four quite distinct varieties, which indicate different directions of Reader's mind:

1. Notes about artists' deaths, about oblivion, about the ways writers are forgotten:

"Fragonard died completely forgotten.

"Nicolas de Stael committed suicide." (p. 84).

This first sort of note presents itself as Reader's probable fate, and it fits with Protagonist's fate, since he's pictured as a former author whose books have been forgotten.

2. Notes about genius, aspiration, and fame:

"Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was damningly abused by reviewers. Once he became famous he had it reissued. And included the reviews as an appendix.

"A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you must not call is Homer." (p. 45).

This second kind of note is often about authors misappreciating other authors:

"Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last.
Said Johnson.

"Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on Fielding." (pp. 161-62)

From this second kind of note we have the impression of a different Reader, one who is aggrieved, and especially misses the praise of his fellow writers. A pettier and scrappier writer than the one who collected the first kind of note.

3. Notes on the surprisingly unethical or immoral behavior of otherwise good or interesting artists: notes on infidelity, cruelty, incest, and so forth. In this third category I include the standard-format refrain, throughout the book, in the form "X was an anti-Semite," with X varying from the usual suspects (Heigedder, De Man, Wagner, Celine) to less common examples. This third category is pettier yet than the second, and indicates another side to Reader: he's sour and righteous as well as wounded and envious.

4... This listing could be multiplied: there seem to be several Readers here, who are more or less sympathetic characters, more or less reconciled to fate and oblivion. In my reading there is one other principal sort of note: the one that marks the passage of time: writers who were exact contemporaries, although they don't seem so or although they never met (Melville and Whitman); writers who lived unexpectly long lives, or brief ones; writers who are separated much further in time than we may have thought. These notes are, for me, the most sustaining: they stretch and compress time in ways that fit the author's sense of his impending oblivion. One of the longest notes in the entire book, and one of the few which clearly identifies Markson with Reader, is this one:

"Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Bapistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.
Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door's ten panels lay heaped in the muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before." (p. 56)

It's not clear in the typesetting of the book whether that last sentence is a separate paragraph: I hope it was.

In short, in sum: this is a book about a ruined career, and the author's impending death, but it's also about two ruined minds: the Reader's mind is "cluttered" so it can no longer work as it should; and at the same time Markson's mind is "cluttered" by unresolved and I think partly unnoticed conflicts between his ambition, his jealousy, and his acceptance of the end of his own life and his own writing.

- - -
Appendix: on reading "Reader's Block" after Google

I wonder if we may have lost the ability to read this novel now that we have Google. I am not the ideal reader of "Reader's Block," but I'm not too far off either. On any given page there will be one or two references I don't get, and the temptation is to look them up. That's clearly not Markson's intention. Google has made it seem as if allusions are things that are to be solved, as if lacunae in memory or knowledge can be filled in by a couple minutes on a search engine. Markson wants his many allusions to authors to resonate: he clearly didn't expect people would try to look them up, and he also didn't expect readers for whom too many of these would be puzzles. He isn't showing off his erudition, bemoaning the decline of literacy, or advocating for a good classical education. He's simply inventorying his own mind, and searching for allusions on Google is absolutely not an appropriate response to the book. And yet. We have Google, and now that I've finished the book I'm going to permit myself to look up some of the many lines I don't recognize. They're tantalizing:

"Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante." (p. 102)

"Que no quiero verla!" (p. 46)

"The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done." (p. 106)

"Thesmophoriazusae." (p. 180)

"Was willst du, fremder Mensch?" (p. 180)

"O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!" (p. 156)

I have deferred looking up these and others until I finished reading, because I know that my encounter with these texts will be fresh, and incomplete -- lacking the context of the full books or poems from which they're taken -- and that in Markson's novel allusions are retrospective and ruminative, signs of a sense of culture that just can't be solved by Google.

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 5 out of 5]

¿Qué acabo de leer? ¿Una novela de referencias y alusiones intelectuales que no tiene casi nada de novela? ¿Un conjunto de anécdotas curiosas sobre escritores, filósofos y artistas? Ambas y algo más.

La trama está compuesta por un par de miles de frases breves que pueden leerse como relatos únicos. Así, sabemos que Kant y Chopin fueron antisemitas o que Camus y London murieron de forma trágica. En el medio, surge una frase poética que te deja pensando.

Bajo esa capa de notas y datos caóticos y entreverados se teje la historia del Lector y el Protagonista. El primero desarrolla una o dos historias sobre el segundo. Metáforas de la creación literaria y de la vida misma.

Esta obra posmoderna y experimental se rebela contra los canones habituales y las líneas argumentales clásicas. Me pase horas googleando algunos datos, los cuales son, por ahora todos ciertos y verificables.

El lector (con minúscula), agradecido.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult to describe, even more difficult to put down. “Reader” is interested in writing a book with the main character of “Protagonist”. He is seemingly unable to get one good page going, as he is constantly flooded with factoids. While discussing The Vulnerables by Nunez a few weeks ago, I mentioned that it had “less of what I love about Nunez’s books – talking about writing and books and authors and literature”. I also said that “if she had a 500-page book coming out about that, I would be pre-ordering it right away”. She doesn’t have such a book, but Markson has 4! So here is the first of the quartet.

While reading these random trivia about editors, critics, authors, literature, death, and racism (I believe in ascending order of frequency), you start to zone out and see some semblance of a story between “Reader” and “Protagonist”, but that doesn’t really matter too too much, does it? Here are some facts I really enjoyed, and I will really attempt to keep the number down, because I would then have to copy out the entire book here:

Thumbed pages: read and read. Who has passed here before me?

Only Bianchon can save me, said Balzac, near death.
Bianchon being a doctor in Le Père Goriot.

Leonardo's notebooks indicate that he knew the sun did not move before Copernicus did.

Despite decades of self-analysis, Freud was forever so anxiety-ridden about missing trains that he would arrive at a station as much as an hour ahead of time.

Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping.

Leibniz: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?

In Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life, Immanuel Kant had several sisters and a brother and did not see any of them for a quarter of a century. At one point he had a letter from the brother and did not answer it for two and a half years.

Throughout the Middle Ages, often no more than a single manuscript of certain classics existed. One leaking monastery roof and the Satyricon could have been lost forever, for instance.

Not far into the story, Robinson Crusoe swims out to the wreck of his ship with no clothes on.
In the selfsame paragraph Defoe has him filling his pockets with biscuits.

Working as a publisher's reader, Andre Gide rejected Swann's Way.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.

An illiterate, underbred book.
Said Virginia Woolf of Ulysses.

There is no mention of Ockham's Razor in anything Ockham ever wrote.

Who was M'Intosh?

The vocabulary in Shakespeare's plays includes 29,066 different words. There are 29,899 different words in Ulysses.

One of James Joyce's patrons offered to pay for analysis for him under Jung. Joyce waved away the thought of it.
Later on, unsuccessfully, Jung would work with Joyce's disturbed daughter Lucia, however.

In Joseph Conrad's view there is not a single sincere line, unquote, in Moby Dick.

Does one know today with whom Columbus sailed when he discovered America?
Said Freud after his break with Jung.

At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.
And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.

I couldn't read it. The human mind isn't that complex.
Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann.

The man who is tired of London is tired of life.

Camus called Faulkner the greatest modern novelist.
But then named Pylon and Sanctuary as the best of his books.

Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent, Nabokov said.

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.
Recited J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad-Gita at Alamogordo.

Tolstoy thought King Lear so bad a play as to be not worth discussion.

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Or is he in some peculiar way thinking of an autobiography?

Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax in any case.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

Bricolage.

Vanishing point.

—So, why hasn’t someone transformed this book into a hyper doc yet? If they did, I would likely grumble. But I guess, if I have a point, it’s something like, I constantly feel the tension that referentialism, allusions, hidden context generates between reader and writer. Should I get all or most of these references? Am I expected to know German, French, Italian, Latin, etc.? Now that I have pocket internet access, should I run down every reference? Must I read every work in full to feel the full force of RB? Should I feel inadequate as a reader? Or should I accept the lacunae and instead read a duality into all the fragments of a robust reading life: a pride in vastness, a hollowness in the remains of the urge to read everything of value forcing one to encounter death at the limits of the page? For me, Markson’s book reconfigures the clearing of literature. It is a work of art working, a thing thinging, and a world worlding: it shines.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Markson achieves a pure distillation of form in these works and has created his own genre - a lucid, incantatory and trance inducing prose style, in which a person's entire self can be discerned through a stream of fragments. Fragments concerning the lives of writers, philosophers artists and their subjects. The greatest, and peculiar reward in reading these four novels, is experiencing the incredible heft of sadness while simultaneously grinning form ear-to-ear. These books deliver an awesome jolt to the soul, spirit and mind. Reading can never be the same again.

[Tijana]

Ovo je sve što sam očekivala od "Vitgenštajnove ljubavnice" i još malo više. Nije toliko do same knjige koliko do kombinacije sledećih faktora:
- rešila sam da se ne upinjem tokom čitanja
- onda mi je Markson pomogao jer je ovo knjiga za svakog studenta opšte književnosti ikada igde (ne samo za nas, naravno, ali ipak) i toliko mi je bilo toplo oko srca kad god prepoznam neki citat koji i ja volim kao Čitalac, od 'ako nema boga, kakav sam ja onda kapetan?' do grozno pakosnog ali beskrajno tačnog Velsovog komentara o romanima Henrija Džejmsa
- ovo je nekako nežnija knjiga, iako i dalje neiskazano tužna, to je izgleda konstantno
- značajno smešnija, štaviše, na mahove urnebesna
- mislim da je temperatura preko 38,5 pomogla jako
Sve u svemu, nema potrebe da se prepričava zaplet, ovo je kao da slušate deku koji razmišlja o svim knjigama svog života i skače s jedne teme na drugu ali tako da sekvence tih zapisa imaju smisla i često sačinjavaju ili fore ili nabacuju smernice nekog dužeg razmišljanja a zapravo... sve je jedna meditacija o knjigama i bliskoj smrti.

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

You have to read all of Markson to get Markson. Challenge Accepted. I feel Markson is pushing me over the brink as far as my own ambitions are concerned, redefining definitions. This is a fascinating journey and it is compulsive to say the least. I shudder to think that when I reach The Last Novel, it will really feel like exactly that.

A review titled Reviewer's Block is ready but will be up only after completing the tetralogy(?). I am sure I am missing all the really good twists.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got Narrative If You Want It

The Reader, now elderly, broke, broken and sick, walked, directionless, and unremarkably into the sea.

He did not remember his daughter's name, nor her brother's, or whether she had one.

William H. Gass was an anti-Semite.

He wrote what and how his father spoke.

The Reader committed suicide.

The Reader was buried in a cemetery close to the beach, next to the grave of the Protagonist, who predeceased him, if in fact they did not die simultaneously.

Did it ever, once, enter even Protagonist's bleakest conjecturings that he would finish out his life alone?

I would give you some violets, but they withered all, when my father died.
Said the Protagonist's daughter [and Ophelia in "Hamlet"]. Or was it the Reader's daughter?

With Reader well aware that he has categorically not thought that through either.

But the Protagonist died first.

Before, even, the Reader.

Who will end up with the Protagonist's cartons of books?

If the Strand Book Store closes?

Literary Post-Modernism, like Abstract Expressionism, was invented by New York drunks.

Not drunk is he who from the floor/Can rise alone and still drink more./But drunk is They, who prostrate lies,/ Without the power to drink or rise.
Contributed Thomas Love Peacock

How has Reader managed to so calamitously fuck up his life and this novel?

Not a Good Start

If I had read this first part of Markson's quartet first (rather than last), then perhaps I might have rated it four stars, rather than three. The basic concept of the project was an interesting one. I've written about it in my reviews of the other volumes.

However, I could equally have rated it two stars. The first novel shares the bitterness and self-pity of the other three, while lacking their occasional charm, humour and wit.

Neither the concept nor the execution is complete or realised at this early stage of the project. The overwhelming majority of quotations aren't attributed to their source, so it's hard to tell what (if anything) Markson actually wrote (rather than appropriated and then assembled). Maybe he is just responsible for the tone of the project, which gravitates from cranky to snarky, and back again.

Certainly, the tone is contagious. Never have I wished that any author or protagonist might die, or rejoiced when eventually they did, more than while reading this volume.

Misfortune and Missed Fortunes

Self-described as Reader in this novel, Markson records the death (by suicide) of other writers and artists, almost with delight.

Like other white American male Post-Modernists who regard themselves as underappreciated geniuses (especially Joseph McElroy and Gilbert Sorrentino), he resents and eviscerates other authors who have been popular or commercially successful. He singles out Charles Dickens for repeated attacks. Dickens had been long dead, so, why the angst? At least, Markson doesn't speculate about his illegitimacy or his impotence, as he does with other figures like Erasmus and Kierkegaard.

All Hands Below

In the same (vain?) vein, Markson continues to envy the Jewish author Saul Bellow his Nobel Prize, quoting (without attribution) the ridiculous alcoholic assessment of Kingsley Amis that "John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow".

Only one member of the Amis family wrote with insight about the work of Bellow, and it wasn't the father.

What's Da Madder Wid Jew?

Markson meticulously records the names of writers, artists and other public figures whom he considers to have been anti-Semites. There is no argument, just bald assertion.

Although there is in fact some academic debate about the issue, he even includes Karl Marx in their number. This seems to be gratuitous, because (though Marx was baptised into the Lutheran Church), both Marx' maternal and paternal grandparents were rabbis. Besides, Marx opposed all forms of religion as the opiate of the masses, not just Judaism.

Anyway, I suspect that Marx would have had as little regard for Markson's opinion, as Saul Bellow might have had for that of Kingsley Amis.

This was the only volume of the quartet that was published by Dalkey Archive Press (even though the other three were published by the one publisher). It's not surprising. It would be interesting to learn the real reason they failed to publish the rest of the quartet. Maybe, for them, one was enough? Or had they satiated their appetite for financial loss?

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Markson’s book in a brief description sounds like a post-Calvino or Borges exercise in cute metafiction. A character named Reader has difficulty composing a novel about a character named Protagonist. The actually book Markson delivers is very different. The narrator intersperses his notes on his novel with anecdotes about a literary and artistic personalities. These start out gossipy and chatty and then lists of how someone committed suicide or died appear, and then lists of who was an anti-Semite, and then names associated with war, massacre, and the holocaust appear. The eternal beauty of art seems to be contrasted with frailty and ugliness of humanity, which gives the book an obsessive and dark edge while still retaining a bizarre humor. A cultural history of the western world imbued with morbidity and melancholy. Here are some quotes from the narrator commenting on what exactly this book is.
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?
A seminonfictional semifiction? Cubist?
Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?
In dramatic and not narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.
And the penultimate line of the book.
Nonlinear-discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
While not quite matching the emotion and focus of Wittengenstein’s Mistress this is still a performance of what Markson does best, an all too rare successful experimental fiction. Or whatever it is? A beautiful book is all I can say definitely.

[Guillermo Jiménez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leer este libro puede llevarte más tiempo del que te imagines.

Cada página está escrita como un laberinto en el cual los muros son en realidad invisibles y todo camino posible está dentro de tu cabeza.

El camino mismo sucede en tu mente.

En tu experiencia.

En tu cultura.

Las múltiples referencias son abismales porque exigen en el lector una concentración intensa. Una atención particularmente precisa. Incluso leyéndolo en su traducción al español, hay párrafos que requieren ser leídos en voz alta, para intentar sacar algo en claro del eco de la imagen propuesta.

Cada párrafo es parte de un rompecabezas distinto, es un paisaje hecho de piezas de diferentes rompecabezas. Es un laberinto interminable puesto que sabes que es un libro al que volverás.

Son epitafios imposibles.

¿Importa definir si es una novela o no es una novela?

Nuestra ignorancia más pura queda exhibida. Se manifiesta. Llega una página en la cual soltamos el Google de nuestra mano, reconocemos que somos incapaces de seguir todo el hilo, todas las referencias, todo nuestro conocimiento es vacuo, es impotente, es suicida.

Llegar a este libro como quien llega a través de una historia paralela. Un conocido. Alguien que comenta al respecto, y luego, te topas con un estante en la librería, y te da en la rodilla izquierda: "Markson", lees, "David Markson. La soledad del lector", lees.

Lo tomas. Buscas más de él y, obvio, no hay nada.

Nunca hay nada más.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of elegant, twisted mystery with no conclusion for the reader to solve--it's not a story or even a narrative per se as much as the straightforward listing of the "notes" of an otherwise nameless Reader, which consist of countless factoids and anecdotes and quotes as well as jottings of what is presumably to be an outline of a novel Reader is working on. But what initially seems to be completely disparate musings (which I found interesting enough simply on that level) slowly begin to form subtle associative patterns, quietly revealing the obsessions and neuroses of the Reader, chief among them tragic deaths of artistic figures (suicides in particular), madness and insanity, and charges of anti-Semitism. Through them all are traces and echoes of the Protagonist, the main character of the Reader's phantom text, which effectively question what a "literary character" can actually consist of (are mere hints of a personal history and interior struggles and basic description of their habits enough?).

I might be underrating this rather remarkable "novel," for I'm finding that it continues to haunt me, its unsolvable questions still lingering...

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Markson's panorama is that of the world of books and of tiny mosaics of historical fact. Though poignantly hinting at deep personal anguish as the organizing principal behind this miniaturist encyclopedia of bits and pieces, this amazing novel evokes all books and all lists and the powerful human lust for inclusiveness. It's as if he's saying, "read this book and know everything worth knowing." But the only thing left out is ... everything else -- which howls at the center of this book like the hurricane of death that sweeps all of us away in the end. I find this the great American novel of our times -- perversely so, heartrendingly so."
Said Richard Foreman.

[Milly Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué lectura más fantástica
Increíble

Textos sueltos y amarrados
Todos te dejan impactado

Pinceladas de realismo puro
¿O habrá invento alguno?

No lo sueltas desde que lo tomas
No te crees lo que lees

Me gustan tantas referencias al judaísmo
No me gustan tantas vidas que terminan pronto

¿Cómo ata cabos este hombre?
¿Cuánto tiempo dedica a este libro?

Quisiera escribir un libro así, sobre otro tema
Pero claro, nunca podré!

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.

Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

I have a narrative but you will be put to it to find it.

What is a novel in any case?

Let’s start with that final question, which is a quote lifted directly from the book (as are the three other quotes above it). I think there’s a fairly well-accepted convention that novels are at least partly fictional. Also, not always true, but mostly, novels have some kind of narrative progression - they tell a story. Reader’s Block pays scant heed to either of these. It consists mostly of a scattering of apparently random facts, quotes, names and sayings (so, not fiction then, and often no real narrative progression). It is often hard to make the connections. I was often put in mind of of what I think was or is called the Round Britain Quiz on the radio where teams are given cryptic clues and need to apply significant lateral thinking to make the associations and reach the answer.

For example, when a paragraph simply says "Geoffrey of Monmouth. Wace. Layamon. Marie de France. Chretien de Troyes. Malory.", do you know immediately what the connection is? I didn’t, but, as far as I can work out from Wikipedia, it is King Arthur. That said, I’m still not sure why King Arthur appears at this or any other point in the book!

Then if one paragraph simply says ,"The Gulf of La Spezia" and a few pages later another says "Swellfoot The Tyrant", do you connect them? (These are complete paragraphs I’m giving you, by the way!). I happened to look these two up and I think the connection is Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Yet somehow, the book does build something in your mind. It’s hard to say what or how. I think "how" might quite simply be that it is a work of genius!

Or does the absence of narrative progression plus that cross-circuited schematism possibly render it even a poem of sorts?

Mixed in with the random facts, names and quotes is a slowly developing story where a writer known only as Reader is mentally collating notes in preparation for writing a novel about a man called Protagonist. We get Markson’s thoughts, we get Reader’s thoughts. But it can be hard to tell which is which. Indeed, sometimes they overlap (I think).

The implication of what we are reading is that Reader wants to prepare his novel but a lifetime of literary details crowd into his mind and fight for space. At one point we read:

Reader and his mind full of clutter.

Gradually the quotes and names and facts seem to start to get darker. We learn a lot about artists of one kind or another who committed suicide. Or who died in one way or another. There is a repeating paragraph that simply says “x was an anti-Semite” where x is a new name each time. There is madness.

What we are left with, amidst the seemingly random recollections, is a picture of a ruined career as an author approaches the end of his life. In its very unconventional and often humourous way, it is an incredibly sad book.

For me, an interesting question is whether the advent of Google and Wikipedia (or, simply, the Internet) ruin this book. It was written before either existed, which makes the depth of knowledge Markson shows even more impressive. But did he actually intend that his readers should either know all the references he makes (unlikely, I think), or look them up before they moved on to the next one (also unlikely in my view)? You could take an approach where you make sure you understand each reference. If you had the rest of your life to dedicate to this book, you might just start to join up some of the dots and make sense of it. But I don’t think Markson intended this to be the approach. Depending on your background, you will make sense of a varying proportion of the references, but I don’t believe it matters because it is the overall impact that is more the point. I confess I did look up several facts and names that were new to me, but I fairly quickly came to a view that this wasn’t the intention and I ended up just letting the book wash over me. It is completely mesmerising!

Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty. Henry James said that Oscar Wilde was a fatuous fool. And an unclean beast.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

This book will not be to everyone’s taste. I know that. Many people will read the first few pages and simply walk away. However, I, for one, have immediately purchased the other three related Markson novels and I can’t wait to read them!

This Is Not a Novel
Vanishing Point
The Last Novel

Finally, here's an article that discusses the four books together and gives some useful background.

http://annex.wikia.com/wiki/David_Mar...

[Luna Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una escritura deliciosa. Eso sí: el libro entero —lleno de nombres, lleno de vidas, lleno de compañía— es una contradicción de su título :)

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was rather harsh on David Markson on reading his last book Springer’s Progress, but this time I was engrossed in yet another experimental novel of his: Reader’s Block. Reader, in this case, is the writer, suffering from the dreaded “Block”. We get glimpses of him as someone who has suffered losses of friends and family, of health and livelihood, and is all alone trying to write this novel.

Reader is distracted from developing his plot and characters by the random thoughts and trivia of all the books he has read over his lifetime. These one-liners drift in an out of Reader’s emerging novel, and they form the most interesting part of the book, at least for me. Did you know that Isaac Newton died a virgin, or that Thomas Hardy sold less than 20 copies each of his first three books, or that Virginia Woolf dismissed Ulysses as “an illiterate and underbred novel”, and Voltaire condemned the works of Shakespeare as a “dungheap”, that Nietzsche paid to publish Thus Spake Zarathusthra that went on to sell all of 40 copies—the list of trivia goes on...It is the most heartening collection of notes for struggling writers who feel alone and unappreciated—“You are not alone,” Reader seems to say,” others, great ones, have suffered this mortal coil too.”

Woven in between the vignettes is a record of painters, poets, musicians, and writers who committed suicide throughout history and of the artists – Jews and Gentiles alike – who in Reader’s opinion were anti-Semitic. These ominous signs foreshadow where Reader is heading with his novel.

Reader’s principal character, aptly called Protagonist, is a reflection of himself, sick and alone, who finds himself in two simultaneous scenes that he can’t seem to exit from: in a graveyard where he encounters a woman beside a grave, and in a house by the sea (which has a boarded cellar piled with boxes) where, while walking along the beach, he follows another woman. This is the extent of his novel, which ends like his life, as identifiable as his trivia selection—non-linear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage—in the wastebasket.

Initially, I wondered if one took out all the trivia, was there was really a novel here? Protagonist’s story only amounts to about half a dozen pages. So then, does one reward the author for the elaborately compiled collection of trivia (in an era prior to Google and other search engines)? Is there a code in the arrangement of these facts (Wikipedia seems to concur with their veracity)? Is this a lament to the futility of the artist’s life while he is alive? All the troubled and eccentric real-life people mentioned in the trivia became giants in their respective fields, especially after their deaths, although their lives were far from pleasant. Certainly much food for thought and fuel to continue the painful journey that is the life of the creative artist, although I would hate to end up in the wastebasket for all my effort!

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reluctant to say anything much about this book, as I prefer to keep it my own selfish secret. This is pretty much a literary and historical trivia book with a very thin strand of plot to it. The book would (almost) have survived without it. What appealed to me was the readerly devotion, the obsessiveness, how the 'Reader' character returned to various themes over and over, such as who was an anti-semite, and who died how. I thought it was marvelous and affirmative. My first Markson.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this melancholic collection of anecdotes and quotes (some attributed, many not) about/from writers, painters, composers, and philosophers, with a studied focus on death and antisemitism, interspersed with bits and pieces of raw material for a novel, in itself a novel? That is for the Reader to decide. After the first few pages I wasn't sure I cared to find out but then the cadence drew me in and carried me along. Not quite a five-star read for me, but quite close.