The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club and Other Parables

by Marvin Cohen

NY 1973 first edition. New Directions. Hardcover octavo. 128p. Fine in Very Near Fine dj. no owner marks; no faults.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Marvin Cohen was born in New York in 1931 and has had about 150 miscellaneous jobs.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

This assemblage of short fiction represents the two modes of Cohen’s writing: short ‘dialogues’ with titles such as ‘On the Clock’s Business and the Cloud’s Nature’ and ‘The World is Cluttered With Objects’ which operate in the manner of an Ionesco or Beckett script, turning language on itself with an eschatological hopelessness, revelling in the absurdity, rather than despairing. The longer stories such as ‘Saving Art for Tourism in One Tragic Lesson’ and ‘Love by Proxy of Solitude’ fare less well on the reader’s patience: Cohen’s knack for bending language into new shapes frustrates as one encounters his strange tics: his repetitions, random exclamations, and taking abstract nouns and bestowing them with abstract qualities (“Open to whisper of love’s quiet reason, cooling rampage of love’s sour fever?” / “Bugles blared out the creeping closer of danger’s crawling demon.”) His focus on creating abstractions locks the reader from the content and pulls the focus to Cohen’s dancing prose, pirouetting on each page into unique variations, often humorous, never beautiful. The strongest of the long pieces is the title one: the ‘Love Club’ is where a series of eloquent men congregate to make lyrical orations on love, rated by applause by the members: this sort of self-conscious winking at literature’s state of exhaustion is mingled with a sincere and surprising celebration of capital L-O-V-E love. The strongest material here showcases Cohen’s fondness for paradoxes and intellectual riddles.

[Peter]

If, in a fit of madness, my local parish magazine decided to publish an amateur surrealist issue, the contributions might read like this. It’s difficult and rather painful to select an example, but there are pages and pages of awkward prose that appears poorly translated to be from a language other – with much many exclamation marks and italics:

“In death, there’s lots of time on my hands.
Then here’s soap and water: go wash your hands!
Then I might disappear altogether!
Then stop complaining about time.
Oh, it’s not time itself that I mind: it’s just that there’s so much of it!”

The underlying ideas and themes are too often banal (or slightly embarrassing - a cockroach visits a PR consultant?) and the whole collection of fables, stories, and dialogues reads like a self-published book - though it isn’t.

The blurb says that Marvin Cohen is an American poet...but it seems to me that poets, whatever they choose to do, should have a facility for language that is simply absent here.

[Kendall Jones]

Dense but in a thought-provoking way. I'd read it again for sure

[R.K. Cowles]

3 1/2 stars