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Notecard Quartet
The Last Novel
In recent novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating," David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases."
Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.
As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.
Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.
As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.
200 pages, Paperback
First published March 16, 2007
36 people are currently reading
1975 people want to read
About the author
David Markson
24 books349 followersDavid 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.
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.
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February 6, 2025
The subject of The Last Novel is death and art… The story is focused on the virtual immortality that art provides to its creators.
There is an almost perfect description of the book given by the author himself:
In The Last Novel a creative mind exists in the inimical world and is surrounded by hostile and incompetent critics and the general public’s bad taste and global misunderstanding…
But to make situation more complicated creators dislike other artists’ works, envy and hate each other, put forth some inane ideas and are capable of making some preposterous judgments…
I believe David Markus belongs among those about whom Louis Aragon said:
“The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.”
There is an almost perfect description of the book given by the author himself:
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.
And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.
In The Last Novel a creative mind exists in the inimical world and is surrounded by hostile and incompetent critics and the general public’s bad taste and global misunderstanding…
Pigs at the pastry cart.
John Updike called critics.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.
Said John Osborne.
But to make situation more complicated creators dislike other artists’ works, envy and hate each other, put forth some inane ideas and are capable of making some preposterous judgments…
Future generations will regard Bob Dylan with the awe reserved for Blake, Whitman, Picasso and the like.
Said an otherwise seemingly rational writer named Jonathan Lethem.
I believe David Markus belongs among those about whom Louis Aragon said:
“The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.”
October 3, 2018
The Last Novel is a quick, easy, charming, sad, profound, surprising, humorous, angry, erudite, critical, clever, bitter, energetic, thought-provoking, challenging, heavy, light, experimental non-novel.
Novel? Perhaps the title is satirical. He calls it a novel, which may be intended as a form of challenge to "the novel" or more likely a joke and a sarcastic one at that. It's a book, certainly. But novel? It's like trying to force a Mormon through a keyhole. Why make "the novel" take on the burden of the avant-garde? Just call it a book. It's non-narrative. The small snippets from the "author" inserted throughout what is otherwise a series of quotations do not make a novel. They make for...brief author-character quotations. Whether the "character" is the same as "the author" is a dead question. Pointless! This character accretes some attributes: he is a writer; he is poor; agèd; lonely. Bitter. It becomes fictionalized simply by putting it into a book that isn't categorized as autobiography. (And even then, any biography, auto- or not, is subject to the hypocrisy of memory, wish fulfillment, and the best intentions.) But so what? A few snippets of fictionalized self-expression buried within something more akin to Roget's Thesaurus do not make for a novel. But they do make for a fascinating text.
Last? The irony (or intention?) that this was his last book before his death (did he know he'd die before writing another?) adds poignancy to the author-character's quips. To some extent, the title also expresses the author's ego. The title resonates between irony and sincerity (After ME, there is NO OTHER!) The Last Novel is not the death or even the far end of the novel, so it doesn't work very well as an intentional statement that nothing further can be done to deconstruct the novel's form because frankly I think this book crossed the line into the world outside the novel space. The title's meaning to me weighs more heavily on the side of Woody Allen. Self-mockery through arrogant assertion.
99% of the content in The Last Novel is a carefully curated collection of quotations (perhaps paraphrased in some cases?) and anecdotes regarding diverse historical figures and artists. The subject matter generally circles around repeated themes, the primary ones that stuck out to me are: religion, racism, criticism, and the value of art. His position around racism? Opposed. Religion? Also opposed. Mostly focuses on the hypocrisy and absurdity of religion and religious dogma. Here he expends the majority of his critique on Christianity and Islam with, to my mind, Judaism getting a pass. Most references to Jews are as victims, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. There's plenty to critique in the world of the Orthodox and Israel, so I'm going to say he's a little soft on the Jews. Criticism? He works both sides of the fence here. He sometimes quotes artists who hate on critics (and himself presents a backhand slap at critics claiming that most who read The Last Novel won't even notice the occasional character-author insertions), but then he goes on to quote authors and artists themselves being "critics" and harshing on other creators. Many of these one sentence critiques are quite hilarious. So I guess the point is that criticism is great...unless it's against you!
The theme that stood out the most prominently was around the value of art (both literary and otherwise). I might even go so far as to say that, primarily, The Last Novel is an homage to art and a challenge to the value of art. The poignancy that flickers in the background of all the anecdotes is the sense that Markson is wondering if the struggle was worth it. Will his writing be a worthy legacy? What is the point of his art after his death? Sometimes the anecdotes highlight the great value that some of us find in art. And in other cases, his selections highlight how easily art can be forgotten, destroyed, or become irrelevant.
Let me acknowledge that much of the greatness of this book is borrowed interest. But ... again I say, so what? I've never read such a brilliant collection of brilliant quotes. It's all in the curation. Let's call it a remix of history. What follows is a selection of various anecdotes to give you a taste of the style.
An impossible to categorize work, The Last Novel is thought provoking and such a fast read that you've no excuse for not giving it a try. Highly recommended.
Novel? Perhaps the title is satirical. He calls it a novel, which may be intended as a form of challenge to "the novel" or more likely a joke and a sarcastic one at that. It's a book, certainly. But novel? It's like trying to force a Mormon through a keyhole. Why make "the novel" take on the burden of the avant-garde? Just call it a book. It's non-narrative. The small snippets from the "author" inserted throughout what is otherwise a series of quotations do not make a novel. They make for...brief author-character quotations. Whether the "character" is the same as "the author" is a dead question. Pointless! This character accretes some attributes: he is a writer; he is poor; agèd; lonely. Bitter. It becomes fictionalized simply by putting it into a book that isn't categorized as autobiography. (And even then, any biography, auto- or not, is subject to the hypocrisy of memory, wish fulfillment, and the best intentions.) But so what? A few snippets of fictionalized self-expression buried within something more akin to Roget's Thesaurus do not make for a novel. But they do make for a fascinating text.
Last? The irony (or intention?) that this was his last book before his death (did he know he'd die before writing another?) adds poignancy to the author-character's quips. To some extent, the title also expresses the author's ego. The title resonates between irony and sincerity (After ME, there is NO OTHER!) The Last Novel is not the death or even the far end of the novel, so it doesn't work very well as an intentional statement that nothing further can be done to deconstruct the novel's form because frankly I think this book crossed the line into the world outside the novel space. The title's meaning to me weighs more heavily on the side of Woody Allen. Self-mockery through arrogant assertion.
99% of the content in The Last Novel is a carefully curated collection of quotations (perhaps paraphrased in some cases?) and anecdotes regarding diverse historical figures and artists. The subject matter generally circles around repeated themes, the primary ones that stuck out to me are: religion, racism, criticism, and the value of art. His position around racism? Opposed. Religion? Also opposed. Mostly focuses on the hypocrisy and absurdity of religion and religious dogma. Here he expends the majority of his critique on Christianity and Islam with, to my mind, Judaism getting a pass. Most references to Jews are as victims, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. There's plenty to critique in the world of the Orthodox and Israel, so I'm going to say he's a little soft on the Jews. Criticism? He works both sides of the fence here. He sometimes quotes artists who hate on critics (and himself presents a backhand slap at critics claiming that most who read The Last Novel won't even notice the occasional character-author insertions), but then he goes on to quote authors and artists themselves being "critics" and harshing on other creators. Many of these one sentence critiques are quite hilarious. So I guess the point is that criticism is great...unless it's against you!
The theme that stood out the most prominently was around the value of art (both literary and otherwise). I might even go so far as to say that, primarily, The Last Novel is an homage to art and a challenge to the value of art. The poignancy that flickers in the background of all the anecdotes is the sense that Markson is wondering if the struggle was worth it. Will his writing be a worthy legacy? What is the point of his art after his death? Sometimes the anecdotes highlight the great value that some of us find in art. And in other cases, his selections highlight how easily art can be forgotten, destroyed, or become irrelevant.
Let me acknowledge that much of the greatness of this book is borrowed interest. But ... again I say, so what? I've never read such a brilliant collection of brilliant quotes. It's all in the curation. Let's call it a remix of history. What follows is a selection of various anecdotes to give you a taste of the style.
An impossible to categorize work, The Last Novel is thought provoking and such a fast read that you've no excuse for not giving it a try. Highly recommended.
August 29, 2013
The final work from Markson concludes the foursome in fine fettle. To describe and defend these things as novels can be a beach—in terms of plot and character, we have Markson describing himself as he composes the collages, commenting on the collage (telling us what we are reading and coining a name for the form), around the addictive slips of trivia. Markson’s best achievement, some argue, is making the experimental as readable as a bestseller, but there has always been a receptive audience for literary trivia. Is Markson manipulating an unliterary form and shoehorning in cheap metafictional tricks to shift units? Nope. Markson had already sold out in the sixties with his comic westerns. His experimental works from Springer’s Progress onwards are fights with form and tussles with technique. His slimline prose in SP is a forerunner to the laconic opacity of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and these novels, and the proliferation and placement of the trivia to make the novels at once humorous, melancholy, and moving is Markson’s mastery. Sleep well, darling innovator.
May 23, 2024
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2023...
“Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?”
En esta ya cuarta obra en torno a la creación artística, quién había sido el Autor en la tercera novela (Punto de Fuga), aquí David Markson ya lo ha convertido en el Novelista y se refiere a él/a sí mismo continuamente como tal, salpicando el texto con recurrentes datos autobiográficos. Bromea sobre el hecho de que los críticos le critiquen que escriba el mismo libro una y otra vez, y de la misma forma advierte que por favor estos mismos críticos no contemplen solo esta serie como una tetralogía o Cuarteto sino que advierte que son obras que pueden ser leídas individualmente: La soledad del lector, Esta no es una novela, Punto de Fuga y esta última, The Last Novel.
"Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.
Like their grandly perspicacious uncles, who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already so.”
Si me habéis leido en las anteriores reseñas sobre la serie, ya sabréis la estructura en la que Markson construye esta serie: todo un laberinto de historias, referencias, anécdotas, muertes y citas en torno a la literatura, el arte, la filosofía, centrándose especialmente en establecer conexiones entre unos párrafos u otros. Conexiones muchas muy emocionantes, hermosísimas otras, divertidas o muy melancólicas, que a su vez están enlazadas con la narración subterránea en torno a la creación de una novela, especialmente centrándose en la soledad y aislamiento en el que se encuentra sumergido el artista durante la creación. Muchos de los temas recurrentes que ya aparecían en La Soledad del lector siguen estando aquí en "The Last Novel", la muerte, la enfermedad, la pobreza y la incomprensión a la que se ve abocado el artista que es fiel a sí mismo, y de eso debía saber David Markson un rato ya que las cuatro novelas están repletas de esos artistas y creadores solos e incomprendidos, que se vieron obligados a publicar sus propios libros, a cuyos funerales apenas fue nadie y o simplemente abocados a la locura por no poder transmitir su arte. De las cuatro novelas de la serie, aquí es donde se hace más palpable la vulnerabilidad y la fragilidad del artista, que ya en su vejez, se ve enfrentado a su mortalidad. Esta novela sería la última de sus obras ya que David Markson murió tres años después, en el 2010.
"Charidas, what is it like down there?
All darkness.
And resurrection?
All a lie.
- Quoth Callimachus.”
Durante las cuatro novelas dedicadas a esta serie, Markson construye una historia que vista en conjunto se podría resumir en una gran obra obsesionada en el conflicto del artista que escribe durante toda su vida a pesar de la indiferencia del público. El reconocimiento le llegó a Markson con La amante de Wittgenstein, su obra más reconocida, donde la narradora también se ve enfrentada a una obra que está escribiendo experimentando por primera vez con la misma fórmula que este Cuarteto. Sin embargo, es aquí en el Cuarteto donde David Markson se expone y se desnuda completamente: está ya viejo, cansado, solo, arruinado y enfermo, y sin embargo sigue leyendo obsesivamente para trasladar sus conocimientos a la escritura. Y a medida que se va acercando el final en este texto, reconocemos en este Novelista a alguien que todavía tiene mucho que decir a los lectores que vendrán.
“Agonies of galloping speechlessness.
Becket one talked of a writer’s block as.”
En The Last Novel, el Novelista está viviendo sus últimos días y sin embargo se sigue aferrando a la vida, al aprendizaje, a la curiosidad por seguir leyendo. Pero a medida que nos hemos ido empapando de estas cuatro novelas, Markson ha conseguido crear uno de los personajes más emocionantes que he leído en mucho tiempo: ese Lector/Escritor/Autor/Novelista que no solo está transmitiendo todos estos conocimientos adquiridos durante sus años como lector obsesivo sino que además nos ha transmitido en que consiste la creación de una obra, parte de tí mismo está en ella, siempre.
“Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?"
“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra."
El proceso de trabajo de David Markson consistía en escribir notas en fichas que iba colocando en cajas de zapatos. Como lector obsesivo que era, iba coleccionando estas notas y agrupándolas hasta que estuvieran listas para darle forma al texto en el que estaba trabajando. Cuando David Markson murió, no solo dejó estas cajitas con las notas agrupadas, sino una gran biblioteca de libros que fueron a parar a librería Strand de Nueva York, una librería que Markson había frecuentado mucho. Sus libros terminaron allí para ser vendidos como libros usados, algunos vendidos en el mercadillo al aire libre por un dólar. Un puñado de lectores y admiradores de Markson, los han ido buscando y reuniendo incluso usando plataformas para ayudar a completar esta biblioteca, y fueron donados a la librería Strand porque Markson así lo quiso, y tal como cuenta Alex Abramovich, quizás era eso lo que él pretendía, que sus libros estuvieran en circulación y vivos en vez de estar almacenados en alguna biblioteca cogiendo polvo.
"A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?”
Puede que lo más importante en David Markson, no es que fuera un soberbio escritor, avanzado a su tiempo, quizás por eso la incomprensión a la que se vio sometido, sino que lo que de verdad impresiona es que fue un lector obsesivo y dedicado completamente a la literatura. Y este Cuarteto lo demuestra completamente. ¡¡Y cuando pienso en los libros de David Markson perdidos por ahí a su muerte, llenos de notas personales, buscados, encontrados y reagrupados por los mismos lectores, qué maravillosa fantasía convertida en realidad!!!
“From the letters of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once leaving his study.
Sometimes it seems to me that my brain is on fire.”
“Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.
Still, I’m learning.”
“Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?”
En esta ya cuarta obra en torno a la creación artística, quién había sido el Autor en la tercera novela (Punto de Fuga), aquí David Markson ya lo ha convertido en el Novelista y se refiere a él/a sí mismo continuamente como tal, salpicando el texto con recurrentes datos autobiográficos. Bromea sobre el hecho de que los críticos le critiquen que escriba el mismo libro una y otra vez, y de la misma forma advierte que por favor estos mismos críticos no contemplen solo esta serie como una tetralogía o Cuarteto sino que advierte que son obras que pueden ser leídas individualmente: La soledad del lector, Esta no es una novela, Punto de Fuga y esta última, The Last Novel.
"Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.
Like their grandly perspicacious uncles, who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already so.”
Si me habéis leido en las anteriores reseñas sobre la serie, ya sabréis la estructura en la que Markson construye esta serie: todo un laberinto de historias, referencias, anécdotas, muertes y citas en torno a la literatura, el arte, la filosofía, centrándose especialmente en establecer conexiones entre unos párrafos u otros. Conexiones muchas muy emocionantes, hermosísimas otras, divertidas o muy melancólicas, que a su vez están enlazadas con la narración subterránea en torno a la creación de una novela, especialmente centrándose en la soledad y aislamiento en el que se encuentra sumergido el artista durante la creación. Muchos de los temas recurrentes que ya aparecían en La Soledad del lector siguen estando aquí en "The Last Novel", la muerte, la enfermedad, la pobreza y la incomprensión a la que se ve abocado el artista que es fiel a sí mismo, y de eso debía saber David Markson un rato ya que las cuatro novelas están repletas de esos artistas y creadores solos e incomprendidos, que se vieron obligados a publicar sus propios libros, a cuyos funerales apenas fue nadie y o simplemente abocados a la locura por no poder transmitir su arte. De las cuatro novelas de la serie, aquí es donde se hace más palpable la vulnerabilidad y la fragilidad del artista, que ya en su vejez, se ve enfrentado a su mortalidad. Esta novela sería la última de sus obras ya que David Markson murió tres años después, en el 2010.
"Charidas, what is it like down there?
All darkness.
And resurrection?
All a lie.
- Quoth Callimachus.”
Durante las cuatro novelas dedicadas a esta serie, Markson construye una historia que vista en conjunto se podría resumir en una gran obra obsesionada en el conflicto del artista que escribe durante toda su vida a pesar de la indiferencia del público. El reconocimiento le llegó a Markson con La amante de Wittgenstein, su obra más reconocida, donde la narradora también se ve enfrentada a una obra que está escribiendo experimentando por primera vez con la misma fórmula que este Cuarteto. Sin embargo, es aquí en el Cuarteto donde David Markson se expone y se desnuda completamente: está ya viejo, cansado, solo, arruinado y enfermo, y sin embargo sigue leyendo obsesivamente para trasladar sus conocimientos a la escritura. Y a medida que se va acercando el final en este texto, reconocemos en este Novelista a alguien que todavía tiene mucho que decir a los lectores que vendrán.
“Agonies of galloping speechlessness.
Becket one talked of a writer’s block as.”
En The Last Novel, el Novelista está viviendo sus últimos días y sin embargo se sigue aferrando a la vida, al aprendizaje, a la curiosidad por seguir leyendo. Pero a medida que nos hemos ido empapando de estas cuatro novelas, Markson ha conseguido crear uno de los personajes más emocionantes que he leído en mucho tiempo: ese Lector/Escritor/Autor/Novelista que no solo está transmitiendo todos estos conocimientos adquiridos durante sus años como lector obsesivo sino que además nos ha transmitido en que consiste la creación de una obra, parte de tí mismo está en ella, siempre.
“Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?"
“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
Said Richard Serra."
El proceso de trabajo de David Markson consistía en escribir notas en fichas que iba colocando en cajas de zapatos. Como lector obsesivo que era, iba coleccionando estas notas y agrupándolas hasta que estuvieran listas para darle forma al texto en el que estaba trabajando. Cuando David Markson murió, no solo dejó estas cajitas con las notas agrupadas, sino una gran biblioteca de libros que fueron a parar a librería Strand de Nueva York, una librería que Markson había frecuentado mucho. Sus libros terminaron allí para ser vendidos como libros usados, algunos vendidos en el mercadillo al aire libre por un dólar. Un puñado de lectores y admiradores de Markson, los han ido buscando y reuniendo incluso usando plataformas para ayudar a completar esta biblioteca, y fueron donados a la librería Strand porque Markson así lo quiso, y tal como cuenta Alex Abramovich, quizás era eso lo que él pretendía, que sus libros estuvieran en circulación y vivos en vez de estar almacenados en alguna biblioteca cogiendo polvo.
"A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles, and is there one who understands me?”
Puede que lo más importante en David Markson, no es que fuera un soberbio escritor, avanzado a su tiempo, quizás por eso la incomprensión a la que se vio sometido, sino que lo que de verdad impresiona es que fue un lector obsesivo y dedicado completamente a la literatura. Y este Cuarteto lo demuestra completamente. ¡¡Y cuando pienso en los libros de David Markson perdidos por ahí a su muerte, llenos de notas personales, buscados, encontrados y reagrupados por los mismos lectores, qué maravillosa fantasía convertida en realidad!!!
“From the letters of Balzac’s, in his mid-thirties, recording that in a fit of creative frenzy he had just spent twenty-six consecutive days without once leaving his study.
Sometimes it seems to me that my brain is on fire.”
“Ancora imparo, said Michelangelo at eighty-seven.
Still, I’m learning.”
August 8, 2017
I had this whole thing planned where I was going to do all the reviews of the tetralogy aping the style. Yeah, original. I opt instead for sincerity, always a bad idea.
Markson's quartet fucked me up in the best possible way. It is one of (the?) most original approaches to the novel that I've seen in a long time. What came across to me as a bit of a cheap trick in Witt congeals in these books and demonstrates the deep humanity of the Man-As-Reader. It's beyond brilliant and I've disappeared completely into his corpus. Each book ends with a damn humdinger of a mic-drop and leaves you a bit shell-shocked. I mean that as a compliment.
Thank you, David. The four were a balm, a mind-salve of comfort, when I needed it. Awe and wonder and star-eyed: never gets old.
Markson's quartet fucked me up in the best possible way. It is one of (the?) most original approaches to the novel that I've seen in a long time. What came across to me as a bit of a cheap trick in Witt congeals in these books and demonstrates the deep humanity of the Man-As-Reader. It's beyond brilliant and I've disappeared completely into his corpus. Each book ends with a damn humdinger of a mic-drop and leaves you a bit shell-shocked. I mean that as a compliment.
Thank you, David. The four were a balm, a mind-salve of comfort, when I needed it. Awe and wonder and star-eyed: never gets old.
January 25, 2025
My copy was deaccessioned by the Grand Rapids, Michigan, public library, which seems almost too apropos given the persistent focus on the ephemerality of acclaim.
January 24, 2024
And with that, Markson’s Notecard Quartet comes to an end. It has been a supremely enjoyable ride, and I would not be surprised if I came back to them much sooner than I currently anticipate. Death is ever present, and death is here. More concrete than ever, perhaps, because the dates of death are the focus. Authors, composers, otherwise famous intellectual figures. And this was the last novel, after all. How bleak.
Here are some of my favourite parts:
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate.
But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one’s stomach when hungry.
This boy will come to nothing.
Said Freud’s father.
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.
At twenty-two, William Faulkner was a special student for a semester at the University of Mississippi — and was given a grade of D in English.
Balzac had written eighty-five novels in his Comédie humaine — with fifty more already planned — before dying at the age of fifty-one.
The next best thing to God.
Edna O’Brien called literature.
The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.
Announced Petronius.
You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.
Flaubert put it.
Pausing to speculate about the plumbing of the era — and wondering how frequently Shakespeare might have bathed.
Or even two centuries later, Jane Austen.
The woman named Mercy Rogers, who in the early 1920s when the subject was relatively new, read practically every available book on psychoanalysis — and then put her head into the oven.
Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
Says a line in Slaughterhouse-Five.
People who more immediately think of Meursault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.
Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.
John von Neumann was twenty-nine when he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — for life.
The Hiroshima survivor who remembered rushing into the street amid the chaos and tripping over someone’s severed head.
And hysterically calling out Excuse me.
Wondering how things worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. Come noon, might von Neumann casually poke his head into Einstein’s office and ask if he felt like lunch?
If you think you understand it, that only shows you don’t know the first thing about it.
Said Niels Bohr re quantum mechanics.
Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.
We cease to wonder at what we understand.
Said Johnson.
Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.
What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.
I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Said Aldous Huxley.
A Cézanne critic spoke of. The two younger brothers of William and Henry James — both of whom were wounded while fighting for the Union during the Civil War.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck said.
The word nihilism.
Coined by Turgenev, for use in Fathers and Sons.
Freud’s addiction to cocaine.
Sherlock Holmes’.
It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.
Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.
He who writes for fools will always find a large audience.
Said Schopenhauer.
Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.
Which is to say, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.
We are told by Dr. Watson about Holmes.
Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.
Said Borges.
John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:
Frankly, no.
The novels of Susan Sontag:
Self-indulgent overrated crap, the Kevin Costner character calls them in the movie Bull Durham.
Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.
Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.
The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.
Said François Mauriac.
So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.
And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.
Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Here are some of my favourite parts:
Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.
How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate.
But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one’s stomach when hungry.
This boy will come to nothing.
Said Freud’s father.
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.
At twenty-two, William Faulkner was a special student for a semester at the University of Mississippi — and was given a grade of D in English.
Balzac had written eighty-five novels in his Comédie humaine — with fifty more already planned — before dying at the age of fifty-one.
The next best thing to God.
Edna O’Brien called literature.
The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading.
Announced Petronius.
You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one.
Flaubert put it.
Pausing to speculate about the plumbing of the era — and wondering how frequently Shakespeare might have bathed.
Or even two centuries later, Jane Austen.
The woman named Mercy Rogers, who in the early 1920s when the subject was relatively new, read practically every available book on psychoanalysis — and then put her head into the oven.
Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
Says a line in Slaughterhouse-Five.
People who more immediately think of Meursault as a character in Camus rather than as a dry white Burgundy.
Not until a year after his burial at Sag Harbor did someone notice that the title of The Recognitions was misspelled on the back of William Gaddis’s headstone.
John von Neumann was twenty-nine when he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — for life.
The Hiroshima survivor who remembered rushing into the street amid the chaos and tripping over someone’s severed head.
And hysterically calling out Excuse me.
Wondering how things worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. Come noon, might von Neumann casually poke his head into Einstein’s office and ask if he felt like lunch?
If you think you understand it, that only shows you don’t know the first thing about it.
Said Niels Bohr re quantum mechanics.
Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.
We cease to wonder at what we understand.
Said Johnson.
Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.
What the dickens, lower case — which has nothing to do with the author of Great Expectations.
I cannot tell what the dickens his name is, says someone in The Merry Wives of Windsor, on stage by 1601.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Said Aldous Huxley.
A Cézanne critic spoke of. The two younger brothers of William and Henry James — both of whom were wounded while fighting for the Union during the Civil War.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck said.
The word nihilism.
Coined by Turgenev, for use in Fathers and Sons.
Freud’s addiction to cocaine.
Sherlock Holmes’.
It may be essential to Harold Bloom that his audience not know quite what he is talking about.
Commenteth Alfred Kazin — pointing out other immortal phrasings altogether.
He who writes for fools will always find a large audience.
Said Schopenhauer.
Freud’s first publication in English — via the Hogarth Press.
Which is to say, by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Of contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics he appeared to know next to nothing.
We are told by Dr. Watson about Holmes.
Reality is under no obligation to be interesting.
Said Borges.
John Steinbeck, asked if he felt he had in fact deserved his own Nobel Prize:
Frankly, no.
The novels of Susan Sontag:
Self-indulgent overrated crap, the Kevin Costner character calls them in the movie Bull Durham.
Ernest Hemingway’s entire front-line service in Italy in World War I, before he was wounded by shell fragments, had added up to less than one week.
Handing out cigarettes and chocolate at a Red Cross canteen.
The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them.
Said François Mauriac.
So debilitatingly paranoid was Kurt Gödel in his later years, over imagined plots to poison him, that he essentially refused to eat.
And died weighing no more than sixty-five pounds.
Trying to think of a single book by a significant writer as transparently spurious throughout as A Moveable Feast.
The old man who will not laugh is a fool.
December 26, 2017
Tosh and Twaddle
It was a sad mistake to read the last instalment of David Markson’s quartet straight after the third. Not only because it shows a modest talent deteriorating into an immodest talent, but because it displays what is worst about white male American Post-modernism.
“Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.” (2, 3, 93, 190) Author (now called Novelist) has lost whatever sense of humour he might once have had, and is now bitter and twisted, snarky and scornful:
Oh, You Sentimental Fool
Markson isn't content to describe his achievement as a personal or unique style, it’s an entire “genre”. The hubris is remarkable.
Like most authors on the list of great American Post-modernists, he has an eye on his status. He is overly confident of his own supremacy and mastery. He resents the popular or financial success of other writers. Because his audience is so tiny, he must content himself with posterity (rather than prosperity):
So Novelist sits at his desk, “impatiently awaiting acclaim.” (75)
And he’s certain that time is on the side of his reputation.
Familiar Hyperbole
So are his Post-modern critics and readers. It’s their job to laud the writers with extravagant praise and hyperblurbole. For, powerless in the real world, they are guardians of posterity.
It’s interesting to explore the significance of the fact that “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (a stylistic predecessor to the quartet) was rejected by 54 publishers before being accepted by Dalkey Archive Press. If you assume that four of the rejection slips came from mainstream publishers, it can be inferred that the other 50 might have been rejections from independent publishers.
In the End, in the End
It’s also worth noting that Dalkey Archive Press published “Reader's Block” (the first volume in the quartet, and the only one I haven't read yet, as at the date of this review), but none of the other three. Did it reject them or were they not offered to it? What does that say about the level of mutual trust between author and publisher? Is the offer of one of his novels an invitation to participate in a loss-making venture that deprives the publisher of funds with which to publish other, potentially more deserving independent authors? Who can blame any publisher for declining the invitation? Insolvency is hardly to be recommended in a publisher that hopes to pay royalties to its stable. Rejections aren’t just made on aesthetic grounds (by "unintelligent" editors and publishers), as Markson would have you believe.
Embarrassing Denouement, N'est-ce Pas?
Markson is constantly at war with his critics:
The thought crossed my mind when reading a previous volume, but after checking a few, I stopped, preferring to draw attention to his own lack of innovation or invention instead.
This judgement is an inevitable consequence of reading any two of the quartet. Not only do passages in each book duplicate those in at least one other (one actually appears in all four volumes), but there is constant repetition internally within each volume, some of which is acknowledged by Novelist:
Quite Operatic in Its Self-Disgust
Like “the Great Eviscerator” (Gilbert Sorrentino), Novelist frequently attacks other writers he dislikes or envies (William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bob Dylan). Sometimes he resorts to snark, bemoaning that he is “old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.” (79)
Novelist appears to derive pleasure from a critic’s attack on another writer, whether he sympathises with the critic or the target. Much of the criticism is equally legitimate when reflected back on Markson himself.
Reverse Apocrypha
SOUNDTRACK:
It was a sad mistake to read the last instalment of David Markson’s quartet straight after the third. Not only because it shows a modest talent deteriorating into an immodest talent, but because it displays what is worst about white male American Post-modernism.
“Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke.” (2, 3, 93, 190) Author (now called Novelist) has lost whatever sense of humour he might once have had, and is now bitter and twisted, snarky and scornful:
“His last book. All of which also then gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases. Which is to say, writing in his own personal genre, as it were.” (4)
“Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.” (51)
Oh, You Sentimental Fool
Markson isn't content to describe his achievement as a personal or unique style, it’s an entire “genre”. The hubris is remarkable.
Like most authors on the list of great American Post-modernists, he has an eye on his status. He is overly confident of his own supremacy and mastery. He resents the popular or financial success of other writers. Because his audience is so tiny, he must content himself with posterity (rather than prosperity):
“Time is the only critic without ambition.”
So Novelist sits at his desk, “impatiently awaiting acclaim.” (75)
And he’s certain that time is on the side of his reputation.
Familiar Hyperbole
So are his Post-modern critics and readers. It’s their job to laud the writers with extravagant praise and hyperblurbole. For, powerless in the real world, they are guardians of posterity.
It’s interesting to explore the significance of the fact that “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (a stylistic predecessor to the quartet) was rejected by 54 publishers before being accepted by Dalkey Archive Press. If you assume that four of the rejection slips came from mainstream publishers, it can be inferred that the other 50 might have been rejections from independent publishers.
In the End, in the End
It’s also worth noting that Dalkey Archive Press published “Reader's Block” (the first volume in the quartet, and the only one I haven't read yet, as at the date of this review), but none of the other three. Did it reject them or were they not offered to it? What does that say about the level of mutual trust between author and publisher? Is the offer of one of his novels an invitation to participate in a loss-making venture that deprives the publisher of funds with which to publish other, potentially more deserving independent authors? Who can blame any publisher for declining the invitation? Insolvency is hardly to be recommended in a publisher that hopes to pay royalties to its stable. Rejections aren’t just made on aesthetic grounds (by "unintelligent" editors and publishers), as Markson would have you believe.
Embarrassing Denouement, N'est-ce Pas?
Markson is constantly at war with his critics:
“Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations - without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.” (69)
The thought crossed my mind when reading a previous volume, but after checking a few, I stopped, preferring to draw attention to his own lack of innovation or invention instead.
“Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over. Like their grandly perspicacious uncles - who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.” (104)
This judgement is an inevitable consequence of reading any two of the quartet. Not only do passages in each book duplicate those in at least one other (one actually appears in all four volumes), but there is constant repetition internally within each volume, some of which is acknowledged by Novelist:
“And which Novelist is quite certain he has quoted before in his life.” (185)
“Which Novelist finds himself several times repeating…” (188)
Quite Operatic in Its Self-Disgust
Like “the Great Eviscerator” (Gilbert Sorrentino), Novelist frequently attacks other writers he dislikes or envies (William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bob Dylan). Sometimes he resorts to snark, bemoaning that he is “old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.” (79)
Novelist appears to derive pleasure from a critic’s attack on another writer, whether he sympathises with the critic or the target. Much of the criticism is equally legitimate when reflected back on Markson himself.
Reverse Apocrypha
“The final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.” (37)
“His ferocious egoism revolts me every time I think of it.” (Wife left behind) (19)
“A boring [work] full of quotations.” (59)
“That’s all there is, those little things?” (155)
“There was nothing to be found in [the work] except pretense and platitudes.” (81)
“Two things you can say about each of the books in the tetralogy: They are short; they are not short enough.” (119)
It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind. (T. S. Eliot) (7)
“Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless.” (37)
“Slapdash, banal, repetitious, self-contradictory, mendacious, odious.” (122)
“Ill-written, mechanical.” (143)
“Self-indulgent overrated crap.” (148)
SOUNDTRACK:
Read
November 17, 2020What happens when a novelist writes a book so poor that it not only fails in itself, but reveals the novelist's other works as failures?
I am so sorry I read this. After reading "Wittgenstein's Mistress," I was eager to see what else Markson had done. This novel, judged just for itself, is extremely weak: it depends on a ploy, which Markson announces: he will keep himself out of the book as much as possible, and fill it instead with facts and anecdotes about painters, composers, and writers. But the few passages about "Novelist," as he calls himself, seem random - and not in an aleatoric, combinatorial, Oulipean, or Cagean sense. They are simply weakly imagined. The anecdotes, which fill the book, are often stories about unrecognized fame: a plausible but unpromising and uninteresting subject for an aging, relatively unrecognized novelist. Others are stocks-in-trade of the arts and humanities.
(I am neither objecting to Markson's erudition or praising it. I seem to write this a lot: but any review that refers to an author's erudition is going to be off the mark, because the imaginary ideal reader should be the one to whom the erudite references are all known, and therefore not erudite. The question then remains: are they interesting references?)
So the book itself is disappointing, but I am sadder that this book partly ruined Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress" for me, because it shows that the desperate self-control of the narrator in that book is actually an easy fabrication comprised of strings of random references. The Wittgensteinian feel of that book depends very much on the illusion that there is an "investigation," in Wittgenstein's sense, of whatever facts the narrator can remember. But "The Last Novel" shows that the parallels, resonances, and recurring references are loosely done and mainly fortuitous. In addition -- most damaging for me -- the few references to Wittgenstein in "The Last Novel" show Markson knows, actually, very little about Wittgenstein, so little that I doubt he even intended the narrator in "Wittgenstein's Mistress" to be exploring the kind of "investigation," or experiencing the kind of linguistic and logical isolation, that I take it Wittgenstein experienced. On p. 44, for example, the "Novelist" notes
"Wittgenstein's shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual consecration of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance."
Aside from the dubiousness of that first sentence (what about architecture? what about Wittgenstein's patronage of Trakl?) the second sentence betrays a deep misunderstanding. Wittgenstein loved detective comics (not even just "stories") because they were antidotes to thinking. He would have hated those sentences.
What happens when a novelist writes a book so poor it infects and undermines his better work? Readers are compelled to try to forget what they've read.
I am so sorry I read this. After reading "Wittgenstein's Mistress," I was eager to see what else Markson had done. This novel, judged just for itself, is extremely weak: it depends on a ploy, which Markson announces: he will keep himself out of the book as much as possible, and fill it instead with facts and anecdotes about painters, composers, and writers. But the few passages about "Novelist," as he calls himself, seem random - and not in an aleatoric, combinatorial, Oulipean, or Cagean sense. They are simply weakly imagined. The anecdotes, which fill the book, are often stories about unrecognized fame: a plausible but unpromising and uninteresting subject for an aging, relatively unrecognized novelist. Others are stocks-in-trade of the arts and humanities.
(I am neither objecting to Markson's erudition or praising it. I seem to write this a lot: but any review that refers to an author's erudition is going to be off the mark, because the imaginary ideal reader should be the one to whom the erudite references are all known, and therefore not erudite. The question then remains: are they interesting references?)
So the book itself is disappointing, but I am sadder that this book partly ruined Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress" for me, because it shows that the desperate self-control of the narrator in that book is actually an easy fabrication comprised of strings of random references. The Wittgensteinian feel of that book depends very much on the illusion that there is an "investigation," in Wittgenstein's sense, of whatever facts the narrator can remember. But "The Last Novel" shows that the parallels, resonances, and recurring references are loosely done and mainly fortuitous. In addition -- most damaging for me -- the few references to Wittgenstein in "The Last Novel" show Markson knows, actually, very little about Wittgenstein, so little that I doubt he even intended the narrator in "Wittgenstein's Mistress" to be exploring the kind of "investigation," or experiencing the kind of linguistic and logical isolation, that I take it Wittgenstein experienced. On p. 44, for example, the "Novelist" notes
"Wittgenstein's shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual consecration of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance."
Aside from the dubiousness of that first sentence (what about architecture? what about Wittgenstein's patronage of Trakl?) the second sentence betrays a deep misunderstanding. Wittgenstein loved detective comics (not even just "stories") because they were antidotes to thinking. He would have hated those sentences.
What happens when a novelist writes a book so poor it infects and undermines his better work? Readers are compelled to try to forget what they've read.
May 4, 2015
And the sentence structures.
Reading can never be the same again.
Reader's Block, this is not a novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel.
Mr. Markson induces a meditative state thorough an assemblage of 'collage like' fragments.
I repeat.
Reading can never be the same again.
Reader's Block, this is not a novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel.
Mr. Markson induces a meditative state thorough an assemblage of 'collage like' fragments.
I repeat.
Read
June 9, 2014Proposition #1: Nearly all readers of The Last Novel have read Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress.
Proposition #2: Most of those readers will have read Wittgenstein's Mistress because David Foster Wallace thought it was cool beans.
Proposition #3: Eagle-eyed readers of this short review may recognize that I'm shittily and superficially cribbing the style of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (which [natch] plays heavily into the style of the aforementioned Markson novel and the thought of the late Mr. Wallace), which I justify by saying I've never read the Tractatus because I have other things to do. Sometimes.
Proposition #4: The Last Novel was indeed a last novel, written by a David Markson who was not widely read, like the novelist in the novel writing his last novel, and whose body was found in his New York apartment.
Proposition #5: The same assault of aphorisms, witticisms, and brief autobiographical notes that shape Wittgenstein's Mistress shape The Last Novel. So I wasn't surprised, but I was amused by the shit Markson has his presumably telegraphed-in self say.
Proposition #6: Because of the similarity, I wasn't wowed. And there was none of the weird, abstract setpiece that I loved about Wittgenstein's Mistress, the empty seaside house...
Proposition #7: So while I enjoyed every wee paragraph, I was bracing myself for a disappointing ending.
Proposition #8: And then, Markson stares death in the face, and I can feel my backbone a little bit, the way I felt when I read Thomas Browne's Urn-Buriall, folded my hands, and looked at my reflection in the glass.
Proposition #2: Most of those readers will have read Wittgenstein's Mistress because David Foster Wallace thought it was cool beans.
Proposition #3: Eagle-eyed readers of this short review may recognize that I'm shittily and superficially cribbing the style of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (which [natch] plays heavily into the style of the aforementioned Markson novel and the thought of the late Mr. Wallace), which I justify by saying I've never read the Tractatus because I have other things to do. Sometimes.
Proposition #4: The Last Novel was indeed a last novel, written by a David Markson who was not widely read, like the novelist in the novel writing his last novel, and whose body was found in his New York apartment.
Proposition #5: The same assault of aphorisms, witticisms, and brief autobiographical notes that shape Wittgenstein's Mistress shape The Last Novel. So I wasn't surprised, but I was amused by the shit Markson has his presumably telegraphed-in self say.
Proposition #6: Because of the similarity, I wasn't wowed. And there was none of the weird, abstract setpiece that I loved about Wittgenstein's Mistress, the empty seaside house...
Proposition #7: So while I enjoyed every wee paragraph, I was bracing myself for a disappointing ending.
Proposition #8: And then, Markson stares death in the face, and I can feel my backbone a little bit, the way I felt when I read Thomas Browne's Urn-Buriall, folded my hands, and looked at my reflection in the glass.
October 28, 2012
The breeziest book of the author tetralogy, where most of the references that make up the text are either attributed or put into immediate context. Despite endings and death looming large throughout, this is probably the funniest book of the bunch. More sports this time, too -- including the great Wayne Gretzky quote: "I don't skate to where the puck is, but where it's going to be." A pretty good summation of Markson's visionary series. If you haven't read these yet, time to catch up!
Read
May 27, 2025I've reviewed a different edition here .
November 29, 2007
this is a little strange: i saw markson read a month ago at the 92nd Y. i've loved him for a long time, partly out of a romanticized notion that these books portray of the long-suffering and isolated genius. i was a little surprised to see not someone who was particularly cranky, but someone almost describable as cheery... something struck me: that the protag of these books is definitely a character, perhaps an exaggeration (vonnegut evidently called up markson after the last one, concerned about markson's 'mental condition') but definitely something markson *uses* (as he may also don, of course, some role when reading out in the public) -- but my sense was that these characters are more just that, characters, than works of autobiographical fiction. ...on the other hand, the *rest* of the book is intensely autobiographical, the detritus and gems -- the graph, the mark -- of a reading life. so i discovered that markson is both more and less artificial than i had assumed...
i also realized *how much* he is editing and sequencing, even more than i'd thought -- they gave out a page of his heavily marked up manuscript -- to create his music(al) of the artist's life.
(i also had the thought, easily wrong and maybe silly to mention, that markson was not, had not been, at least in this last decade, critically or socially or financially ignored. at least not as much as i'd assumed. but that invitations to the right parties and publications (though maybe not grants) had indeed come his way, and that maybe out of stubbornness but more out of some form of integrity, he had refused them. and done so in some kind of shoulder-shrugging automatic way--kind of like how bunuel describes the morality of the surrealist, i.e. impossible to describe but very judging and very exact.)
reading THE LAST NOVEL has all kinds of pleasures: the stumbling on the familiar, the echoes of course, feelings of smugness and admiration for what respectively you knew and what markson knows, the terrible (and yet somehow expectedly so) difficulties of being an artist and of aging both. it goes by fast and can be happily reread.
(here's something: i'd once thought up a personal category of experience i dubbed the 'trivially profound' and had placed there things like sunsets and mountains, those experiences of the ineffable that are deep but with which you can do nothing. those experiences just are, almost impossible to even comment upon. then i realized maybe the word 'trivially' was both redundant and misleading. all profundity is un-useable in this way -- thus perhaps trivial, but still of course vital, foundational, basic... markson's work might be like this for me.) (what, of course, auden means too when he says poetry makes nothing happen.)
he said he had vowed after the last one not to do another--but did somehow anyway... that he had one more, at least, in him.
i also realized *how much* he is editing and sequencing, even more than i'd thought -- they gave out a page of his heavily marked up manuscript -- to create his music(al) of the artist's life.
(i also had the thought, easily wrong and maybe silly to mention, that markson was not, had not been, at least in this last decade, critically or socially or financially ignored. at least not as much as i'd assumed. but that invitations to the right parties and publications (though maybe not grants) had indeed come his way, and that maybe out of stubbornness but more out of some form of integrity, he had refused them. and done so in some kind of shoulder-shrugging automatic way--kind of like how bunuel describes the morality of the surrealist, i.e. impossible to describe but very judging and very exact.)
reading THE LAST NOVEL has all kinds of pleasures: the stumbling on the familiar, the echoes of course, feelings of smugness and admiration for what respectively you knew and what markson knows, the terrible (and yet somehow expectedly so) difficulties of being an artist and of aging both. it goes by fast and can be happily reread.
(here's something: i'd once thought up a personal category of experience i dubbed the 'trivially profound' and had placed there things like sunsets and mountains, those experiences of the ineffable that are deep but with which you can do nothing. those experiences just are, almost impossible to even comment upon. then i realized maybe the word 'trivially' was both redundant and misleading. all profundity is un-useable in this way -- thus perhaps trivial, but still of course vital, foundational, basic... markson's work might be like this for me.) (what, of course, auden means too when he says poetry makes nothing happen.)
he said he had vowed after the last one not to do another--but did somehow anyway... that he had one more, at least, in him.
August 16, 2016
what i learned from this book: 1.popular conceptions of great "masterworks" of art are continually evolving. 2.concerning other artists' work, one can hear the singing of highest praises or the most brutal dirges by other artists where judgements are determined by the strongest jealousies imaginable...
the novelist's constant effort to size up his career through comparison to the "greats," saturates every page, paying considerable attn. to how it is that so many artists completed enviable oeuvres in their youth, while others only began in their 70's. many artists' demonstrable conviction to their work appears as footnotes throughout the novel by way of smattered quotes and scaffolded historical semi-fiction blurbages. here are some randomly generated quotes and blurbages:
"People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.
Said Elliot" (Markson, 2007,p.55).
"If you are going to make a book end badly, Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out, it must end badly from the beginning--Such as by mentioning an eighth-story roof in its very first paragraphs.
And which should presumably call to mind Chekhov's admonition that if a pistol is displayed in a first act, it had damned well better be fired by the last" (Markson, 2007, p.92).
"Auden's notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.
But Henry James, never" (Markson, 2007, p.156).
"Let me alone. Good day.
Said Tom Paine--to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when hey lay dying.
How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.
Said Publilius Syrus" (Markson, 2007, p. 176).
enjoyed best at a leisurely pace.
the novelist's constant effort to size up his career through comparison to the "greats," saturates every page, paying considerable attn. to how it is that so many artists completed enviable oeuvres in their youth, while others only began in their 70's. many artists' demonstrable conviction to their work appears as footnotes throughout the novel by way of smattered quotes and scaffolded historical semi-fiction blurbages. here are some randomly generated quotes and blurbages:
"People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.
Said Elliot" (Markson, 2007,p.55).
"If you are going to make a book end badly, Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out, it must end badly from the beginning--Such as by mentioning an eighth-story roof in its very first paragraphs.
And which should presumably call to mind Chekhov's admonition that if a pistol is displayed in a first act, it had damned well better be fired by the last" (Markson, 2007, p.92).
"Auden's notion that one could readily imagine a young Tolstoy or Stendhal or Dostoievsky in a bar fight.
But Henry James, never" (Markson, 2007, p.156).
"Let me alone. Good day.
Said Tom Paine--to the two clergymen who had contrived to make their way to his bedside when hey lay dying.
How long the days for the wretched, how swift for the favored.
Said Publilius Syrus" (Markson, 2007, p. 176).
enjoyed best at a leisurely pace.
January 22, 2008
The word I said as I finished this today at lunch in the Bourse in Philly was "perfect." That is, it ends perfectly, so smoothly. It's all these short quotes and bits of high-art trivia, dates of death etc, about artists, musicians, poets, writers, and the occasional athlete (Yaz, Gretsky)and politicians, mixed in with bits about the Novelist. It also intermittently tells you what the Novelist is up to with the book you're reading, for example: "For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax." There are maybe five of these lines, plus a funny related thing about murdering a cat. He also occasionaly pokes at Dale Peck and Damien Hirst et al . . . Mainly, thanks to the form, Markson's work is ideal bathroom reading, subway reading, quick/distracted lunch-break reading, or reading while watching a televised sporting event. But I also found that the more I committed to reading this one as I neared the end (putting aside "Anna K." for a day), the more I learned about the poor old avant-garde artist behind the pages composing this theme-and-variation compilation of high-art trivia. The more I committed to it, also, the more it was funny (maybe a dozen outloud laughs in the book?) and sad, especially toward the end. What more can you ask from something as formally and interestingly individuated (yet absolutely ordered) as this? Again, this book is VERY MUCH RECOMMENDED for those who keep books in the bathroom, if only because it taught me this palindrome: "Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?"
April 17, 2017
David Markson has a dark sense of humor. His last novel is called THE LAST NOVEL, he died a few years after its publication in 2010. I think it’s the fifth novel that he’s written in a genre of his own creation, something he’d been working on since the late 1980s, a sort of collage of facts that creates a narrative — not linked stories, but more emotional connections holding the whole thing tenuously together. The facts are akin to tweets, short bursts of trivia, sometimes funny, other times not. The ones in this novel revolve around ideas of death, artistic lives and recognition or the lack thereof and the loneliness of old age. Though the narrator is only referred to as Novelist, a portrait develops, one that isn’t templated by old constructs of plot, character, setting, etc., but something original. Stories are, after all, how we maneuver through and make sense of life, but they’re complete fabrications, and too often we forget that we’re the author and we can edit as we see fit. Markson isn’t trying to deny our hardwired cognizance, but by being still and letting the mind wander through the ephemera we collect over a lifetime, he has produced a new form. It’s just another form, yes, but it’s a fun and maybe more honest one.
July 14, 2013
Imagine a person came up to you and started talking in one-sentence paragraphs.
Rather than following the normal pattern of speech in which data is parsed into fragments, short exclamations, and longer asides, everything they said consisted of a one sentence point.
Assuming that such a person could reference Ancient Greece, Osamu Noguchi, and Virginia Woolf, such an achievement might be actually fairly impressive.
Some people think that grammatical conventions exist for a reason, inviting a discourse and emphasis of ideas based on the content of the referred to topics.
Possibly the very attempt to break convention itself contains some aesthetic merit.
Individuals following highly idiosyncratic patterns are sometimes believed to be schizotypical.
The relationship between language, thoughts, ideas, history, convention, knowledge, and mental illness remains disputed and argued over.
---
Okay, there's the 7 sentence mock-up of David Markson, lifetime New Yorker, distinct and 'genre specific to the artist' meta-style. The bad news is that to a degree, what Markson is doing is kind of rude. It's patronizing to consider conversation or the writer-reader relationship to be a sort of machine-gun succession of ejaculations poured out one didactic sentence at a time on the hapless reader. Most of us speak in short sentences. At times, given the complexity of ideas, we rely on compound sentences. Meaning from short phrases. If a person sees you merely as a waste-basket or trashbin, perhaps they'll pour everything out to you in quick one liners. (The default assumption being that you, the listener or reader, is too stupid to understand balancing of ideas or paragraphing of emphasis. But that's the negative type of Markson analysis.
Switch case: best possible presentation. David Markson, the reclusive artist-of-artists or writer-of-writers has produced a truly distinctive ('novel' so to speak), meta- fiction/non-fiction genre-bending work that is a touchstone for writers and heavy bibliophiles, a rare and elusive work that is understood mostly by the actual creators of writing material rather than the general public. Earning series upon series of 5/5 ratings and breathless accolades from top readers/reviewers, Markson creates what nobody else does, ranging over three thousand years of human history, in one sentence reflecting on the catacombs and cave paintings during the French Resistance, on another exploring society's mistreatment of the artist (perhaps the most common motif in the work), artistic rivalries, science/art divide, treatment of scientists, and the infinitely complex relationship between art, society's knowledge of art, history of art, and meaning, and the creative person her/himself. We go from Poe's final 72 hours to Nietzsche's. We meet Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Claude Lorraine, artists commenting on artists to arrive at a sweeping, unified overview of epistemology and aesthetic influence in one neat book. We understand artists at times over-rate themselves. We find that the best works do indeed require at times effort on the part of the viewer/reader/listener.
Well, where does Markson fit between these above two extremes. Probably closer to the sympathetic reading. A book exists by itself as its own entity; if the style or content is tiresome, it can be put down. Whatever hostility (however justified) the reader feels in being machine gunned one sentence paragraphs 5000x repeatedly is counterbalanced by the unique aesthetic affects Markson derives. Much more than Wittgenstein's Mistress, this is in fact a philosophy handbook masquerading as a novel, and the author, through his own asides about 'this is the last book' and 'poets are either too easily read or too difficult' makes it clear he knows what he is doing.
one pretty stellar review:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
good bad review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
4/5. interesting conceit and avant-garde 'genre-bender,' that draws on a huge well-spring of classical knowledge. only 3 references to Japanese philosophy/artists (Hokusai, Noguchi... was it ukiyo-e); Markson hasn't read any Eastern philosophy apparently and can't explain 7 different types of Zen, so overall the work is unbalanced-- (why mention Whistler if you don't know Whistler wanted to be considered a Japanese artist?); anecdotes do check out; an additional pleasure to be read with Wikipedia. immense, wide-ranging from ballet to Jonathan Lethem (!) references.
Rather than following the normal pattern of speech in which data is parsed into fragments, short exclamations, and longer asides, everything they said consisted of a one sentence point.
Assuming that such a person could reference Ancient Greece, Osamu Noguchi, and Virginia Woolf, such an achievement might be actually fairly impressive.
Some people think that grammatical conventions exist for a reason, inviting a discourse and emphasis of ideas based on the content of the referred to topics.
Possibly the very attempt to break convention itself contains some aesthetic merit.
Individuals following highly idiosyncratic patterns are sometimes believed to be schizotypical.
The relationship between language, thoughts, ideas, history, convention, knowledge, and mental illness remains disputed and argued over.
---
Okay, there's the 7 sentence mock-up of David Markson, lifetime New Yorker, distinct and 'genre specific to the artist' meta-style. The bad news is that to a degree, what Markson is doing is kind of rude. It's patronizing to consider conversation or the writer-reader relationship to be a sort of machine-gun succession of ejaculations poured out one didactic sentence at a time on the hapless reader. Most of us speak in short sentences. At times, given the complexity of ideas, we rely on compound sentences. Meaning from short phrases. If a person sees you merely as a waste-basket or trashbin, perhaps they'll pour everything out to you in quick one liners. (The default assumption being that you, the listener or reader, is too stupid to understand balancing of ideas or paragraphing of emphasis. But that's the negative type of Markson analysis.
Switch case: best possible presentation. David Markson, the reclusive artist-of-artists or writer-of-writers has produced a truly distinctive ('novel' so to speak), meta- fiction/non-fiction genre-bending work that is a touchstone for writers and heavy bibliophiles, a rare and elusive work that is understood mostly by the actual creators of writing material rather than the general public. Earning series upon series of 5/5 ratings and breathless accolades from top readers/reviewers, Markson creates what nobody else does, ranging over three thousand years of human history, in one sentence reflecting on the catacombs and cave paintings during the French Resistance, on another exploring society's mistreatment of the artist (perhaps the most common motif in the work), artistic rivalries, science/art divide, treatment of scientists, and the infinitely complex relationship between art, society's knowledge of art, history of art, and meaning, and the creative person her/himself. We go from Poe's final 72 hours to Nietzsche's. We meet Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Claude Lorraine, artists commenting on artists to arrive at a sweeping, unified overview of epistemology and aesthetic influence in one neat book. We understand artists at times over-rate themselves. We find that the best works do indeed require at times effort on the part of the viewer/reader/listener.
Well, where does Markson fit between these above two extremes. Probably closer to the sympathetic reading. A book exists by itself as its own entity; if the style or content is tiresome, it can be put down. Whatever hostility (however justified) the reader feels in being machine gunned one sentence paragraphs 5000x repeatedly is counterbalanced by the unique aesthetic affects Markson derives. Much more than Wittgenstein's Mistress, this is in fact a philosophy handbook masquerading as a novel, and the author, through his own asides about 'this is the last book' and 'poets are either too easily read or too difficult' makes it clear he knows what he is doing.
one pretty stellar review:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
good bad review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
4/5. interesting conceit and avant-garde 'genre-bender,' that draws on a huge well-spring of classical knowledge. only 3 references to Japanese philosophy/artists (Hokusai, Noguchi... was it ukiyo-e); Markson hasn't read any Eastern philosophy apparently and can't explain 7 different types of Zen, so overall the work is unbalanced-- (why mention Whistler if you don't know Whistler wanted to be considered a Japanese artist?); anecdotes do check out; an additional pleasure to be read with Wikipedia. immense, wide-ranging from ballet to Jonathan Lethem (!) references.
Read
January 16, 2013Yeah, I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste.
People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really feels like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. It's a sad end.
People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really feels like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. It's a sad end.
December 27, 2020
So, I started reading this book without any prior knowledge about its unique writing style: short periods were the narrator (an old "Novelist") is quoting things that said -or it is said they said- writers, artists, historic figures and other famous (dead) people; short anecdotes about people that belong to the aforementioned groups; obvious or less obvious connections between them through very subtle comments by the Novelist, sometimes so subtle they come in the form of a single word choice or the word order in the sentence; few scattered comments the Novelist makes about his own miserable, broken, lonely life, as it's nearing its end.
One would think that all these ingredients are a recipe for disaster, but Markson manages to create an attractive "novel" (although, in a first glance it doesn't remind most readers of a novel not even remotely), where motifs and themes, recurring ideas and intertextuality emerge more and more in this prima facie hotpot of a book.
Aging, death, art, writing, vanity, meaninglessness, absurd, are the things that seem to occupy the Novelist's mind -and ours as well.
A book definitely worth of a reread.
One would think that all these ingredients are a recipe for disaster, but Markson manages to create an attractive "novel" (although, in a first glance it doesn't remind most readers of a novel not even remotely), where motifs and themes, recurring ideas and intertextuality emerge more and more in this prima facie hotpot of a book.
Aging, death, art, writing, vanity, meaninglessness, absurd, are the things that seem to occupy the Novelist's mind -and ours as well.
A book definitely worth of a reread.
August 23, 2010
"Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke." My first David Markson but not my last. I picked this book up in my indie bookstore because I feeling kind of broke and miserable myself and wanted company. The Last Novel is not a novel on the surface so much as a collection of anecdotes, quotes and factoids on and about the creative life.
But underneath or threaded throughout those clips is a sad truth about art and culture and the value society has always given it. It's also the story of getting old, passing out of this life and of the smallness of life itself. Wildly entertaining, fascinating and laugh-out-loud funny in places.
A wonderful book, impossible to describe and impossible to put down.
But underneath or threaded throughout those clips is a sad truth about art and culture and the value society has always given it. It's also the story of getting old, passing out of this life and of the smallness of life itself. Wildly entertaining, fascinating and laugh-out-loud funny in places.
A wonderful book, impossible to describe and impossible to put down.
November 13, 2011
Its like all memories, the things that flashed by in a second, the things read, seen, thought....all come together and fill the Author's mind as he contemplates his illness - amazing!! You need to have a good general knowledge about art, literature etc. to get the full benefit of the facts written and you need to be watchful for the snippets of the Author's life amongst the quotes...
January 16, 2025
What a sweetheart David markson is I wish I had met him
January 26, 2025
Assembling the most extensive and incoherent conspiracy ever pinned to a corkboard.
March 22, 2018
We appear briefly in a sea of human folly.
The ways we fight for power and build empires and states, and the way these things collapse and die, and the kinds of harm we invent for ourselves and each other, would be comic if they weren't so damned sad.
Art, in Markson's weird literary collages, is not the cure for any of this. If anything, Markson finds in the history of art a transcendent embodiment of our follies and the futility of our efforts.
But there's a deep and effervescent kind of beauty and comedy in the elaborate arrangement of facts and stories in this book. Like the best art about art, it sees the limits of its own efforts, grapples with the deep forces driving it, and pushes the edges of the form.
The outcome in something difficult, frequently rewarding, and, in the end, astounding.
The ways we fight for power and build empires and states, and the way these things collapse and die, and the kinds of harm we invent for ourselves and each other, would be comic if they weren't so damned sad.
Art, in Markson's weird literary collages, is not the cure for any of this. If anything, Markson finds in the history of art a transcendent embodiment of our follies and the futility of our efforts.
But there's a deep and effervescent kind of beauty and comedy in the elaborate arrangement of facts and stories in this book. Like the best art about art, it sees the limits of its own efforts, grapples with the deep forces driving it, and pushes the edges of the form.
The outcome in something difficult, frequently rewarding, and, in the end, astounding.
January 28, 2011
I picked this up after serving an americano to a guy who had it tucked under his arm, when I worked at Urban Standard. He seemed discriminating. Had good hair. I googled it. What, is that weird?
Didn't realize until halfway through that Markson's the guy who wrote "Wittgenstein's Mistress," which I always meant to read but haven't.
The character of "the writer," is not really a character and not really interesting. But the book is. Sometimes. Oh, and there's no narrative. And no optimism really. Read if your own stream of consciousness anecdote machine isn't bleak or literary enough.
Didn't realize until halfway through that Markson's the guy who wrote "Wittgenstein's Mistress," which I always meant to read but haven't.
The character of "the writer," is not really a character and not really interesting. But the book is. Sometimes. Oh, and there's no narrative. And no optimism really. Read if your own stream of consciousness anecdote machine isn't bleak or literary enough.
July 23, 2012
Just couldnt get into it. I tried to keep an open mind but it just seemed like I was reading a stream of conciousness of an old ornery man nearing the end whilst he peppered in the random facts and quotes of the geniuses of the world. I felt as if most of the ancedotes were very entertaining but a whole book of them, let alone it being called a "novel" ....its something i couldnt really agree with.
With that said I felt compeled to continue reading it until i felt as if i was wasting my time to read a sad and sometimes hilarious compilation of what seemed (at the time) a totally random string of quotes. I feel as if i tried it out again I might be able give it 3 stars but for now, 2 is as high as I can go. Not sure if I will be able to read anything else from this "genre" that Markson has created, maybe it just goes above my head, but I can say that this is a vastly different read than I am used to and it is interesting to say the least. To those who are considering reading this....try it out, cant hurt.....right?
With that said I felt compeled to continue reading it until i felt as if i was wasting my time to read a sad and sometimes hilarious compilation of what seemed (at the time) a totally random string of quotes. I feel as if i tried it out again I might be able give it 3 stars but for now, 2 is as high as I can go. Not sure if I will be able to read anything else from this "genre" that Markson has created, maybe it just goes above my head, but I can say that this is a vastly different read than I am used to and it is interesting to say the least. To those who are considering reading this....try it out, cant hurt.....right?
April 21, 2009
I would have given it 4 stars if the author hadn't spent so much time not so subtly insinuating that he was just another in a long line of misunderstood geniuses. The ultimate passive-aggressive (non)narrator.
May 22, 2012
my 5 cents here: discussed here: http://www.5cense.com/12/last_undone.htm
September 6, 2013
For my reviews, go here:
http://www.jeffbursey.com/downloads/B...
and
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/rbw/...
http://www.jeffbursey.com/downloads/B...
and
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/rbw/...
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