Word: againe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The weaving of different stories occurs more through curious echoes and cross-references than through comprehensible relations. Barth once again has his own defense ready in the words of Lady Amherst:
The guiding patterns of Letters are like those abstract coffee-table sculptures that come apart into little pieces, then stand whole again only as a testimony to the dogged persistence of the party guest who sat there all night putting the damn thing back together again. You can play that...
He didn't, though; he wrote this bloat, and he tells us why over and over again in the course of it. (In fact, if you cut out all the self-conscious justifications for the denseness and length of Letters, it would probably become both readable and manageable.)
IF YOU LOOK only at the large strokes in Letters, however, another explanation for its size emerges, one more believable, more acceptable, though less flattering to Barth. Each of his correspondents either relives or believes he is reliving a portion of his past life. Lady Amherst echoing Samuel Johnson, calls...
After describing Europe and Asia in his best-selling The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux has moved his one man railway show into the western hemisphere. This time he chose the jaunt between Boston and Southern Argentina, once again via the tracks. In what would seem like a replay with just...