Word: barth
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...hard, as Barth noted, to grasp the scale and meaning of the murder of millions of human beings. After statements like Castro's it is harder still. Extraordinary acts of murder slip by us, easing past our dulled sensibilities. Millions have died in Cambodia, as, it seems, will millions more. Persistent reports confirm that the Brazilian government is massacring the Amazon Indians to permit exploitation of the Brazilian hinterland. How can we describe these atrocities, how can we summon up the will to intervene, as the U.N. says we have the right to do, if "genocide" is just another lame...
LIKE A LITERARY KRONOS, John Barth has stuffed each of his fictional offspring down his maw and let forth an echoing belch of a novel. The noise deafens; Barth blushes. With reason--many an atrocity litters Letters's past, including the authorial analogues of incest, cannibalism and flagellation. But what Barth does in the privacy of his own imagination is his own business; the worst atrocity he reserves for the hapless reader. The siren call of Barth's in-souciance, his cleverness, his recklessness, beckons you towards a grinding crash on the rocks surrounding these 750 pages, and a lonely...
...Barth knows. No novel has displayed such an elaborate Maginot Line of prepared defenses since Joyce had Stuart Gilbert write a whole book under his "supervision" to explicate Ulysses. Barth demands that Joycean parallel. You could spend a month, a year, maybe a life detecting patterns within patterns in Ulysses; at the end you might look back and wonder why you bothered, but at least you'd have met thousands of smart people along the way. You can spend the same time with Letters and find equally pleasing patterns, but then look over your shoulder and your only company...
Letters asks to be encapsulated, begs you for a precis on hind paws. Better, though, to let Barth himself summarize his beast...
This assault on mechanical modernism--one of Barth's correspondents describes "those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism"--hardly fits a novel that follows a schematic masterplan. You see, if you take the seven letters of the title-word "letters," superimpose them on a seven-month calendar using a quaint motto, so that the letters of the motto form the letters of "letters," then each letter of the motto will fall neatly onto a date in the calendar, one for each of the letters in the book...