14 October 2009

David Markson, Fred Exley


I missed the book-review volleying that will have taken place relating to David Markson’s private-eye novel, EPITAPH FOR A TRAMP. Many wags have tried to write “the world’s longest haiku” and I think of them when I imagine that Markson was trying to write the coolest character in all of literature. The tribe of persons who (freely) allow themselves the intoxicating delusion that Greenwich Village in the late 1950s was the innermost chamber of the heart of cool will doubtless have read the book wondering if Markson was writing a detective novel to garner some of the cash that is falsely called ‘quick,’ or if he was writing the true book, his Gatsby; the secret sharer, the purloined letter.
I don’t recall reading a book (coffee, a sandwich, it’s raining all month in Ithaca, New York this year) with such sun-beating presence of auctorus; you and I spy through the costume parade, and no one is ever out of character, Chaucer is the neediest pilgrim, who, in Canterbury, regretted, celebrated, and swam with the beguiled.
Buoyed in restless seas, treading between the emperor’s new clothes and "le musée sans murs."
Harry Fannin: Bartleby drinking champagne.

Oh, it was a real castle!

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