Crypto-Topographia

by Christopher Middleton

Christopher Middleton’s writing in Crypto-Topographia falls within the genre of ‘short prose’, which Middleton defines as ‘liminal, ludic and disruptive’. Many of the texts concern places, singly or clustered, which offer their own secret store of time: lived time, signs of presence, whispers or howls. Time is stretched back, folded or pretended, and can transform a group of trees into ‘the locus of a drama’ (‘A Close Shave With Sacrilege’). Sometimes place is supplanted by object: sliding carpets and material colour… Dispersed among variously ‘situated’ texts, history scintillates, not as a plan, but as an ensemble of glimpses. The epilogue records a strange episode of travel, ‘The Gaze of the Turkish Mona Lisa’, a masterly description of a Turkish lady, whom Middleton manages to depict, while refraining from looking at her.

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2002

About the author

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zurich, at King's College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Holderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. Over the last two decades Carcanet has published six books of his poems, Intimate Chronicles (1996), one book of his experimental prose and two volumes of essays, as well as his Selected Writings and Faint Harps and Silver Voices, a collection of verse translations.

He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

Fiction M628c 2002