The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose

by Harry Mathews

This selection of Harry Mathews’s longer prose writings attests his innovative genius in sevenradically differing Country Cooking in Central France is perhaps the longest, most demanding and surely the most extravagant recipe ever concocted. (Mathews’s best piece — The Guardian). Singular 61 pungent demonstrations of masturbation by both sexes, from Almaty to Zizanga. The Orchard is the author’s memorial of his close friend Georges Perec, composed in startlingly succinct and revealing glimpses. Armenian Papers, a sequence of prose poems that recounts a glittering epic of servitude, love and war in a land remote both in time and place. Translation and the the Case of Preserving Maltese, an essay that establishes with persuasive guile a context for the practices of the Oulipo or, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for potential literature), the provocative group of writers and mathematicians of which Mathews is the only active English-speaking member. The Way Home, a story derived from a series of drawings by Trevor Winkfield (incorporated here in the text) that! explores the dreamlike life within an ordinary man’s ordinary day. Autobiography, an exceptional example of the genre in which the author tells his own story entirely in terms of the people who have marked his life. This is a revised edition of a collection first published in the UK in 1988 and not previously available in the USA. The London Times described the original collection as an almost pugnacious demonstration of his talents.

Genres: Nonfiction, Short Stories

213 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Harry Mathews was an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.

Together with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, Mathews founded and edited the short-lived but influential literary journal Locus Solus (named after a novel by Raymond Roussel, one of Mathews's chief early influences) from 1961 to 1962.

Harry Mathews was the first American chosen for membership in the French literary society known as the Oulipo, which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in literature, in particular through the use of various constraints and algorithms. The late French writer Georges Perec, likewise a member, was a good friend, and the two translated some of each other's writings. Mathews considers many of his works to be Oulipian in nature, but even before he encountered the society he was working in a parallel direction.

Mathews was married to the writer Marie Chaix and divided his time between Paris, Key West, and New York.

Reviews

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Второе издание сборника короткой прозы, сильно выигравшее от того, что один рассказ уехал на положенное ему место в "Избранных декларациях зависимости". Все тексты здесь, как и обещает издатель своим названием, - анти-классика и анти-традиция. Гениальны его микроэтюды о мастурбации и разнообразные воспоминания о Жорже Переке, а эссе об УЛиПосских принципах перевода просто великолепно и написано в духе Гая Давенпорта. Кстати, в какой-то части эти принципы совпадают с омофонными переводами Луиса Зукофски из Катулла, а вообще становится всеобъемлюще понятно, что "формализмом" и "буквализмом" в переводе наши ревнители устоев называют совсем не то, что нужно бы. Вот его-то и надо будет на досуге перевести.
Автобиография тоже превосходна.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uneven collection which gets better as it chugs along. Reaches brilliance with the Armenian Papers (and perhaps The Orchard) and ends on the rather straightforward Autobiography. Worth those few things alone, though I am curious now to move on to the larger novels for which he is known and writes about within some of these works. Atlas Press never disappoints though this volume is perhaps of peripheral interest to most.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

smart solid collection, especially the armenian papers: imagining a new english translation of a collection of medieval latin poems, of which no original exists, only an artistically interpretive 19C italian translation.