Lost in the Funhouse

by John Barth

Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, American, Classics, Literary Fiction, 20th Century

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

John Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composed The Shirt of Nessus , a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.
He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with short The Floating Opera , which deals with suicide, and The End of the Road on controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."
The life of Ebenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth. Northrop Frye called an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.
He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.
The conceit of the university as universe based Giles Goat-Boy , a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks that Joseph Campbell prescribed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.
The even more metafictional Lost in the Funhouse , the short story collection, and Chimera , the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. In Letters , Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.
Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in the Atlantic in 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.
Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.

Reviews

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 1 out of 5]

True Story from my European Breakdown:

At Westminster Abbey, I paused to read a plaque. Suddenly glancing up, I realized that the group was gone.

Americans who couldn’t be bothered to read. Sigh.

Officially, I was lost.

Reflexively, I thought, “How shall I find the group?”

After 2.3 seconds, rational thought returned. The gods of fate had smiled down on me and bestowed their favor. Gone was the extrovert who thought it necessary to narrate aloud every crack in the pavement and every fleck of paint all over Europe.

I was enjoying being lost and took active steps to become loster.

Why is this story relevant?

Because I would loster John Barth in the funhouse.


The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Softcover Text - $13.54 from Amazon

Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth’s collection of fourteen metafictional short-stories could take the cupcake for the most extreme form of self-reflexive postmodern literature ever written.

Frame-Tale is ten words long on a Mobius strip, Night-Sea Journey a ten-pager, an occasionally light, occasionally dark brooding on life and death in the tradition of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, and the longest piece in the collection, Lost in the Funhouse, about a young boy on the threshold of his teenage years, a story that awakened my own buried, complex emotions when I was of similar age, a story utilizing metafictional techniques in the telling of a traditional coming-of-age tale.

However, to give a reader a more decided taste of John Barth’s scrumptious vanilla with honey cream cheese frosting cupcake collection, I will focus on one of my favorite of these delectable specimens, the title of which is (and let us not be shocked since we are talking metafiction): Title. Here goes with my linking Title with a batch of major themes in the world of the postmodern:

Poiumena – Big word, but don’t be put off, it means a story about the very process of creating a story, even the very story we are reading, as in the first short paragraph of Title: “Beginning: in the middle, past the middle, nearer three-quarters done, waiting for the end. Consider how dreadful so far: passionless, abstraction, pro, dis. And it will get worse. Can we possibly continue?” Actually it does continue for another nine pages, and, fortunately, this metafictional story gets better not worse. Better, that is, if you are into metafiction.

Irony and Playfulness – The first-person narrator, we can call him John-John (I have no shame as I just used this silly name in a previous John Barth review) tells us directly how he is required to develop a plot and theme by getting down and dirty into some serious conflicts and complications. Of course, big difference between talking about conflicts and actual conflicts, just as there is a big difference between reading about a fistfight and the reality of exchanging blows and coming home with a bloody nose. The authors of metafiction have the smallest number of bloody noses per page compared with all other genres. No kidding – I did the counting myself.

Pastiche – In postmodern literature, pasting together various genres or styles. Not to be outdone, John-John pastes together a story with digressions on grammar, direct addresses to the reader, William Faulkner swearwords, reflections on self-reflexive fiction-writing, among others. And, by the way, in one of his other stories collected here, Menelaiad, an entire paragraph consists of quotation marks.

Minimalism – As it turns out, this John Barth collection includes a life story compressed into fourteen pages and an autobiography boiled down into six pages. Does it get any more minimal that that? One way minimalism can be defined is the manner in which an author will provide the barest descriptions and ask the reader to fill in the blanks. Again, not to be outdone, in Title, John-John asks us directly to fill in the blank at least once; and in other passages, we are asked indirectly to fill in the blanks. By my latest count, I filled in the blank twenty-seven times.

Maximalism – Thou shall leave no literary device unturned. In his author’s Forward to this collection, John Barth informs us writers tend by temperament to be either sprinters or marathoners and how really, really, short fiction is not his long suit. But after tapping many the literary device in a string of doorstopper novels, he wanted to, by golly, get his fiction in those collections of short stories, the kind of books he always uses to teach from. “Not all of a writer’s motives are pure.” Thus we have Title and the other short stories here. Got to hand it to you Sir John, you are a maximalist with a vengeance!

Metafiction – A close cousin with a story about a story, metafiction deals with writing about writing. And there is plenty of such in Title, as when we read: “Once upon a time you were satisfied with incidental felicities and niceties of technique: the unexpected image, the refreshingly accurate word-choice, the memorable simile that yields deeper and subtler significances upon reflection, like a memorable smile. Somebody please stop me.” No problem, John-John – I’ll stop you. As the dice below spell out, we have reached the end. I hope this short review provides enough information to enable a reader to judge if Lost in the Funhouse is your cupcake of tea. And that's "T" as in Title.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, to be honest, I found this book to be almost as painful as La Disparition by Georges Perec (reviewed here on GR). It was full of inter-textual and metafiction notes - in other words the author talking to himself about how the reader should or could interpret his works, his choices of words, his choices of plot devices, etc. There is no linear narrative other than a few chapters with the same character Ambrose and his own set of neuroses. I can see why the book was a bit revolutionary - particularly in the hard to read section Menelaiad where he quotes inside of quotes inside of quotes and the Anonymiad which is again some belly-bottom writing about writing about writing. It was not really a pleasant read but as it was on the Yale Online Course "American Literature after 1945", I wanted to read it. Not sure if other work by John Barth is more readable, but this book has certainly cured me of any curiosity I may have harboured. I can deal with intertextuality in DFW and to a degree in Gaddis or Pynchon, but in Barth it got to be as distracting as the missing 'e' in La Disparition.

[Garima · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lost in the Funhouse started off on a positive note and acquired my attention due its various meta-fictional tricks, for which I’m a pretty soft target, but it was soon succumbed to those tricks only, which got a little out of hand for my personal taste . This is not a perfect series by any means and never meant to, especially with all those literary gymnastics, most of which ended in a nasty fall. I’m fairly receptive to all these experimental and post modern writings but in most of the cases I try not to ignore the content and there lies my main problem with this book.

John Barth mentioned in the author’s note that this book shouldn’t be viewed as a short story collection but as a series and therefore required to be received "all at once", which I failed to do so except for few of the stories, which are also my favorites. The title story of course is the biggest strength of this book, which is deftly handled with judicious mix of content, meta techniques, metaphorical significance and at the same time, is engaging enough to hold the interest of a reader. This is one piece which can be a good introduction for any Barth neophyte. This story also inspired Wallaces's novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way from Girl with Curious hair. Apart from this, Night sea journey, Petition, Autobiography- A self recorded fiction, Title are few others which I enjoyed and the use of language in most of them is very impressive. By this time, one gets comfortable with the fact that he/she/it is reading someone who is smart, witty, highly innovative and most importantly, very original.

After that begun the downfall of this book for me, not due to the lack of interesting elements but uninteresting subject matter with which, I could in no way had have connected. Read Greek Myths. But at the same time I wonder if their knowledge would have brought any respite to my reading experience, as for example, I’m well aware about Narcissus myth, but didn’t understand a single word of Echo, where Barth has related the content of this myth, especially w/r/t ‘self-reflection’ factor. The analysis of this particular story is much more interesting in my humble opinion.

With Life Story and Menelaiad came this huge tsunami of almost everything meta one can think of. It’s fascinating for sure, but only in parts. I was mostly eager to jump to interesting fragments such as this:

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

A Smart Alec he is!

But some were too much to digest. For example this:

" '("(('(((" 'Well. . .' ")))'))")'
" ' " ' " 'He asked Prince Paris-' 'You didn't!' " "By Zeus!" ' 'By Zeus!' " "You didn't!" ' 'Did you really?' " "By Zeus,"

Yes! There is a brutal dissection of Punctuation marks going on in aforementioned text. I admire grammar but not that much.

So overall a modest beginning for me in the Barth’s wonderland and I’m hopeful that his other works shall prove to be much more balanced and winsomely innovative. In fact, some sources have claimed that the same self-reflection factor in his story Echo is used in a more creative way in The Sot-weed factor and Giles Goat-boy, which I shall definitely look forward to read. This book- 3 Stars- I merely Liked it.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Darwin ate (U) his mark.



(A.) Once upon a time there was a review that began: (B.) (b.)Once upon a time there was a review that began (a.) Barth wrote a novel for himself. He wrote a novel to himself. He doesn't care about you. He is not writing for you. He is not going to make you eat your short fiction or even make you shoot Chekhov's gun sitting on the fictional wall next to you.

Barth makes me sometimes regret my decision to not go to Johns Hopkins. What was I thinking? Perhaps, I could have met Barth. Perhaps, I did go to Johns Hopkins and I did meet Barth in another story in another life. Or, perhaps, I just don't remember, or perhaps I am dreaming I lived a life where I didn't meet Barth.

Why am I trying to even write a Meta-review of Barth well developed for its age? Everything about Barth has already been transmitted, written about, alluded to, sketched on the soft walls of a thousand reflective uteruses by a million different swimming swimmers prior to drowning. I have nothing left to add. Nothing new that I can capture. No heritage to contribute. No flower to pollinate. No stylized ambition. No original thoughts. The WORLD and the WORD are both paraded parodies.

[Ben Loory · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's like being trapped in a room with robin williams on coke and he just keeps telling the same joke OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER

[Ed · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've discovered I prefer my postmodernism in light doses, enriching rather than supplanting the traditional parts of literature, like plot and character. It's all very well to dive into the deep end now and then, but I will only follow you so long as you have a good reason for being there. It's all extremely clever and original, but throughout too much of Lost in the Funhouse, I felt the author had very little meaningful to say. Stories which are about writing stories in which nothing happens except the author talking about how he is writing a story in which nothing happens, saying isn't this all quite boring, but then you knew it was going to be boring because I told you it would be, and yet even as I say this you keep reading - ha ha, joke's on you! But that's the point, you say! It says so much about our expectations of literature, and the relationship between the writer and reader! Sure, I get it. And I'm with you the first time, maybe even the second. But then let's please move on to something else.

This collection starts off really quite promisingly - some of the first half is excellent - but with each story proceeds to hammer the same single tired tone, only a little harder each time, until there's nothing left but a great piercing din, and all you really want to do is just leave the room and sit in silence for a while. I left the room at some point in the Greek cycle; it was just too much for me.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something Similar

"Writers learn from their experience of other writers as well as from their experience of life in the world; it was the happy marriage of form and content in Borges's ficciones - the way he regularly turned his narrative means into part of his message - that suggested how I might try something similar; in my way and with my materials."


Interstitialiad [Go on! Say it!]
[Now Featuring Italicised Barth]

"For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers?"

For ME!!! For YOU!!! Perhaps for US!!! Literarily a COUPLE of LOVERS...of LITERATURE!!!

Insert Plot Here

"What's all this leading up to?"

"Is there a plot here?"

"What is the story's theme?"

"Each [sees] himself as the hero of the story, when the truth might turn out to be that he's the villain, or the coward."

More Imagination

"Less really is More, other things being equal."

"No reader would put up with so much with such (sic) prolixity."

"Nobody has enough imagination."

"There aren't enough different ways to say that."

Author, Narrator, Character, Reader

I'm not who you think I am. I'm not the author. I'm not John Barth. I didn't write this. I'm not writing this.

"Who's telling the story, and to whom?"

Surely it's not the author!!!

Well then, to whom is it being told?

"The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction."

I'm not talking. It's not me speaking to you.

I was once imagined by the author, and now you're imagining me. I exist only in the imagination, though in between I am written down. (Or typed up.)

"If I'm going to be a fictional character, I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some piece of avant-garde preciousness."

The Imagined Hero

"I'm not the man I used to be."

"My problem was, I had too much imagination to be a hero."

I am not an average American.

I am the nectar and ambrosia of legends past and yet to come.

"Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness."

"He wonders: will he become a regular person?"

"Is there really such a person as Ambrose, or is he a figment of the author's imagination?"

"The more closely an author identifies with the narrator, literally or metaphorically, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative viewpoint."

"Nobody likes a pedant."

Needed Telling

"Can nothing be made meaningful?"

"Our story's finished before it starts."

Off with the narrator! On with the story!

"It's not a short story." I told him. "I tell it as it was."

"I don't know why it needed telling."

"It is important to keep the senses operating."

"Spring, pose, splash!"

"At this point, they were both despite themselves."

"Let the reader see the serious wordplay on second reading."

Fiction, In Fact

"The climax of the story must be its protagonist's discovery of a way to get through the funhouse."

"Aha," said Mother. "I shall never forget this moment."

"It is perfectly normal. We have all been through it. It will not last forever."

"No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgement from the other characters."

"In the end, they'd be lovers; their dialogue lines would match up."

"The world was going on! This part ought to be dramatised."

"In fiction the merely true must always yield to the plausible."

"Such are the walls of custom."

"Here was one of Western Culture's truly great imaginations."

"The last word in fiction, in fact."

The Implied Victor

"Wait: the story's not finished!"

"The fact is, the narrator has narrated himself into a corner, a state of affairs more tsk-tsk than boo-hoo, and because his position is absurd he calls the world absurd."

"[He] was so sophistical a character as more likely to annoy than to engage."

"Self-defeat implies a victor, and who do you suppose it is?”

"One manifestation of schizophrenia as everybody knows is the movement from reality toward fantasy, a progress which not infrequently takes the form of distorted and fragmented representation, abstract formalism, an increasing preoccupation, even obsession, with pattern and design for their own sakes - especially patterns of a baroque, enormously detailed character - to the (virtual) exclusion of representative 'content'."

Speechless with Sympathy

He looked through "a lavender cascade of hysteria" that surrounded the window of the study in the old family summer residence.

"At this point pathological boredom leads to a final desire for death and nothingness - the Romantic syndrome."

"The idea pleased him."

Read This Sentence

"Will you deny you've read this sentence?" I went on. I go on: "This?"

Is it enough to end this story with a question mark? Or better still a full stop.



"If I fail to exclaim with wonder or otherwise respond, it will be that I'm speechless with sympathy." Or something similar...



SOUNDTRACK:



Ann Peebles - I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwoKq...

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two very brilliant stories and a whole kaboodle of indigestible bollocks. (Yes, I confess to skipping lightly and sprightly over the last three Greek-mythology-based items. What is it with this Greek tripe?) But like many a cd I have purchased, the two good ones were worth the price of entry. This collection is – it says here - a major landmark of experimental fiction. Well, as landmarks go, it was a bit of a Hadrian’s Wall.


Tourist : Where’s Hadrian’s wall?
Local inhabitant of the area: It’s right there.
Tourist : What, that? That’s Hadrian’s Wall?
Local : Yes. That’s it. (Turns away to hide smile.)

GREAT EXPERIMENTAL SHORT STORIES

I love ones that work, and these are my must-read favourites.

The Library of Babylon : Jorge Luis Borges
The Aleph : Jorge Luis Borges
(He takes absolutely mental ideas and applies a freezing cold, scholarly logic to them.)
The Terminal Beach – J G Ballard
(A prose poem with most of the repertoire of sinister Ballard symbols included. I think he missed the empty swimming pool this time.)
The Babysitter – Robert Coover
(Astonishingly creepy and exciting; he takes a stock horror story situation – babysitter menaced by house intruder – and chops it all up into fragments of time; quite a simple method which touches of genius sometimes are. Read it here)
Night-Sea Journey – John Barth
Lost in the Funhouse – John Barth
(the first a theological monologue by a spermatozoa, described by MJ Nicholls as “insufferable” but by P Bryant as “dazzling, witty and daringly post-Bonhoefferian”; the second a wonderful exercise in decay and rot – the jejune story plods along and is attacked from within by its own grammar, assumptions, cliches and syntax.)
The Squirrel Cage : Thomas Disch
(this is probably poor man’s Beckett but I still love this story of a man in a cage)
"Franz Kafka" by Jorge Luis Borges : Alvin Greenberg
(this is a riff on Borges, of course, and is the most fun you can have with the Argentinian librarian without going up to him and tickling him)
The Great Hug : Donald Barthelme
The Balloon : Donald Barthelme
(Barthelme - he had this golden period where everything he did was hilarious and mad, so I could have chosen any of about 15. Outside the golden period he’s obscurantist and as much fun as the crap stories in Lost in the Funhouse which is zero fun. If I was of a mind, I would get The Great Hug tattooed on my body, so that you could read the whole story (it’s not that long) from heel to neck and round and down again. Then I could go on tv as Donald Barthelme’s greatest fan, which would be untrue, because I’m not. But his good stuff is from another dimension, you know, the fifth)
Sex Story : Robert Gluck
(can’t talk about this much, and it’s definitely not safe for work)
Ant Colony : Alissa Nutting
(see my review)
The Entertainment District : Tony Burgess
(this is a section from a tiny novel Ravenna Gets but it’s a short piece on its own and – er – wow!)
Happy Endings : Margaret Atwood
(she’s so cynical and mean and funny in this one)
Sea Oak : George Saunders
(Who can resist this opening line : “Min and Jade are feeding their babies while watching “How My Child Died Violently” . Amidst the post-everything mulch in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories this one stood out like a tarantula on a slice of angel cake.)

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. This soi-disant landmark in experimental fiction was stuffed with endless exercises in indulgence, vague and rambling stories, pretentious non-sequiturs and assorted Greek gibberish. The title piece, ‘Title’ and ‘Petition’ were the only engaging and amusing stories here. Most of the collection indulges in Barth’s obsession with Victorian writing and Greek myth. ‘Night-Sea Journey,’ ‘Meneliad’ and ‘Anonymiad’ are insufferable, despite the clever tricks and (rare) flashes of wit. (The middle story plays a brain-busting game with the metafiction format, though the content sags badly). This territory has been explored with twice the panache by Gil Sorrentino. Barth’s work skews towards the cold and academic, whereas Sorrentino never loses his steely humanity, in spite of the high-wire games.

[Hamed Manoochehri · Rating 5 out of 5]

قبل از هر چیز باید بگم که این کتاب یه تنه، یه ژانر تازه یعنی متافیکشن رُ وارد نویسندگی پست مدرن کرد و باتوجه به تکنیکی بودنش فقط به کسی پیشنهادش می‌کنم که از آثار تجربی (experimental)، پست‌مدرن و پتافیکشن خوشش میاد. به اونایی که دنبال فرم‌های تازه‌ن و حوصله دارن با متن کلنجار برن. و واقعا عاشق این کلنجا رفتنه هستن.

 از طرفی چون یه بخش زیادی از کارهای تجربی بارث مربوط می شه به کاربرد زبان، توصیه میکنم حتما متن انگلیسی رُ بخونید تا حض کامل نصیبتون بشه. 

جان بارث اینجا کل قواعد داستان‌نویسی رُ ریخته به هم. هی بهت یادآوری می‌کنه که "آره، این یه داستانه، منم نویسنده‌ام و تو داری از دریچه ذهن من می‌خونی!" و خب اگه اهل این مدل بازی‌های ذهنی باشی، کیف می‌کنی. متن بارث خیلی خیلی بامزه و سرشار از طنز رِندانه ست. حتی توی پیش‌درآمدی هم که براش نوشته داره مخاطب رُ دست می ندازه و از جیب و به هزینه ما، به ما می خنده. ولی مسخره‌مون نمی کنه.

داستان‌های این کتاب همگی به هم مربوط هستن. یه تعدادی از داستان ها، پروتاگونیست مشابه دارن اما اصلی ترین تارِ گره زننده داستان ها، فرامتن مشابه هست. اینکه همه این داستان ها، از درون داستان به بیرون و فرآیند خلق داستان نگاه می کنن. داستانا فقط درباره‌ی شخصیت‌ها یا ماجراها نیستن، بلکه درباره‌ی خود داستان گفتنه‌ان. انگار خود متن داره هی به خودش نگاه می‌کنه و می‌پرسه: "من دارم چی کار می‌کنم؟" مخصوصاً توی داستان معروفش، "گم‌شده در شهربازی"، که یه پسر نوجوونه گم میشه توی هزار توی آینه‌ها، ولی در واقع خود ما هم گم میشیم توی بازی‌های زبانی بارث.

در طی خوندن کتاب که تقریبا ۲۵ روز طول کشید، به یه سری نکات کلیدی و تکرار شونده توی آنالیز داستان ها برخوردم که دوست دارم اینا رُ با شما هم به اشتراک بذارم:

۱. خودآگاهی (self-reflexivity):

تقریباً تو همه‌ی داستان‌ها، متن خودش رو لو می‌ده. یعنی راوی یا ساختار داستان به خواننده یادآوری می‌کنه که "این یه داستانه" و در نتیجه ما هیچ‌وقت کامل توی داستان غرق نمی‌شیم. این تکنیک باعث میشه خواننده دائم بفهمه که داره یه چیز ساختگی می‌خونه.

۲. نویسنده در داستان:

خود نویسنده یا صدای نویسنده خیلی وقتا مستقیم وارد داستان میشه. حتی گاهی راوی بین نوشتن می‌مونه و میگه "الان نمی‌دونم ادامه‌اش رو چطور بگم". این هم بخشی از بازی پست‌مدرنشه: نویسنده نقش خدایی نداره، داره دست و پا می‌زنه درست مثل شخصیت‌ها.

۳. فروپاشی ساختار سنتی داستان:

شروع، میانه، پایان؟ نه اینجا نداریم! خیلی وقتا داستان وسطش قطع میشه، یا اصلاً به جایی نمی‌رسه. بارث نشون میده که دیگه نمی‌شه مثل قبل‌ها قصه تعریف کرد، چون فرم و ساختار خودش مسئله شده.

۴. تِم هویت و گم‌گشتگی:

توی داستان "Lost in the Funhouse" که اسم کل کتاب هم ازش گرفته شده، شخصیت اصلی (آمبروز) توی شهربازی گم میشه، ولی این گم‌شدگی بیشتر درونی و روانیه. این تم تو داستانای دیگه هم هست: شخصیت‌ها دنبال معنا یا ثباتن ولی نمی‌تونن پیداش کنن.

۵. طنز و پارودی:

بارث خیلی جاها داره سبک‌های نوشتاری دیگه رو مسخره می‌کنه یا باهاشون بازی می‌کنه. مثلاً یه جا داستانی می‌نویسه که انگار داره نحوه نوشتن داستان رو درس می‌ده، ولی خودش از اون فراتر می‌ره و یه داستان جدید از دلش درمی‌آره.

۶. وسواس روی فرم:

بارث عاشق فرم و ساختاره. ممکنه یه داستان از لحاظ محتوا ساده باشه، ولی ساختارش این‌قدر پیچیده باشه که بشه درباره‌ش پایان‌نامه نوشت! فرم برای بارث خودش یه جور محتواست.


بارث با این مجموعه یه جور اعلام حضور می‌کنه: "من اینجام تا از دل شکستِ فرم‌های قدیمی، فرم‌های جدید بسازم." و خب... موفق هم میشه، البته برای مخاطب‌هایی که حوصله‌ی این بازی‌های ذهنی و فرمالیستی رو دارن.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Lost In The Funhouse; Fiction For Print, Tape, Live Voice is John Barth's response to a gauntlet Marshall McLuhan was throwing down back in the heady days of the sixties regarding the immanent demise of the work of art as printed text and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of the Gutenberg family. Sound familiar? As it is his first collection of short fiction (anomalous), no matter one's response to the Funhouse, please do pick up one of his long works, the form in which his muse sings much so sweetly.

How seriously ought we regard the book's subtitle, "for Print, Tape, Live Voice"? [??] But according to the "Author's Note" these pieces are intended for a variety of performance modalities: ". . .take the print medium for granted but lose or gain nothing in oral recitation. . . would lose part of their point n any except printed form. . . meant for either print or recorded authorial voice, but not for live or non-authorial voice. . . will make no sense unless heard in live or recorded voices, male and female, or read as if so heard. . . intended for monophonic authorial recording, either disc or tape. . . for monophonic tape and visible but silent author. . . may be said to have been composed for 'printed voice'. . . print, monophonic recorded authorial voice, stereophonic ditto in dialogue with itself, live authorial voice, live ditto in dialogue with monophonic ditto aforementioned, and live ditto interlocutory with stereophonic et cetera, my own preference. . . " You decide. . .

But then should you. . . Well, yes, of course, we are here to have a good time after all. Altogether now, chorally, "On with the Story!" Indeed.


Frame-Tale -- How to write fiction with scissors in many fewer hours than that other guy with his whole cut-up thing that no one wants to read.


Ambrose His Mark, Water-Message, Lost in the Funhouse (The Ambrose stories) -- Please take a gander at these stories when you get around to placing LETTERS on your calendar. Character Ambrose will be recycled there.


Lost in the Funhouse --

JB: For whom is the funhouse fun?
DFW: For whom is the funhouse a house?

With this dialogue we see history shift from the postmodern to the post-postmodern, or at least an attempt at the post-post. Famously, DFW wrote his "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" in the margins of this here very story. That's reason enough to read it. And who takes DFW seriously when he says those unnice things about our Barth-man? You say mean things about your father all the time, too.


Menelaiad -- Perhaps the crowning achievement of this collection of literary stunts and dares. Having sent his (unneeded, but foisted) student assistants into the stacks to discover frame-tales and stories about stories and stories with stories inside them and such like (you remember 1001 Nights etc?) his results indicated that no story-within-story had been written which bored down more than four (or five) stories deep, i.e., a story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story. "Ah," said Herr Barth, "I can indeed do much better! I can go as deep as seven stories-within-stories-within-etcetera. . . ." And he did. The result looks something like this:

"'"'"'"Love!"'"'"'"

Or, better:

"'"'"'"Speak!" Menelaus cried to Helen on the bridal bed,' I reminded Helen in her Trojan bedroom," I confessed to Eidothea on the beach,' I declared to Proteus in the cave-mouth," I vouchsafed to Helen on the ship,' I told Peisistratus at least in my Spartan hall," I say to whoever and where- I am. And Helen answered: [vide supra.

Will that drive you mad? How about sitting in the audience at Boston College on the eve of a wintery storm whilst Herr Meister Barth reads the entire damn thing inclusive of visual aids by way of cue cards keeping count of all of that '"' and '''. Well, that was the night he (re)met his bride to be and future book dedicatee, Shelly.

Passionate Virtuosity, indeed.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

One's enjoyment of this collection may depend on one's enthusiasm for wordplay. There is a significant amount of utterly clever portmanteuing. Buried beneath the lexical prestidigitation is a penchant for unconventional storytelling. Combining homages to classical mythology with post-modern shenanigans, Barth's creative use of the English language is a rare confection. Yet, there are points when his esoteric noodling will become inscrutable for Cro-magnon readers like yours truly.

The high-browness of some sections are Rushmore-esque. Experimentation prevails through retellings, reimaginings, and regurgitations of Greek tragedies, pseudo-Arabian tales, and a perplexing ménage a treize of Gulliverian travails.

He admits preference to long-form fiction, though condensed, his voice is richly exuberant. My fave example was the tangled Siamese twin's illicit and unimaginable tale, told in a slippery and macabre bildungs-Geschichte.

If I had to describe the nested tales in one word it would be: ovoviviparous.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

44th book of 2022.

A real postmodern piss-around. I've been wanting to read Barth for some time, but, like some of the other postmodernists (Vollmann, for example), he's quite hard to come across (as far as I've seen) over here in England. I finally found this copy and a copy of Giles Goat-Boy in my favourite second-hand bookshop the other week. The first story in this collection told me all I needed to know about what Barth was up to (he was up to quite a lot), when "Frame-Tale" urges you to cut the page from the book and twist and glue it into a Möbius strip:



Following that is "Night-Sea Journey", which is great. By the end we realise our narrator, describing a strange nightmarish land in which his fellows drown around him and darkness reigns, is in fact a sperm. A very philosophical sperm, at that, who says at near the end of the story, ''You who I may be about to become, what You are: with the last twitch of my real self I beg You to listen. It is not love that sustains me!'' If you have the chance to read this story alone then I recommend it. Presumably it is the birth of the recurring character through some of the stories, Ambrose. The titular "Lost in the Funhouse" is decent enough, as is "Ambrose His Mark". The meta devices grow and grow and by the end of the short story collection, I'll admit, I had almost no idea what was going on in what I was reading. On a sentence level, I like Barth and I'm looking forward to reading more of him but these ultra-meta stories were a headache more than they were enjoyable.

"Menelaiad" is the most confusing, Greek myth within Greek myth. To borrow The New York Times outlining the story,

where at one point the hero Menelaus, husband of Helen of Troy, is telling us what he told Telemachus what he told Helen what he told Proteus what he told Eidothea the sea-nymph. There are details of the story told to Eidothea which he cannot tell to Proteus, just as he does not care to tell Helen all that he told Eidothea, and here he is telling it all to us (to us!) as he told it in Sparta to Telemachus, who, because Helen is listening close by, cannot be told everything, either. Quite literally, one finds oneself reading quotation marks more carefully than one reads the text. And then we discover that it isn't Menelaus we've been listening to ... but here I must send you to the text.

And it's true, the quotation marks get ridiculous, as characters quote someone else who is quoting someone else who is quoting someone else. Read these lines for all you need to know about the story,

'''''''''Why?' I repeated,'' I repeated,' I repeated,'' I repeated,' I repeated,'' I repeat. '''''''''And the woman, with a bride-shy smile and hushed voice, replied, 'Why what?'
'''''''''Faster than Athena sealed beneath missile Sicily upstart Enceladus, Poseidon Nisyros mutine Polybutes, I sealed my would-widen eyes; snugger than Porces Laocoön, Heracles Antaeus, I held to my point interrogative Helen, to whom as about us combusting nightlong Ilion I rehearsed our history horse to horse, driving at last as eveningly myself to the seed and omphalos of all. . .''('((''(((')))

The brackets at the end there are tiny, as small as the apostrophes in the text but Goodreads, of course, cannot replicate them. As these lines alone demonstrate: the apostrophes are beyond headache-inducing and the references to Greek myth are... heavy. I wouldn't recommend even bothering without reading The Odyssey or The Iliad. A lot of the flying names I don't even know. I only know Laocoön, from above, for example, because he is one of my favourite statues in the Vatican. Most names are beyond me other than the well-known ones.

I can't imagine I've inspired anyone to read it. That wasn't my purpose per se but I would never recommend this other than "Night-Sea Journey". I hope his novels are better. This is 201 pages long and it took me 11 days to read it and I mostly skimmed the last story because I couldn't find anything to hold onto. OK, Barth, you're clever. I fled (fled!) to Yale for some answers and Professor Amy Hungerford said this, though it hasn't made me feel much better. I didn't like The Crying of Lot 49 much, I preferred Gravity's Rainbow. I'm a big Nabokov fan, but I wouldn't say he's like Barf. My apologies, Barth.

Prof. A.H.: If you think that Barth in all his heady, intellectual, canonical difficulty is uninterested in the world outside of his fiction, I think you could argue that it's on this notion of desire that he stakes his work's connection to the world. And the echo of that desire is, I would say, pleasure: something like, in this case, Nabokov's aesthetic bliss, but here it's more funny than that. It's not even so much the transportation and the nostalgic quality of Nabokov's description, sometimes. It's that wit, that pleasurable wit, the pleasure we get reading, being absorbed by something that we have to work hard to read, and yet repays us with that pleasure. When you read Crying of Lot 49 I'd like you to think about what that novel represents in the relation between language and the world. Is it similar? Barth and Pynchon are often talked about as part of the same metafictional movement in this couple of decades, '60s and '70s. Are they assimilable to one another in these terms? Think about that as you read.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far then? Even this far? For what discernible motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

Where indeed?

Up through titular story (p94) everything was working for me. In fact, it had all the necessary elements of a tour-de-force: a purloined apiary, ontological gamete theory, article adjective noun, a metaphor that looked like a simile.

At one point my wife interrupted me to ask what I was reading, so I told her.

"You read some weird shit," said she. "I'm sticking with Wine Spectator."

"Night-Sea Journey" and "Lost in the Funhouse" are the first half highlights.

After that, Barth "heads up his ass" so far the going gets rough to the point of unreadable. I had to grit my teeth, take breaks, verb phrase preserving the series. "Life-story" and "Title" are both guilty of blank. So extremely Droste-recursive and painfully self-consciously meta-fictional there's almost no room for any. (No mistake here, I checked the galley-proofs: this is what the author intended.)

Then B-- comes out of it and into something entirely different in the penultimate and tailpiece: "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad".

For the former, it helps to 1) at least be acquainted with Greek mythology, if not have recently read The Odyssey (which I have 5 times in the past five years, since I "teach" that work) 2) not worry too much about all the nested quotation marks the first time through. We get it, Menelaus' immortality is real, if linguistic ("...this isn't the voice of Menelaus; this voice is Menelaus, all there is of him.").

So, the way I read LitF is not as discrete stories but as a curated set which read together comprise a "work," if not a novel of sorts. I tend to think that the heady, minstrel Ambrose is the narrating- author of "Title" and "Life-Story", penning his own crack-up. So, when Barth "'heads up his ass,'" in "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad" he comes out on the other side of sanity: into a fully fictional world that he can now manipulate as author in the same way conventional folk perambulate. He's a character whose awareness of his own fictionality has unmoored him from his docking.

...my crux, my core, I'm cutting you out; __________; there, at the heart, never to be filled, a mere lacuna. (177)

To go further would transmogrify: review --> essay. Suffice to say that if one is enough of a trouper to soldier through the middle section, there's a big pay-out. Or at least there was for me.

To be moved to art instead of to action by one's wretchedness may preserve one's life and sanity; at the same time, it may leave one wretcheder yet. (117)

Here we make an end: bereft of all reference points, Lost in the Funhouse.

4.25/5

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_76F...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6OQ...

To whom is the funhouse fun?
To the Bookchemist.

But seriously, don't read this book if you don't know what you're getting into; it would only annoy you. Otherwise, roll up roll up.

[Theo Logos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Postmodern metafiction which is by turns fascinating, though-provoking, humorous, clever, tedious, mind-numbing, and infuriatingly pointless. It tackles themes of identity, story-telling, and existence.

Several stories seem to fit together in a continuing narrative: Night-Sea Journey, Ambrose His Mark, Water-Message, Lost In The Funhouse, and possibly Autobiography. Several others shared a Greek mythology theme.

The story Night-Sea Journey was the reason I picked up this book originally some thirty years ago, and was my reason for rereading it now. Ambrose His Mark was surprisingly amusing, and mostly free of the book’s metafiction.


Frame-Tale
A single page with instructions to remove it and create a Möbius strip. A symbolic meta beginning.

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN


Night-Sea Journey 5⭐️
A first person perspective of a cynically philosophical sperm, who in his musings cleverly paraphrases the likes of Tertullian, Ginsberg, and Tennyson.

”Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream?”

”I am no longer young, and it is we spent, old swimmers, disabused of every illusion, who are most vulnerable to dreams.”


Ambrose His Mark 4⭐️
A satirical, occasionally slapstick tale of the infant Ambrose’s origins — his mad, absent father, his flamboyant, narcissistic mother, his eccentric extended family, and the dramatic incident from which he (belatedly) obtained his name.


Autobiography 3 1/2 ⭐️
Another cynically musing rant, similar in tone and theme to Night-Sea Journey, albeit this one is post rather than pre conception. The meta is starting to kick in.

”Are you there? If so I’m blind and deaf to you, or you are to me, or both’re both. One may be imaginary; I’ve had stranger ideas. I hope I’m a fiction without real hope. Where there’s a voice there’s a speaker.”

”Who am I? A little crise d’ identite for you.”

”Beneath self-contempt, I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loath self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.”


Water-Message 3 ⭐️
The trials, tribulations, adventures and dreams of 10 year old Ambrose.


Petition 2⭐️
This one — a letter petition to the visiting king of Siam from a sad and desperate conjoined twin — is the first of these stories that seems to have nothing to do with the admittedly loose tale that has been being spun so far. I guess you could read it as darkly humorous, but I just found it off putting.

”And while our condition is freakish, our origin is almost certainly commonplace.”


Lost In The Funhouse 3⭐️
A return to Ambrose and his development, this time on a holiday to Ocean City, Maryland on Independence Day during the war. It explores the awkward angst of a 13 year old while taking frequent diversions into meta commentary on the text.

”One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody’s felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak. Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?”

”He wished he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator — though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.”


Echo 2⭐️
Greek mythos erotic ramblings for what purpose?


”Thus we linger forever on the autognostic verge — not you and I, but Narcissus, Tiresias, Echo. Are they still in the Thesbian caves?


Two Meditations 1⭐️
If you can work out what these short “meditations” have to do with Niagara Falls and Lake Erie you’re ahead of me.


Title 3⭐️
In which all traditional narrative disappears, replaced entirely by meta rambling. A kind of noodling about, at its strongest like a jazz solo, but at its extended worst more like a Phish concert.


Glossolalia 3 1/2 ⭐️
Another dive into mythology, as opaque as the last, but shorter and more eloquent, almost a prose poem.

”The laureled clairvoyants tell our doom in riddles. Sewn in our robes are horrid tales, and the speakers-in-tongues pronounce atrocious tidings…The senseless babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, or prayer.”


Life-Story 3 ⭐️
Once again, this story is all meta noodling, though passingly entertaining for what it is. The author provides some self-deprecating humor. Still, much longer than strictly necessary.

”He being by vocation an author of novels and stories it was perhaps inevitable that one afternoon the possibility would occur to the writer of these lines that his own life might be a fiction, in which he was the leading or an accessory character.”

”If I’m going to be a fictional character G declared to himself I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not in some piece of avant-garde preciousness.”


Menelaiad 3 ⭐️
Back to the Greeks, but this time with an intelligible narrative. Menelaus, home from the Trojan War, entertains Telemachus (Odysseus’s son) and regales him with his stories. At many points this story captivated me, but it just kept dragging on, and on, and on until I was wearied sick of it.

”My problem was, I’d too much imagination to be a hero. My problem was, I’d leisure to think.”

”We seers see fore and aft but not amidships. I know what you’ve been and will be; how is it you’re here? What god teaches men to godsnatch?”


Anonymiad
And it was here, after slogging my way through the previous story, that I stopped reading. Couldn’t face another 50 pager like the last.

[Oleh Bilinkevych · Rating 4 out of 5]

Для людей які «плавають» у Давньогрецькій міфології, не призвичаїлися до експериментально письма та не тримали в руках «Улісса» – це буде наче шлях крізь забуті світом чагарники.
Якби не післямова від Максима, я б і половини не вкурив що то було😅

[Franco Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.”

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this collection made me mad at my undergraduate profs from San Francisco State from the early 1980s who never bothered to teach me that Postmodern Literature (Well, the postmodern novel) not only existed in America but was born in America. Why did we feel compelled to ignore Joseph Heller and John Barth (not to mention Gaddis, Gass, Pynchon, and even Don DeLillo until White Noise) and rather buy it back from Italo Calvino and Milan Kundera in overpriced trade paperbacks fostered upon us by Reaganite American psychos in publishing hell-bent on inventing ways to make us spend twice as much on a product we needed only half as much. Was a John Barth pocketbook, perhaps, not good enough for the big haired boys and girls who danced to Depeche mode? Was all that padding really necessary in the shoulders of our blazers? Did we really need to import Duran Duran and convince David Bowie to fuck art and dance when we had the Violent Femmes, Husker Du, The Replacements, Tom Waits, and Prince in our Midwestern backyard?--well, Waits was in L.A., but you know what I mean. Such are the mysteries of history and the mistakes that a cultures makes. (Music made the same mistake two decades earlier when Hermen's Hermits outsold Motown's finest despite all those British blokes endlessly covering Smokey Robinson.)

That's about all I have to say about that. Barth nailed it. Sure, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is perhaps more lighthearted and accessible--but, hell, if you're not educated enough to know the Iliad and the Odyssey then you probably don't want to read any Pomo novels anyway. Lost in the Funhouse is fucking brilliant--in that perfect, self-reflexive Pomo way--and beyond it even.

Although I wonder less if I might be a character in a novel than how I can become a character in a novel.

This is not a review review; it's a reaction. The first action was reading the book. Now you.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lost in the Funhouse is a tough book to review, because it screams for some sort of clever, self-aware, self-reflexive metafictional review. The trick there is that reviews are sort of self-aware and self-reflexive by their nature, which is why e.g. it's completely unsurprising to see the author poke their head in and say "hey guys this is Sentimental Surrealist (not my real name) and here's what I think of Lost in the Funhouse or whatever it is I happen to be reviewing, which as of right now is Lost in the Funhouse. My god, what is this, a third-grade book report? "The book I chose to review is Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth." I have a BA in English and here I am pulling those tricks? Come now.

So, what's there to do? I could cross-reference other people's reviews, make a nod to how Aidan or Darwin8U (the only of my friends who have reviewed this book) did or express surprise that Paul liked it, but that wouldn't have the effect I'm going for here, because again, nobody would be surprised by that. Or I could cull from my other reviews, mention how I reviewed The Big Sleep in the style of Raymond Chandler, but who wants to read that? The object of the review isn't the author or the review, it's the book being reviewed, whereas the object of the book is the book itself, books being works of art and therefore justifying themselves, as long as they're good, which Lost in the Funhouse mostly is, although "Anonymiad" disappears up its own ass and I'm still not sure if "Meleniad" is anything but an exercise in quotation marks.

"'I'm still not sure if "Meleniad" is anything but an exercise in quotation marks,'" says my inner monologue. "Listen to yourself, Sentimental Surrealist. You have this BA in English, but you don't get that 'Meleniad' is really an exercise in nested narrative, tying it into one of the creepier images of the earlier 'Petition?' You, who's always drawing these connections as to HOW IT ALL TIES TOGETHER, couldn't see that one coming? Jesus, maybe they should take that degree back."

"I get it," I reply to my inner monolog, "But look, man. Barth had already perfected the gentle art of recursion with the jaw-dropping 'Lost in the Funhouse,' where Borges' idea of labyrinth-as-story is put into haunting practice. 'Meleniad's' narrative layers are sort of cool, but it strikes me as an example of the emotionless formalism Barth's critics accuse him of. So yes, my inner monologue, '"'I'm still not sure if 'Meleniad' is anything but an exercise in quotation marks'"'.

See, there you go again, tossing about names like Borges, mentioning that you know what formalism is, mentioning your English degree twice. People are going to find this review inevitably off-putting, Sentimental Surrealist. You've vanished up your own ass, and there's no way out now. You've pretty much guaranteed that only English majors will want to read this book (of course, it's hard to imagine your average James Patterson fan enjoying John Barth [Wait a minute there, aren't you supposed to be some sort of postmodernist? (is it acceptable to refer to yourself as a postmodernist, or does that make you a douche?] Aren't these sort of "true literature vs. popular fiction" distinctions supposed to be beneath you? (or is low art the new high art? People are now looking down their noses at a lot of rock music and holding disco up alongside Beethoven, which sure wouldn't have happened thirty years ago) I think you need to rethink your approach, man], but what the hell do I know)

So, let's to the point, now that I'm so far gone up my own ass that I can see my own digestive tracts working, and it's so gross that I'm gonna throw down a rope ladder so I boogie on outta here. Lost in the Funhouse is full of stories about people writing stories, stories that deconstruct the idea of the story as the linguistic construct, stories that take the forms of labyrinths, stories told from perspectives you wouldn't expect them to be told from, the works. It breaks every Rule of Storytelling you've ever read, and if you hate the formalists and would rather read the old masters (who can be everyone from Harper Lee to Jane Austen, just so's they wouldn't touch metafiction with a ten-foot pole), you're out of luck here. But if you're obsessed with postmodernism, scoop this one up. Even though it's difficult to review.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

As critics decried the Death of the Novel, Death of the Story, Death of the Author, Death of et cetera, Barth took it upon himself to revel in the debris, causing further destruction in the process. Despite being billed as a connected series, this collection covers a lot of relatively unconnected ground, veering between personal narrative, self-reflexive formal pyrotechnics, and re-constructed mythology. It's all very clever, but the content, for me, sometimes fails to keep pace with the cleverness. Earlier in the book, we have more linear narratives that can lag due mainly to their comedic conceits not being funny enough to propel their complete lengths; later, we run into complete deconstruction that may lack any content besides its own form, or Greek mythologies repurposed to obscure meta-purposes. (I'm no classicist, but I would think I'd know enough to navigate these reasonably well, but they seem to get lost in manipulating own ersatz period mechanics. Closer "Anonymiad" is the only one with any kind of story-form equilibrium). Despite this, somehow it's actually the insane metastories in the center that attracted me the most -- the narrative-formal-reflexive sweet spot of the title story, the metaphysical panic of "Life-Story" and "Title" -- each of these is remarkable, but exist as bright points amid a bit of slogging. Still worth it for these, and perhaps for much more if more patient readers excavate this further. Impatient readers will get nowhere -- see apparent complaint of critics who took the opener to be narrated by a fish. No, it's much weirder and better than that, even if the conceit is pushed somewhat beyond patience for any who caught on from the first pages. So, basically, I continue to find Barth interesting but rather trying. At least there were no characterizations that bugged me as much as in Giles, Goat Boy

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this over a span of several weeks, really. When I saw that the title page had "Fiction for print, live tape, and voice," I was intrigued and had to go find out what that meant. There are instructions by the author of which stories should be read out loud and which ones should have come recorded onto tape, of course none of them are. So the first thing I did was read the out loud ones out loud, which was a blast.

Then I got into the character of Ambrose, who appears in a few stories. I love how Barth captures the essence of a child, with all the imagination and arms-length observations, but still shows him playing along with his own role.

My two favorite stories were Title and Autobiography, although the first time I read Autobiography I felt like I had been punched in the stomach because of the subject matter and the really frank intensity he allows himself to write with.

Less successful for me was this somewhat tedious self-awareness where Barth himself would step back and examine the writing process, within the prose. Once would have been interesting but it happens several times. Also, and this is more my fault than his, I just don't have enough mythology in my body to be as entertained with the last two stories as I think he was writing and imagining them. The quirky, funny nature of them comes through, but I felt like it was too removed from me.

[Zahra · Rating 3 out of 5]

من تنها داستان کوتاه ”Lost in the Funhouse“ رو خوندم‌، منتها چون نسخه‌ی جداگانه‌ای براش نیست اون رو با کالکشنی که با همین نام از نویسنده منتشر شده علامت می‌زنم.

جان بارث برای من نقطه‌ی شروع پست‌مدرنیسم بود. کاری که اون اینجا انجام میده، استفاده از یک راوی نامتعارفه که با کامنت‌هایی که روی اصول داستان‌نویسی، شخصیت‌پردازی و صنایع ادبی میده، پروسه‌ی داستان رو به‌طور نامنظم و به‌دفعات مختل می‌کنه.
میشه گفت روایت رو در اصل دو خط موازی که تنها لحظاتی هم‌دیگر رو قطع می‌کنند، جلو می‌بره.
ایده‌ی پشت این فرم، تاکید نویسنده روی ماهیت «ساختگی» داستانه. شیفت‌های زمانی، چندپارگی ساختار، روایت متافیکشنال و غیرخطی، همه از تکنیک‌های به‌کار رفته هستند.
جان بارث با شکستن دیوار چهارم، چیزی شبیه به کاری که برتولت برشت در تئاتر انجام داد، غیرواقعی بودن داستان رو مکرر به خواننده گوشزد می‌کنه. (البته برتولت برشت پست مدرن نبود!)

از دیدن ریویوها تعجب نکردم چون درک می‌کنم خواننده‌ی امروزی که به‌سختی برای خوندن روایت خطی تمرکز داره، این نوع داستان حتی در حوصله‌ش بگنجه.
به‌هرحال برای من جالب بود و مشتاق شدم بیشتر از پست‌مدرنیسم بخونم‌.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dear Mr Barth,

As I yet again write you a letter in a review of a book about writing about writing about writing (sigh!), I must apologise for not being clever enough to know what the hell you're on about in pretty much all of this. Should I take the time to deconstruct your stories, I suspect your only message is that life sucks and we will all die one day, in which case I must thank you for this highly original and important message that is worth taking the time to consider.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
NOT!

(Sigh!)

[Viktoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Сказитися! Ох і дав Барт жару.
Спочатку все так по-дорослому і тужливо. Подорож нічним морем. Становлення письменника. Борсання серед відкритих вод, що тягнуть до дна. І що краще, запитує Барт, відразу тонути, чи борсаючись загинути під самим Берегом, якого, можливо і немає.

«А я тоді «досягти Берега»: а що, коли Берег існує лише в нашій фантазії плавців і його вигадано, аби пояснити сам жахливий факт, що ми кудись пливемо, завжди тільки це й робили і далі плитимемо без перепочинку (я тут виняток), поки не помремо?… Одне слово, блаженна маєтність потопельника.

Потім наш герой народжується, а ми читаємо історію в дусі Джеральда Даррела.

Зі скреготом збираю усі залишки інтелекту аби вхопити нитку власне Загубленого у кімнаті сміху. Все гаразд, світ-лабіринт, хтось (оператор) тим усім керує.
Ехо нагадує Лаканівські вчення про Нарциса, власне Ехо, Едипа і усіх разом взятих. А потім читаю післямову і розумію, що не те)

Після все в тумані: Заголовок та Історія Життя, але ж пам’ятаємо це постмодернізм) і миримося з тим туманом.

І тут, фанфари:
«Читачу! Ти, упертий, цинічний виродку, орієнтований на друковане слово, це саме до тебе я звертаюся, до кого ж іще, із самих нутрощів цієї монструозноі прози. Тож ти дочитав мене до цього місця? Аж до цього? Який сумнівний мотив тебе спонукає? Як так, що ти не йдеш до кінотеатру, не дивишся телевізор, не витріщажшся на стінку, не граєш із другом у теніс, не втілюєш своіх амурних планів стосовно особи, що спала тобі на думку, коли я заговорив про амурні плани? Не можеш ніяк насититися, просякнути наскрізь, вимкнутися? Де ж твоя совість?»

А вже потім на сцені з’являються герої стародавньої Греції. Підготуйтесь, адже сміятися ви будете до сліз. Якби Барт викладав міфологію, о то було б надцікаво)

«кидатиму вам кістки, щоб ви або наростили на них мясо, або хоч поколупалимя в них, як забажаєте»
Уявляю, як він розважився, поки писав цю збірку. А от перекладачеві було не переливки. Ет, Барт!

Про Стрічку Мебіоса, камеру обскури і інші задуми твору, бо ж його важко назвати просто збіркою оповідань, можна прочитати вже в книзі.

[Andrew]

Barth is such a lyrical writer, especially compared to most of the brooding postmodernist set. Just look at the opening story, "Night-Sea Journey." Gorgeous in its imagery, rich with philosophical inquiry, it's worthy of Calvino.

And Barth doesn't limit himself, he gracefully steps from style to style, going from that to weird biographies to formal experiments to lyrical, haunting childhood tales. Above all, the whole thing is a big, long mash note in love with the writing process.

I get the feeling people don't read Barth as much anymore. The influence on David Foster Wallace is unmistakable, so if you dig DFW, go read Barth. This and Giles Goat-Boy are both phenomenal.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few stories in, and I was ready to put this on a shelf with Calvino, Nabokov, and the other luminaries of post-modern meta-fiction. Unfortunately, like so many front-loaded albums from bands that you only kind of like, the second half was supremely tiresome. Overall: disappointment.

But the highs -- oh, the highs! There's definitely a few stories in here that are must-reads for fans of the genre. "Night-sea Journey" is a spectacular tale of a confused spermatozoa cell, whose brief existence forms densely-layered metaphors on human life, philosophy, and questions of purpose. It sounds icky, but it isn't -- it's brilliant.

There are a few "standard-format" stories in the first half that are very pleasant as well. But then Barth's multitude of styles and narrative techniques come to a head in the title story "Lost in the Funhouse," which might be one of the most fun things I've come across in a long time. Barth tells an incredibly mundane story, but is absolutely littered with self-awareness, meta-fictional winks at the reader, and explanations of what certain sentences and sections are supposed to be accomplishing in terms of the narrative. It's pretty much a perfect example of the genre.

Unfortunately, the next several stories utilize either a very similar method (which gets old and never hits the same heights), or go into Greek mythology in a completely un-interesting way. I found myself skimming over stories, which is never a good sign.

All in all -- worth it for the handful of standout stories, but not as great as I was hoping it'd be going into it. I'll have to try out his novels, which I'm sure are a little more focused.

[Олександр Заїка]

Барт грається з текстом і запрошує вас до гри. Ця збірка не є чимось надскладним та відлякуючим, для нормального прочитання непотрібна додаткова підготовка чи поглиблені знання з історії, міфології, чи квантової механіки. Барт радо ділиться сам всіма потрібними знаннями та люб'язно надає можливість прийняти участь у цьому святі флюїдної літературної форми. Такий собі паперовий парк розваг, де ви можете подивитись як оповідання пише саме себе, як усвідомлює себе, як автор пише оповідання в реальному часі, безкінечні метафори на тему творця і його творіння (звичайно автор і текст, тому куди в цьому дійстві без читача), а також дві передмови та ще сім додаткових приміток. Особливо хочеться виділити Менелаїду та Аноніміаду. В першій Барт подорожує між оповідями, та жонглює часовими рамками. Дуже яскраво уявив це у вигляді театральної постановки. Фінальна ж Аноніміада дає нам змогу поглянути на події троянської війни з оптики нікому невідомого молодого менестреля, амбіції якого потонули у вирі (wink) історії. Так буває, якщо твої герої не приносять богам гекатомб, а сам ти ріжеш лише кіз. 10 метафікшинів з 10.

[Юра Мельник · Rating 3 out of 5]

Такий собі дуууже завуальований персоналізований Улісс.