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Mahu
"Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, who, unlike his ambitious, successful brothers, is a lazy man who approaches the world around him with a defiant spirit and a witty outlook on life. Part of the reason for Mahu's laziness is that he may be nothing more than a character in a failing novel by his friend Latirail, a novel that is being overrun by characters invented by yet a different author" The second half of this book consists of Mahu's strange and hilarious musings on everything from belly dancers to how he catches ideas from other people in the same way he catches germs.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1952
186 people want to read
About the author
Robert Pinget
67 books41 followersRobert Pinget was a Swiss-born French novelist and playwright associated with the nouveau roman movement.
After completing his law studies and working as a lawyer for a year, he moved to Paris in 1946 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
In 1951, he published his first novel Entre Fantoine et Agapa. After publishing two other novels, but then having his fourth rejected by Gallimard, Pinget was recommended by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett to Jérôme Lindon, head of Éditions de Minuit, where he subsequently published Graal flibuste in 1956. Éditions de Minuit became his main publisher.
Scholars and critics have often associated his work with that of his friend Samuel Beckett, who he met in 1955.
(from Wikipedia)
After completing his law studies and working as a lawyer for a year, he moved to Paris in 1946 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
In 1951, he published his first novel Entre Fantoine et Agapa. After publishing two other novels, but then having his fourth rejected by Gallimard, Pinget was recommended by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett to Jérôme Lindon, head of Éditions de Minuit, where he subsequently published Graal flibuste in 1956. Éditions de Minuit became his main publisher.
Scholars and critics have often associated his work with that of his friend Samuel Beckett, who he met in 1955.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 21, 2014
The blurb namedrops Mulligan Stew and At Swim-Two-Birds, so already my expectations for Mahu were through the ceiling or that roof area that shields us from inferior books. In fact, Mahu is straight-up comedic absurdism with meta elements and has neither the structural genius of Sorro or Flann. The first section involves multiple narrators and amusing shenanigans in an impossible-to-fathom-but-fun manner, and the second section focuses on Mahu as a comedic character—an obsessive and eccentric bloke who makes observations of the unusual kind that leave the reader (me) baffled but with a serene sense of having tussled with a berserk mind. Can (should?) books offer more than the pleasure of having tussled with Great and Berserk minds? I THINK NOT.
March 14, 2025
HOUSEKEEPING 2025:
Hands down my favorite Pinget. It is actually fun, lives up to promise, and is driven by its own wonderful illogic.
Then again that COULD be Baga. It's been 8 fucking years and I'm supposed to remember between Mahu and Baga?
Bullshit!
(One of the two, I believe this, is incredible. I will have to reread to see; aging is a cruel mistress that doesn't share her weed.)
Hands down my favorite Pinget. It is actually fun, lives up to promise, and is driven by its own wonderful illogic.
Then again that COULD be Baga. It's been 8 fucking years and I'm supposed to remember between Mahu and Baga?
Bullshit!
(One of the two, I believe this, is incredible. I will have to reread to see; aging is a cruel mistress that doesn't share her weed.)
January 6, 2019
Really, what's not to like? Okay, the occasional racism, probably. But generally, this is fun stuff. Not inaccessible at all. Maybe a bit slight, but what the hey. A good book to read while drinking a beer, I think.
June 1, 2020
A short, rhapsodic kind of work which spills out from the top and leaves you laughing at the end.
(What with the casual employment of racist tropes - I wish I didn't read this at this time, but it was short enough to pull out.)
(What with the casual employment of racist tropes - I wish I didn't read this at this time, but it was short enough to pull out.)
November 19, 2020
No purpose, no plot, boring.
May 4, 2007
maybe his humor doesnt translate or its dated ...or it's me, but i'm not sure i get the pinget love. it is a real dry humor, and the idea of characters running around outside of their books/masters can be and was once a good one... i got this cuz i could really make headway into the inquisitory and was hoping this would give me an in. but it didn't.
July 2, 2009
Fun little absurdist surrealism, though the twoparts of this book seem disjointed. Like reading two seperate short stories (though the second is more a group of anecdotes). The amount of word play though makes me suspect about the translation. How has it altered the original? Not as good as Eastern Europeans tackling similar ground.
January 15, 2017
Rather unfunny, laced with misogyny and racism, and too disjointed to be anything other than a series of trying entries. There is a good line about writing and the creation of art being an infirmity, which I often think myself, before seeking the elusive cure. A short book, at least. My first Pinget was a wash. Sadly, he ain't no Queneau of Perec.
April 2, 2017
Well, I tried.
Previously, I've liked Pinget. I read The Inquisitory which, despite being often confusing or obscure, was at least remarkable in setting and in country-house weirdness, and is something I've reread and kept on my shelf for future examinations.
Not so much with Mahu: Or the Material.
Now, it's described as being a sort of fellow-traveller with works such as At Swim-Two-Birds and while it does have a surreal sort of humour flowing through it, that's where the comparison ends. Likewise the comparison of Pinget to Beckett: that seems a bit of a reduction - with Samuel at least there's the idea of a plan behind the words, a meaning to the ranting. Not so here.
The book apparently tells the story of a "man outside his time", a menial worker and borderline idiot. He's one of a large family and he can't figure out why they're successful (or, at least, interested in success) while he isn't. So we get a sort of idiot wino fool's take on the world over the length of the book, with about as much interest as you'd expect.
Mahu is broken into two parts. Neither makes a lot of sense. The first is a bit of a description, a stab at narrative, whereas the second is simply the words of Mahu, verging on intoxicated ranting. There's a distinct feeling that reality does not collide with the narrator's world, other than to provide a canvas for observation. Pinget does, it's true, accurately convey the obsessively recurrent nature of wound-up speech, but Mahu, for all his much-vaunted observation, doesn't share much beyond reminiscences.
It strikes me that Pinget - a champion of the nouveau romain - approached the work with a cut-up mentality, exerted per chapter rather than per line or word. The binding on my copy is coming out; other than the last three chapters of the book, I could rearrange everything else and be no more or less impressed. It could be argued that it is intentional, but I suspect not - in a book where the narrator is painted as completely unreliable, why should we rely on structure?
There's a couple of interesting pieces where the idea of writing and reality intersect: a novel is being written and then is changed, Heisenberg-style, by the observation of another character. There's an intriguing moment where the outcome of a criminal investigation hangs on what's written in a fictional work, but it's discarded in favour of more farting about, and - latterly - some pretty racist bullshit about unclosable lips and the horrors of a black man fancying a white woman.
(Had this occurred earlier in the book I would've ejector-seated out. Fuck that noise. Yes, it's from 1952 but still, fuck that noise.)
By the end of the book I found myself slogging through to get to the end so that I wouldn't be defeated by this Mahu fuck. So you can imagine how galling it is to find that the last two pars of the book are such:
Previously, I've liked Pinget. I read The Inquisitory which, despite being often confusing or obscure, was at least remarkable in setting and in country-house weirdness, and is something I've reread and kept on my shelf for future examinations.
Not so much with Mahu: Or the Material.
Now, it's described as being a sort of fellow-traveller with works such as At Swim-Two-Birds and while it does have a surreal sort of humour flowing through it, that's where the comparison ends. Likewise the comparison of Pinget to Beckett: that seems a bit of a reduction - with Samuel at least there's the idea of a plan behind the words, a meaning to the ranting. Not so here.
The book apparently tells the story of a "man outside his time", a menial worker and borderline idiot. He's one of a large family and he can't figure out why they're successful (or, at least, interested in success) while he isn't. So we get a sort of idiot wino fool's take on the world over the length of the book, with about as much interest as you'd expect.
Mahu is broken into two parts. Neither makes a lot of sense. The first is a bit of a description, a stab at narrative, whereas the second is simply the words of Mahu, verging on intoxicated ranting. There's a distinct feeling that reality does not collide with the narrator's world, other than to provide a canvas for observation. Pinget does, it's true, accurately convey the obsessively recurrent nature of wound-up speech, but Mahu, for all his much-vaunted observation, doesn't share much beyond reminiscences.
It strikes me that Pinget - a champion of the nouveau romain - approached the work with a cut-up mentality, exerted per chapter rather than per line or word. The binding on my copy is coming out; other than the last three chapters of the book, I could rearrange everything else and be no more or less impressed. It could be argued that it is intentional, but I suspect not - in a book where the narrator is painted as completely unreliable, why should we rely on structure?
There's a couple of interesting pieces where the idea of writing and reality intersect: a novel is being written and then is changed, Heisenberg-style, by the observation of another character. There's an intriguing moment where the outcome of a criminal investigation hangs on what's written in a fictional work, but it's discarded in favour of more farting about, and - latterly - some pretty racist bullshit about unclosable lips and the horrors of a black man fancying a white woman.
(Had this occurred earlier in the book I would've ejector-seated out. Fuck that noise. Yes, it's from 1952 but still, fuck that noise.)
By the end of the book I found myself slogging through to get to the end so that I wouldn't be defeated by this Mahu fuck. So you can imagine how galling it is to find that the last two pars of the book are such:
Between you and me, the first part was a novel that didn't work out but it doesn't matter, it gave me a few scales to practise on, what matters to me is not that I should sing well, but that I should hear my voice without bronchitis, when you've got bronchitis, you know, there are lots of little whistling noises.So the whole thing's a writing exercise? Jesus, guy, keep it in a journal.
Well there you are, I've nothing else to say, but the game's mine, I've won.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews