The Conversions

by Harry Mathews

At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the cost of an uncharted French island. A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, United States, 20th Century, American Fiction, Literature

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Conversions is a story of an objet d’art – a mysterious adze of gold…

Having turned on a ceiling spotlight to illuminate the case, he opened it. A weapon rested on the brilliant red lining, its smooth handle of ash, its billshaped flat blade of gold.
According to Mr. Wayl, the instrument was a ritual adze. The side of the bill we had first beheld was plain, but its reverse was chased with wiry engravings, depicting seven scenes. Six had in common the figure of a longhaired woman with full breasts and a face crosshatched for swarthiness. Mr. Wayl suggested that the woman was some heroine or saint, and that the engravings told her life. He looked at me curiously while he said this.

The novel is an absurdist mystery written in the exquisite style of Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel.
Partaking in a weird worm race the narrator wins the adze and soon he learns that the owner of the gold adze is bequeathed the great wealth but in order to get his inheritance he must unriddle three riddles:

1) When was a stone not a king?
2) What was La Metre de Sire Fadevant?
3) Who shaved the Old Man’s Beard?

Consequently the hero embarks on the adventurous investigation in the exotic and incredible world of arts.
Human ability to create is unlimited… It is ability to understand what was created that is limited.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mathews is so undervalued it’s pitiful. A la Frost’s guide “who only has at heart your getting lost,” this absolute gem of a debut is every bit the blast that Lot 49 is, but beats it to several punches—the least of which is mere date of publication. Harry was a legitimate genius and the only American Oulipian for a reason, juste? Corrigez-moi si j’ai tort. Read it and the French will make sense.

The language, not the people.

[Jim Elkins]

Why it Can Be Treacherous to Emulate Effects Rather Than Structure

The Conversions is an object lesson in a particular peril of emulation. Mathews said several times that his encounter with Roussel's work, to whom he was introduced by Ashbery, changed the direction of his work. The Conversions is based more directly on Roussel than other novels by Mathews, and some pages could be mistaken for Roussel if they were presented without context. At the same time The Conversions is far from Roussel, and in a certain sense, as far as it is possible to get.

In the Paris Review interview, Mathews says he "didn’t use [Roussel's] methods specifically," but his were "similar in that they were based on relationships between words, often puns" -- which is the method Roussel describes in How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Mathews also offers this, as a generalization: "The whole thing is based on misunderstanding language." (tinyurl.com/6d2m862)

The Conversions is a series of short chapters, each with a story involving a puzzle. Some are descriptions of machines, exactly as in Roussel; others are translations of texts, or stories told by people the narrator visits. Each chapter is different in style, historical references, and in the kind of puzzle. Mathews is closest to Roussel when he describes machines, like the undersea clock that incorporates a miraculous acid held in place by magnets (pp. 164-71), the wasps who "scorch" bacteria, producing a cure for an epidemic (p. 51), or the painter's machine that supposedly produces unusual colors (p. 119-28).

Mathews is more scholarly than Roussel, and he plays with Latin puns (pp. 110-18), German prose (there is a chapter in German, pp. 172-80), and French. He also knows more about some historical questions than Roussel may have, especially regarding medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music (there is a chapter on Orlando di Lasso). Those differences aside, much of the material in The Conversions could have been imagined by Roussel forty years before Mathews's book.

Yet he is far from Roussel in two crucial particulars.

First, he presents the solutions to each puzzle, or the impossibility of a solution, in each chapter, together with the puzzle. In Impressions of Africa, all the strange performances and machines are described in the first half of the book, and then "explained" in the second half, but the "explanations" prove to be as enigmatic as the expositions, and the overall "explanation" (that the performers are captives of the African king) doesn't come close to serving the ordinary function of an explanation, which is to dispel mystery or irrationality. But in The Conversions each chapter concludes with the narrator's summary. Most chapters yield a small insight, and the narrator continues on to the next puzzle, as in a murder mystery. Roussel defers explanation, so that each new episode in Impressions of Africa, New Impressions of Africa, and Locus Solus accumulates a perverse and increasingly inexplicable opacity. Mathews writes more like an author of detective fiction, bringing readers along with partial solutions, promising clarity at the end.

Second, Mathews ends by declaring the puzzle is insoluble. He does this abruptly, but there are also clues that the book as a whole will not resolve. For me, the strongest of those is the throwaway comment, toward the end of the chapter on the painter's machine, that the mechanism doesn't actually produce unusual colors for the artist, but is "only a means of supplying him with material for the exercise of his talent" — exactly in the way the puzzles serve the novel The Conversions rather than the truth of the narrative in The Conversions (p. 127). In the Paris Review interview, Mathews says:

"The ends of my books are also designed in a way that subverts any illusion that what you have become involved in is anything but the book itself. In The Conversions, as you approach the end of the book, you get to a part where the narrator doesn’t understand the last of three riddles. The whole quest falls apart. What happens next? You turn the page and are greeted with nine pages of German. This infuriated people."

This is far from Roussel, for whom it would be irrational and misguided (he might have said, more simply, wrong) to admit, in the book, that the puzzles and mysteries are only there to serve the art of fiction. It's the exact opposite: Roussel writes from the other side of the mirror, as if everything he is saying is in earnest, and the created world he presents is utterly true. That is the crucial move that ensures enigma, as Michel Foucault observed in Death and the Labyrinth.

Considered as emulation, The Conversions shows that the temptation to copy or surpass the effects of a writer can miss the forest for the trees. In Roussel, the trees are fascinating and strange, but nowhere near as odd as the forest, which remains as silent and free of explanation as a real forest. In Mathews, the forest is literature, and the rules that produce his text, even if they are "from Mars" as Georges Perec once said, are in the service of creating compelling writing. Roussel had no idea about writing in that sense, because he was too deeply deluded.

2016, revised 2024

[Black Glove · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a wealthy New Yorker's digs the narrator is gifted a gold axe (adze) after winning a party game - namely: a worm race.
Soon thereafter the eccentric host is dead, he's carked it, and according to his Last Will & Testament the person in possession of the antique axe at the time of the flush kook's passing gets the bulk of his humongous fortune, providing he/she can answer three riddles relating to the artefact's history.
This is how The Conversions by Harry Mathews begins, and it's a strange almost awkward tale, written in a chilled, concise style infused with wordplay and stories-within-stories.
The elegant storytelling follows the narrator's globetrotting antics as he attempts to provide answers to the three riddles.
The result is a sophisticated escapade of red herrings, flying pigs, white elephants, odd encounters, flamboyant puzzles etc.
Worth exploring if you have a fondness for peculiar fiction.

[Gabe Cweigenberg]

DNF with 30 pages left. Only counting it as read because of the time I’ve spent with this book, reading and re-reading chapter after chapter. It started off strong, lots of laughs, generally intriguing. It spoilt after about 50 pages, though. I had had interest in Mathews for quite some time before reading this. I chose this as my entry not because it was his first book, but because it was compared to one of my favorite books, The Crying of Lot 49. A lesson not to believe comparisons/critics. A chase for something an unknown desire? Yes. But nothing to rival, or even parallel the terror of Oedipa’s odyssey.

I understand why this would appeal to some readers. Mathews was an incredible talent, and I plan to read more of his oeuvre. But this one was not for me.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Хэрри Мэтьюз еще раз подтверждает, что авангард авангарду рознь. Дело ведь не в постмодернистских коллажах и нарративных вывертах, как будто придуманных нарочно, чтобы дразнить обывателя. Дело в том еще, и как это делается. Вот Мэтьюз дразнит лихо и увлекательно, он гораздо ближе к веселым фабулистам, чем к зубодробительно скучным умникам. Громоздя одного лохматого пса на другого и другой фегут на третий, Мэтьюз выстраивает дивную повествовательную матрешку обаятельнейшей бессмыслицы (с механизмами), давая нам понять, что в идеале такой и должна быть вся развлекательная литература.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't rhapsodize about this book enough. Odd, mysterious, intriguing, atmospheric, unpredictable, Russian Dolls of stories within a quest narrative. I'd rank this with the best movies of Lynch and Kubrick's 2001 as well as singular books like 'The Unconsoled' by Ishiguro as it's kind of a fairy tale for adults, where there is no resolution in the conventional sense but there is a lingering intrigue and sense of wonder, both during and after reading. The short story about a plane crash in the Arctic is alone worth reading this book for.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bit more of a wank than his later works, especially Tlooth, written around the same time as this one and with it shares some surface features. I'm all for dense trickeries in books, but this novel is so devoid of anything even remotely interesting or engaging that it's hard to find anything of value in it. An unknown quantity wanders through blandly written documents and correspondence to solve an equally bland mystery placed upon his/her shoulders by the only amusing character in the book, Mr. Wayl, who dies within minutes of the opening. A lot of the narrative revolves around ancient cultic rites and weird math puzzles and whatever. It just doesn't work as well as Tlooth was outrageous and passionate in its dastardly devious humor. The Conversions is considered superior to The Crying of Lot 49? Who came up with that one?
Skip this one and read some of his other stuff, which are uniformly better.

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the book is about an effort to decipher a riddle posed in the first chapters. Details of the protagonist’s point-to-point investigation are presented in lengthy passages and in such density that sometimes it feels like playing various parts of encyclopedia on fast forward, which is frankly better than it sounds.

Some reviewers compare The Conversions to several other ‘experimental’ works, most notably The Crying of lot 49, which is broadly similar in style and plot. Indeed, Mathews uses entropy as a narrative device, Pynchon-style, and he does it well enough. It’s fairly clear however, that the purpose of this proliferation of excessively rich, often erudite descriptions and deeply buried allusions is primarily to show off.

The early enigma-setting chapter (which includes a worm race) is actually a good sample of what’s ahead: it’s quirky, overloaded with ludicrous detail, and a bit too trippy to be taken at face value. Compared to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which has a similar premise, the stories forming a chain aren’t equally pretty, but some do grasp attention. Just as Calvino covers many styles, Mathews covers many fields of research. The hero listens to many stories, reads a novel, studies some documents. Like in the novel-within-the-novel from Wonder Boys, there's also a fair amount of horse genealogy in between (likely this is where the concept came from!). The mystery that emerges slowly concerns a religious sect and its female leader (the author points firmly at Robert Graves, as was the cliché of his times).

All this is told as an interrupted avalanche of facts, technical data, secrets, language games and occasional humor. For some, this is more likely to spawn growing indifference rather than continuous interest. I was eager enough to get through this novel in two sittings while on train – it’s relatively short and manages, for some 100 pages, to draw attention solely by being a literary oddity. This is not bad.

One truly interesting thing about this half-obscure work is how many other literary efforts of similar kind it predates. It foreshadows not only Calvino and Pynchon but also text machines such as Pale Fire, with its play upon editorial appendices. This list inescapably includes some lower-brow offerings, like Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series (which makes for a good train read as well).

The Conversions is not that much captivating on its own, however. The problem is that Mathews, having a concept and a considerable skill, didn’t seem to know exactly how to use them. Neither had he Nabokov’s grace, nor Pynchon’s playful mastery. Even Oulipo's formal experiments usually seemed to have a kind of purpose which is nowhere to be found here. What’s left is a puzzle, several pieces of which I was able to match together, unwilling to look closer for any others. Putting it simply, it might be clever enough, but it’s not fun enough. It’s still better than Da Vinci Code, though.

[Andrew]

OK, so an American reads a bunch of Cendrars and Roussel and tries to apply those methods to an American novel with mixed results. Harry Mathews wrote some great stuff later on, as my nation's sole Oulipian, and both Cendrars and Roussel wrote wonderfully weird French prose that remains difficult to classify 100 years on. The Conversions was clearly a first novel, and if I was a betting man when it was published in 1962, I would have guessed that its author would go on to do great things. But stick to the later stuff.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book in that seems a mix of Pynchon's crying of lot 49, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and O'brien's The Third Policeman..but written before any were published(actually same year as pale fire)! Endless jawdropping weirdness and humor.

[Bettie]

https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

a blast. nearly perfect.


a year later: because I got a few more of his books and yup still this good.

[Roie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i don’t wanna talk about it

[Dillon Ostlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mathews is a superbly talented writer with an unbelievable gift for hiding just how smart he is. This is 4 stars because I didn’t understand all of it, and that just makes me want to read it again.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

INTERVIEWER

So (Raymond) Roussel provided a model for The Conversions?

MATHEWS

I didn’t use his methods specifically, but mine were similar in that they were based on relationships between words, often puns. The whole thing is based on misunderstanding language. Arriving at a party, the narrator is told that a song being sung is “The Sheik of Araby,” but what he hears is “the cheek of our Bea,” Bea being the daughter of the house. That kind of thing goes on throughout the book. (From The Paris Review Art of Fiction interview #191.)


As another reviewer says, such constraint-driven narratives kind of come out, more often than you'd think, sounding very similar. The Conversions is quite like reading Roussel and/or Georges Perec--I didn't see the Crying of Lot 49 similarity as much as others here--perhaps because every novel is also a mystery now (vomit). So, sadly, I must agree that this just isn't as fun/entertaining as Roussel, Perec, and others. I so loved Cigarettes that I will read on in Matthews undaunted.

And although there was no love interest of any kind--it was still a better love story than Twilight.

[David Chess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not completely proud of how much I love books like this, but I do.

It's somewhat pretentious, somewhat "ooh look how smart I am, I am in on the joke, I understand this conundrum, and realize that the author has purposely given this other one no solution, look how all of this is meta-commentary on story-telling and novel-writing, and how much I grok all of that!".

But on the other hand it's really good meta-commentary, via really wonderful conundrums both soluble and insoluble, and I had a great time reading it.

Also, it has a will that requires certain heirs to eat the funeral music transcribed as pancakes. What more could one want!

[Brett Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always loved a book that takes me on a treasure hunt, that is ripe with tangents, folding onto itself, story-within-stories, characters that you're introduced to in far flung settings and surrounded by eclectic items and that overall, doesn't need to make complete sense or have a complete ending. This is not a book for people who enjoy traditional plots or loose ends being tied, this is a book for those who savor being taken around and around and not necessarily back-again.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently re-read this book--a Roussel-like effort from Mathews, first published in the 60s. What can I say. I am a sucker for this kind of thing of formal innovation in fiction. Don't let the three stars fool you; I don't give out three starts to just anyone.

[Emmett · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book recalls Calvino's If on a Winter's Night, Pynchon's Lot 49 & the "eggplant miracle" sections of Barth's Sot-Weed Factor with the key distinction that The Conversions is just way crappier than all of those books.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is wonderful. It's wildly poetic and very much aware that it is a book. HM takes advantage of words in ways that few authors would be brave enough to try, and the ending is perfect.

[Thomas Gizbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsively fun globe-trotting esoteric detective story that's also a meditation on puzzles and solutions. It was great.

[A2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiction at its finest: a daring, dazzling feat of the imagination.

This book is a page-turner. I devoured it as I devoured YA novels in my younger years. Lots of people complain about (or praise) the novel's difficulty; it is really not as difficult as they say. The plot is quite easy to follow--the narrator always explains the motivations behind his actions, and describes how he pieces various clues together. You always know what the narrator knows (if you are confused, the narrator probably is, too), but be warned: the extent of your knowledge ends there. And that's what makes this book so wonderful: it's both accessible and impenetrable.

From the first few pages you are hooked into a massive puzzle (game?) concerning a gold adze and, soon, a rich man's will. The game itself is not really so special; it depends on three vague questions to which the narrator must find answers. However, it is the narrator's journey which makes this novel truly unique. He travels to tiny towns and big cities, different countries, different continents. Wherever the last clue points, he goes. A thrilling adventure, to say the least.

Perhaps the most fascinating sections of The Conversions have no relevance to the central puzzle whatsoever; instead, they are intricate digressions on events in the story. For example, a former owner of the gold adze (whom the narrator consults) launches into a detailed summary of a book he has just written (about the aftermath of an Arctic planewreck). We learn about the disgraces of Beatrice and Isidore, who discovered, respectively, a new contraception method and a temporary vaccine for a deadly disease. We learn about a certain compound called "fleshmetal" which allows for temperatures below absolute zero. We learn about an obscure religion whose history can only be found in arcane documents. These sidestories make up the bulk of the novel, and are just as fascinating as the game itself. Each anecdote is highly original (yet entirely fictional!); Mathews' alternate history could easily be the real one (aside from a few curious absurdities).

Obviously this novel is intellectually stimulating and expansive. (Don't worry about the French; it doesn't appear often, and when it does, Google Translate should do the job.) And despite the narrator's formal, expressionless tone (wrought by pitch-perfect prose), The Conversions offers a slice of emotional depth. We don't learn much about the narrator, except when he mentions a failing marriage and deteriorating finances. These oddly timed glimpses into a mysterious life are touching, if only because the rest of the book sprints wildly to an elusive finish line. (The narrator reminds me of Stevens in The Remains of the Day.) And there is an almost epiphanic scene at the end, where the narrator realizes that maybe everything is fake and his search has been worthless.

An unexpected knockout. These are the surprises I live for. My favorite book so far this year.

Oh, yes, and the pancakes.

[Jack Delaney · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Do: unevenly, the three horns gave the note in the near darkness." The millionaire Mr. Wayl has promised his ceremonial adze to whomever wins a worm race (don't ask), and with this musical foofaraw the contest begins. But then Mr. Wayl dies, his will stipulating that in order to hold on to the adze, the winner has to explain its historical significance to his executrix.

So we're off across the sea on a wild goose chase, as our narrator tries to pull together the adze's story via interviews and archives, in what is essentially one long excuse for Harry Matthews to play with language.

We meet an anarchist who only speaks backwards, competitors at a makeshift poetry tournament on a Long Island beach, and twins who talk in code:

"Naraguts tarago yaragou, baragag-haraguead, answered Gore: twaraguins aragare twaraguins aragand naragueitharaguer haragas praraguiaragoraraguitaraguy."

In Scotland, there are the notes of a scientist who discovered how to induce temperatures below 0 Kelvin. Clues about the adze are dropped in a detailed account of a dreamer who goes to the city of Heaven, but is accidentally dropped in its outskirts, where diseased people are beaten by the angelic police (illness is a moral failing, there). Ultimately, we find out that a lot hinges on an overly complicated sundial.

In his BOMB interview, Matthews talks about how these seemingly endless asides are meant to gesture at a hidden plot. "The narrator," he says, "makes only two or three remarks in the course of The Conversions—about his wife divorcing him, for instance—but they’re enough to suggest all the things that he’s not saying that he should be saying." It's a clever trick, because it frees him up to write whatever he'd like, while maintaining an urgency to the narrative thanks to the negative space of the 'real story.'

But I like his storytelling games best in the first half of the book, before (I suspect) he decided to characterize his narrator as avoidant. The predominant emotion of these early tales is: joy. Even when things go south, as with the three German classical music enthusiasts crossing the tundra in the wake of a plane crash, there's a sense that words can bridge experiences and make us less lonely in what we live through.

Matthews seems to disavow this idea at the end of the book. It reminded me of reading Shen Congwen, whose later short stories (especially the two he wrote in 1935-36) indicate a loss of faith in the ability of narrative to improve people's real-world conditions. I imagine the two of them in two different corners of the planet, in two far-flung decades, writing alone at a desk as their main livelihood, not knowing whether what they wrote would change anything. Then I imagine them again. This time, they are much older, and they are telling a long story from a chair to a gaggle of grandchildren who are sitting on the floor as moths bat against the windows and the clock moves towards midnight. A neighbor sitting on a porch next door would hear uproarious laughter break out from time to time, or a gasp, until at some point the lights go out and a contented sigh flies up the chimney away.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A perfectly charming puzzle-box of a novel which amply presages, but does not live up to, the pleasures of later works like _Tlooth_ and _The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium_. Sections of the novel were initially published in Locus Solus, the journal co-founded and -edited by Mathews, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. I suspect the novel actually works better in *that* context (i.e. explicitly under the banner of Raymond Roussel) than as a standalone volume. The first installment was sandwiched between Ashbery and Frank O’Hara; a later installment came at the end of a double-volume including works by Landis Everson, Koch, Barbara Guest, and James Merrill… In such company, Mathews’ multilingual puns and outre humor feel less forced (though by the same token, perhaps less unique).

[Atomman · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 1/2 stars.

I wanted to like this more, but it was a bit of a slog. "The Conversions" can only be enjoyed for the ride, not the destination, and the humor was a little too opaque. There is some great, wacky stuff in here, but both the equally bizarre "Tlooth" and the more approachable "Cigarettes" were better able to sustain my interest.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I thought it was okay, but in the end it's just kind of nihilistic. Sort of Pynchonian, but not really. The best thing about it was retroactively recognizing a reference in Life a User's Manual. Intriguing enough that I may read more of Mathews, however.

[Full Daffy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The humor certainly hasn’t aged well. He didn’t know how to end this book which is why I like authors who write endings first so they know where they’re going. Otherwise you end up with this nonsense or unexplained magic (Stephen King) to tie up loose ends. Deus-ex-machina bull****.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would say in comparison to ‘Tlooth’ the craziness works a little more given the set up yet both suffer from the the fact that the techniques Mathews uses and the odd sentences that come from it is all there is to show.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few metafictionalists who can intellectually soar yet connect with every reader. He totally commits to character and narration with nary a trace of self-congratulatory chortling (are you listening, Jack Barth?). An underrated master of the form. I want to read everythng he ever wrote.