Tlooth

by Harry Mathews

This novel begins in a Russian prison camp at a baseball game featuring the defective Baptists versus the Fideists. There is a plot (of sorts), one of revenge surrounding a doctor who, in removing a bone spur from our narrator, manages to amputate a ring and index finger, a significant surgical error considering that the narrator is, or was, a violinist. When Dr. Roak is released from prison, our narrator escapes in order to begin the pursuit, and thus begins a digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then on to India and Morocco and France. All of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concern and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.

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

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

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]

Tlooth is a medical cacotopia – weird dentistry, all sorts of mental disorders and exquisite perversity are included…

The human body, richest of nature’s fruits, is not a single organism made of constituent parts, but an assemblage of entities on whose voluntary collaboration the functioning of the whole depends. “The body is analogous to a political confederation, not to a federation as is normally supposed.” Every entity within the body is endowed with its own psyche, more or less developed in awareness and self-consciousness.

And following this revolutionary medical theory the story boasts plenty of extravagant absurdist ideas. And the world presents its inhabitants with a lot of stupendous semiotic riddles…

…abstractions are simple, subtle and overwhelming. They remind us that art at its highest is not removed from life, but is its master.

In the world as well as in art anything can happen… And happens.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate smarmy suggestives like "what really is a novel?" because they're stupid. This is one of those books that probably gets that question plastered all over its blurbs in newer editions (only once on my trade copy) because it really is antithetical to anything you think a novel might be. There is a "plot" and then a "plot", there are mazes, word puzzles, pornographic sequences that dissolve from innocent typos into a gargantuan horror tale of insensibility, yet you still get it(a real coup). This is probably best for a particular kind of reader: if birds being inserted inside people's anuses during an orgy disturbs you then this book probably isn't for you.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is far more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

4.5 stars perhaps?

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOUSEKEEPING 2025

KAFKAESQUE!

Not really, but I've always wanted to use that battered old bird.

Matthews rarely, maybe never, made a misstep in his long career. This sophomore bow isn't an exception. Tlooth, if less great than The Conversions, is such only by the skin of its...

(yep...)

tleeth.

God bless Harry and all who sail her. Goddamn, I love this sonofasonofasonofa sailing man.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Embarassed to admit that this picaresque tale of dentistry and revenge is the first I've read by Mathews. Those familiar with the Oulipo group need no introduction, but bears comparison to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 or Barthelme's Snow White, two other brief classics of 60s postmodernism from the same period, for verbal brilliance, eruditon, inventiveness. No summary of the plot could do justice. The Oulipan mania for constraints, puzzles, stories within stories, intertextuality; scholarly mysteries, pornography, medicine, geology, travel. Hugely entertaining. (Must find out how Dr. Smautf is related to Bartlebooth's servant in Life a User's Manual...)

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Штука сама по себе экзотическая: медицинский фабулистский (сиречь пост-модернистский) триллер / приключенческий роман, вполне взрывная и анатомически порой натуралистичная смесь, что, понятно, ограничит потенциальную аудиторию любителей нелинейного чтения, выставив фантиков, снежинок и бабочек за порог. Но такова одна из структурных составляющих авторской игры, понятно, где ничего просто так не читателю не предлагается: потому что вторая такая доминанта - это широко понимаемая духовность в разных ее религиозных изводах. Вот из этих двух храмов - тела и духа - и возводит Мэтьюз свою самодвижущуюся педальную повозку, на которой отправляет наших героев/инь из советского концлагеря под Джексонградом через умозрительные Гималаи (вернее, конечно, через Царство пресвитера Иоанна) в Венецию (снимать высокохудожественный порнофильм о монахинях и голых черных парашютистах), далее - везде по пути телесного распада фигур с текучей гендерной принадлежностью.

Среди прочих приятных особенностей Мэтьюза еще и то, что он совершенно гармоничен: слух у него абсолютен настолько, что ни один свой прием или гэг он не эксплуатирует до упаду. Он никогда не наскучивает и всегда вовремя меняет регистр (чего не скажешь, например, о Вёрлицере), поэтому чтение его остается высокорисковым приключением, как в лучшие времена и с лучшими текстами.

Да, а загадочное название романа, конечно, должно звучать как "Чвак".

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange Rabelaisian ragbag this is. Mathews's 1966 anti-novel rattles along in the way such tales are meant to, nevertheless. In Part One, the narrator is a prisoner at a camp called Jacksongrad in Siberia where the inmates are divided arbitrarily into groups based upon evangelical schisms. Hmm... In Part Two, the narrator and three accomplices stage their escape and then make their way across the Soviet east, meeting bizarre tribes along the way. Part Three is on the trail of a released fellow inmate who amputated two of the narrator's fingers, ending a promising career as a violinist.

There are games and puzzles aplenty, many of which remain impenetrable, to this reader at least. In this sense, Tlooth feels like a deeply Oulipian work, even though it was published seven years before Mathews was co-opted into the brotherhood. Perhaps this was his application form. An esoteric essay in Frerman/Spanglish, a labyrinth with a corresponding jumbled passage of experimental typography, a passage of pornographic spoonerisms and so on... yup, impenetrable.

And then there's that odd title... The word it's closest to is "tooth", of course, and our hero has been trained in dentistry at the prison camp. The pornographic film script sequence also mangles language, at one point using the similarly constructed word "mlouth". Could it be an allusion to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the imaginary world created by Borges? Who knows?

There's some synchronicity going on here with his friend Georges Perec. Although the two didn't meet until 1970, the final chapter is called 'The Journey to Sfax', Tunisia's second city where Perec lived for a short while. That's an unlikely coincidence. And there's a minor character named Smautf. I know of only one other instance of this unpronounceable name, Bartlebooth's butler in Life a User's Manual. So I did a bit of digging. It revealed that Smautf is one of four 'Gods of Amenti' in Ancient Egyptian mythology, who protect the dead on their journey into the afterlife. The other three are Amset, Hapi and Kebhnsof, the first two of whom just happen to be characters in Tlooth tloo. What to make of that? It's not until right at the end that the gender of the narrator is confirmed and that her name is Nephthys, yet another Egyptian funerary god... Perec's character has to be a tribute, then, conscious or unconscious.

I enjoyed the first two parts of the novel, the third markedly less so. There's a lot of nasty violence, gratuitous to my eyes, and which I found unpleasant. Likewise the sex - without the wordplay, it would easily earn a nomination for Literary Review's 'Bad Sex Award'. And all to what purpose? To validate Mathew's transgressive credentials? That leaves Tlooth perching somewhere between three and four stars for me, rounded up for the first two parts.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps the most baffling book I've read so far. Very playful and Oulipan in spirit.

(P.S. I'm not sure if its "Oulipian" or "Oulipan" or "Oulipoian". Forgive me).

[Samuel Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sure, lots of zany fun. But these mid-century po-mo funhouses just always feel poorly aged, somewhat empty and leave me cold. Sounds and fury and all that.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

A baseball game in a Soviet prison camp somewhere in Siberia, played by prisoners with American names segregated by their arcane, presumably fictitious Christian denominations. (Resurrectionists, Fideists, Defective Baptists, etc. - the latter believing that baptism must be renewed each year in comically trying circumstances.) It is not clear why all of them are there, but the Fideists are known to have committed heinous crimes: "undertaker's assistant and caterer to necrophiles", a dentist who mutilated patients' mouths, a gynecologist ("committed analogous crimes"), a "restroom bomber", and a Sweeney Todd-like surgeon-grocer duo, the former of which removed the narrator's left and index ring fingers, ending a promising violin career, and prompting a mid-game assassination attempt - the narrator replaces the ball with a duplicate intricately wired to explode upon hard impact with a bat, but not catcher's glove. (The plan quickly goes awry.)

No spoilers here, as all of this is the first page or so. Mathews' postmodern picaresque is probably not everyone's taste but I loved it. Each intricately carved sentence unloads a new bundle of plot absurdities behind a deadpan façade; this short novel (published in a 1975 omnibus between The Conversions and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium) careens from the Himalayas to Venice to Morocco and the French countryside. Characteristically, there are nested stories (an elaborate plan to smuggle a Hong Kong traditional medicine ["forbidden everywhere, as it was known to contain arsenic and glass splinters"] into southern Europe via a front company; an evolutionary war between spiders and migratory birds); polyglot word puzzles involving diagrams and medieval arcana; and textual chaos: when commissioned to write a scenario for a "blue movie" for an Italian nobleman, the narrator goes into hallucinatory detail veiled by spoonerisms and near-glossolalia ("my kite slew to its wool hock and she began stinking lard").

Mathews was a friend of Georges Perec and the first American admitted to the Oulipo; he invented his own algorithm for generating texts by transposition and permutation, and translated French poetry. Not every page lands, but each is laden with stylistic and formal invention. An energising literary tonic for the dog days of summer.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! This is experimental writing at its finest. I confess I never actually knew - and still don't know! - what it was all about, but that doesn't really matter. Mathews presents his gallery of characters and their frequently outlandish & impossible situations & actions so assuredly & with such deadpan delivery & in such gorgeous prose that you don't even dare to stop the rhythmic flow to question the proceedings, while registering on some level that something isn't quite right, that this or that could never actually happen; that it is all part of some colossal twisted joke universe that Mathews has constructed for his own obscure purpose. Imagination run completely wild, but presented as sober & even academic fact. Even when the very language itself breaks down for a stretch & becomes something approaching gibberish, one has enough confidence & momentum built up to get thru to the other side. There is the nebulous notion of a plot that propels you forward, but the endless digressions are fabulous in their own right, and one never feels the exercise is pointless. For many years Mathews was the only American member of the experimental writers' group Oulipo, and here he more than proves his worth with a book that keeps you on your toes for the entire thrilling ride. Not merely something to read; this is a real workout for the brain in the best possible sense, constantly putting to the test all your preconceived notions of what a book can, or should, be.

[Black Glove · Rating 5 out of 5]

DmENTAL
Written in short chapters, the narrative of TLOOTH is awash with absurdist digressions and surreal imagery.
Halfway through I was pleasantly confused. By the end I was pleasantly bemused. All in all I enjoyed the author's limpid style and the many dreamlike happenings.
The point of writings like this isn't necessarily the story, more the incidental side-stepping and strange instances that occur along the way, and this is loaded with such deviations - "play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories" so says the back cover blurb. I'd define it as elegantly mind-bending (with a soupçon of filth).

[Andrew]

For a novel this short, it took me a minute to get into. But once I was in, I was very much in. Perhaps there's a bit too much 1960s-type zaniness for my taste, a bit too much whimsy with an emphasis on the "h" pronunciation, but on the whole it was an enjoyable, small experimental novel. Did it reach the heights that Pynchon hit in Crying of Lot 49 or Barthelme did in The Dead Father? No. But was it an eminently enjoyable distraction? Yes.

[e · Rating 5 out of 5]

SPOILER WARNING.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Whaaaa....what the hell just happened? I find myself fresh out of the delightful hallucination that is Harry Mathew’s Tlooth, a tale of triumph, love, adventure, and revenge...kind of. Our narrator (Mary Nephthys?) has been robbed of two of her fingers (which is troubling because she is a violinist). The narrator is a part of the Defective Baptist group at the Jacksongrad prison camp in Russia.
Tlooth is a novel in four parts, and each chapter is governed by its own set of rules and truths which we must follow. Much like the Fideism for which the Fideist group at Jacksongrad is named; (upon researching, I found that, according to the internet, Fideism: “is an epistemological theory which maintains that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths ...”) one must “play along” with the story, and follow the narrator into the strange, absurd, and often magical lands depicted within.
Tlooth contains moments of pure hilarity, poetry, magical histories, absurdity, Oulipan experimentation, eccentric theological diagrams and studies, mazes, and all other manners of the vast territory that is Mathew’s imagination. Every character the narrator encounters has a strange and delightful history, objects and instruments are described as perplexing and uncanny, and every meringue is shaped like a squirrel. Although perplexing, (what happened in Venice I can only describe as a hilarious, hallucinogenic, idiosyncratic, artistic pornography) these delightfully odd details that are of this world, but not. They are of the world of the magical realism and hover in that realm of childhood imagination and ingenuity that we often forget to visit.
Tlooth gets weird, and stays weird, but it is not just a random smattering of insanity. Strange occurrences lead the narrator to epiphany and the plot, although purposefully muted by twists and turns, is driven by them, and I was delighted to be invited along for its slow reveal. Bizarre folk tales of mountain-dwelling spiders, orchestras played by instruments made from human body parts, mysterious tribes of poetic kings and human sacrifice, electrochemically manipulated organs, and birds shoved up people’s asses, are but a few of the micro-narratives that weave through the narrator’s journey that makes up Tlooth. (I loved the entire adventure across the Himalayas).
Mathew’s experiments with language as well. In one section, the narrator’s mis-reading of Robin Marr’s notes turns into a poetic visions, in another, a textual maze is written on Hapi (the “velocipede”, not the character) that is meant to be superimposed upon a labyrinth to solve it, in yet another the beginnings of words (sh, ch, etc.) are replaced (in the Venice section, I still have yet to figure it out entirely!), plus countless other word/language experiments.
I am still mulling over some of the experiments and puzzles within Tlooth (In fact, I am still wondering about the Oracle’s utterance of the title) but I will refrain from writing a million pages and staying up all night doing so, as I feel they are to be savored and not rushed. I am filled with a longing to see Hapi’s paintings, to hear the human-instrument concert of the Defective Baptists, to see the velocipede, to hear Beverley’s organ, and to witness the columns made of cheese. I hope Dr.Roak’s teeth fall out.
Furbowls!

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never have I seen a book open with such promise only to abandon it wholesale. The first fifty pages are playful and heavily laden with strange puzzles. The following hundred pages range between weird-beyond-my-prodigious-comfort-zone and just plain boring. As it fits into the absurdist/oulipian movements, Tlooth shouldn't be approached with expectations of strong plotting. Nevertheless, after page 60, the story doesn't resume in any meaningful way until the final 10 pages. There are isolated vignettes in the book that made me grin wide, but they aren't enough to counter the waste of space that makes up the rest of the it.

[Adam Floridia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange. Random. Creative. Strange.

A Favorite Quotation:
"Center field: Lynn Petomi, dentist, mutilated the mouths of patients.
Pitcher: Hilary Cheyne-Stokes, gynecologist, committed analogous crimes" (first page!)

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

postmodern dentistry? i guess this book is pretty neat. i at least enjoyed the digression on the Latin "res", a nice passage for anybody who gets obsessed with word games.

[Christopher Waller · Rating 4 out of 5]

2pomo4me

[Jake Beka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Need more Mathews. NOW!

[Marc Nash · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of those books that makes up its own narrative rules which are impenetrable, with each scene veering into another almost wholly unrelated. I starts ff with a game of baseball between two sets of Russian Gulag prisoners, divided into different anti-social (ie religious) cults and gos downhill in the comprehensibility stakes from that. here is an assassination bomb plot attached to the ball being pitched, but that's about the last of the humour we're privileged. Absurdist? Whimsical? The trouble is nothing knits the scenes together, the book is wholly without metaphor and anything for the reader to grasp on to as to what it might be about. It just is. And that is is not very satisfying.

In similar vein to Motorman and The Third Policeman and I didn't get on with them either.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third of Mathews' books I've read, and while enjoyable reads, I am beginning to suspect a recurring pattern that, regardless of what procedure he is abiding by, all of his books are more or less rewrites of Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus. That is to say, the most pervasive element of any Mathews novel is the strange contraption / puzzle / digression, and of course this is just the point.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love everything about Harry Mathews writing, but I wasn't quite as pulled in as I was with The Conversions. I'm fairly certain that no other writer is having near as much influence on my approach to storytelling right now as Mathews, though. I appreciate the risks that he takes, even though they don't seem like risks in the context of his books. He really makes the idea of trying new things work well, and I love the concept that the book is nothing more than what it's is. Res qua res.

[Roger Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid example of a book that is top grade, but will not be so regarded by many. Ironically, I found out about it in 1977, but did not read it until 2010.

From the Oulipo stable.

[Thomas Hale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel very pandered to by this one. A prison escape becomes a globetrotting adventure of silly, absurd episodes, preposterous characters, sex, sickness, and utterly misplaced academic rigour. I couldn't put it down, enjoying the little linguistic puzzles and deciphering metaphor and comedy skits to try (and fail) at finding a coherent plot. But Matthews is uninterested in plot or structure in general, happy to let the reader tumble through little scenes or rants or travelogues. The prose is sometimes very pretty, and sometimes utter nonsense, but it's fun and amiable nonsense. A breath of fresh air.

[Brett Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all three of Harry Mathews main novels (The Conversions-Tlooth-Sinking of...) I also have trouble recommending them to anyone. My answer to the preliminary “So what is the book about?” always falls short of the mark.

This book, as well as the others, really fit what the word “Dreamlike” should mean. They are intricately written, exquisitely detailed stories that lead to dead ends or are nonsense. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. They are now dreams actually are, garden paths that are cut short, the buildup ultimately amounting to nothing, but which is what is so great about these novels. Mathew’s writing is so skillful and his vocabulary so vast that they are so enjoyable to read just to see what other concoction of words or plot that he whips together. Tlooth especially made me laugh out loud, not because of outright humor, but the deep, ridiculous scenarios that Mathews builds for the reader.

Tlooth and his other novels may frustrate those that were looking for one plot line or something easier to follow. I’ve even heard Tlooth dismisses as “not even a novel.” Must one always have to reaffirm themselves that what they are reading is a novel, a magazine, a biography? Let the writing take you on a raucous, world traveling romp of ridiculousness. Don’t forget to have fun.

[The Great Dan Marino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mathews does confuse me a bit cuz I don't know the constraints he's (as an Oulipian) writing from. Makes it hard--uncomfortable, even--to read him as a writer. But when I just give myself over and read as a reader I totally dig his stuff--he's entertaining as hell, engaging, hilarious, hugely intelligent, provocative, formally aggressive without being too abstruse. And this is just a really good book, singular. Propulsive spine of plot that's interestingly treated (revenge plot where narrator's constantly getting foiled, then just lets nemesis die of infection at end). Crazy setpieces, with the prison and the hallucinatory (pretty awesome outrageous and offensive) porno script mixed in w/"real" events. Formal interaction of labyrinths w/the text = brilliant. The middle section, however, the trip through the mountains, was quite boring, though I understand what it was doing. And despite the engaging games, the formally required proliferation of scene & place gave a greater feeling of slightness than I'd prefer. Def will come back to him sometime though.

[Cestmoi]

this suffers from being read immediately after i finished amalgamemnon, because particularly early on, it has that roussel quality where it's a bunch of fun interesting ideas following some kind of logic you can't quite make out, but as soon as you put it down you have no desire to see what the next idea is, it just feels kind of lifeless. picks up in the middle when the narrator starts daydreaming the plot of an erotic movie instead of doing what they're supposed to, and has a 'twist' at the end that recontextualises a bunch of what happened that feels kind of cheap but i enjoyed and it was pretty funny to skim back over parts that seemed to make sense at the time, then make absolutely no sense given the twist, and then you realise you missed some hints of what exactly had been going on. definitely shouldve read it after reading something that wasnt as wild and perfect as amalgamemnon but i didnt so this review is not as good as it probably wouldve been. who cares, mathews was probably cia

[Downward · Rating 2 out of 5]

i had a tough time with this one; theres only a pretense of plot that devolves into a lot of postmodern tics that sometimes im cool with, but in this case only served to alienate me with out heightening my a. emotional or b. intellectual experience. there are parts of this book where the prose hums and parts where the wordplay and experiments are enough engine to get you down the road but if you asked me to tell you anything about this book, what you'd get is a very long look while i racked my brain trying to remember a single detail.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I feel like more than when I read The Conversions, I really started appreciating how groundbreaking Mathews really was, and certainly how deeply influential he was on Perec. The thing is, though, greater appreciation doesn't in this case correlate to greater *enjoyment,* and I feel like three stars might be a bit generous. I feel this is a book that's *a lot* better in theory than in practice.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book blew my mind. Mathews must be a genius, and I must read more of his stuff.

Eccentric, hilarious, erudite, postmodern, droll, lascivious, playful . . . It's got all these maxed out to hundy p. The first half is perfection, and the second half is a tad laggy, but I think only in comparison to its own self. It's a wonderful book.

I need to look more into this "Oulipo" movement. Yay, another rabbit hole full of books to explore.

Recommended for prison baseball teams.