What do you think?
Rate this book
Mopus
Fiction. An astounding debut novel, written with courage, innovation, wisdom, style. Oisin Curran leads us onto a topology of narrative surfaces that appear and disappear subway terrorists in an urban density, a bucolic meadow and stream, postapocalyptic devastation, a ninth century abbey, forty-fifth century conspiracies. The narrative here allows one to enter the creative guts of storytelling, to experience it as a living force. Curran is like Beckett, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, Bernhard, Celine, Faulkner, in whose work powerful prose excavates the ground of narrative itself, and exposes the sources and necessity of storytelling.
Hardcover
First published November 1, 2007
2 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 15, 2020
FLOATING THIS OLD-ASS REVIEW BECAUSE SOMEONE IS LOOKING FOR READALIKES TO IT, AND I CAN'T THINK OF MANY. IF YOU CAN, LEMME KNOW!
my first post-reading response is: "yes!!" my second is "huh?" this is my version of a glowing review. i got this at the brooklyn book fair last week, and it was the most exciting "discovery" of the day. i felt obligated to buy something at the booth because greg told me the man behind it was eugene marten and i shook his hand because i liked his book so much, only it wasn't him, and i barely managed to reconstruct my dignity. tip: to regain dignity, spend money. but the book sounded really good the way the man-who-was-not-eugene-marten was describing it - very much my cup of lost scrapbook, sea came in at midnight, infinite jest tea. and while it is not quite like those books, it is indeed a beautifully written, loopy chronology, poetry stew of a novel. there is an "i" and a "you" and a dog, and the ghost of a womb-ingested twin, and a ruminating man in a wheelchair. some of these characters are the same. it definitely requires a second reading, and even though it is only 152 pages, it reads slower than you would think, because you don't want to rush it. there is some beautiful, beautiful prose in here, and even though there are things about it i am a little puzzled about, my overall feeling is positive and intrigued. i managed to get the one copy in the warehouse into the store, so hurry up and buy it. but greg is allowed to borrow mine - the last thing he needs is more books...
come to my blog!
my first post-reading response is: "yes!!" my second is "huh?" this is my version of a glowing review. i got this at the brooklyn book fair last week, and it was the most exciting "discovery" of the day. i felt obligated to buy something at the booth because greg told me the man behind it was eugene marten and i shook his hand because i liked his book so much, only it wasn't him, and i barely managed to reconstruct my dignity. tip: to regain dignity, spend money. but the book sounded really good the way the man-who-was-not-eugene-marten was describing it - very much my cup of lost scrapbook, sea came in at midnight, infinite jest tea. and while it is not quite like those books, it is indeed a beautifully written, loopy chronology, poetry stew of a novel. there is an "i" and a "you" and a dog, and the ghost of a womb-ingested twin, and a ruminating man in a wheelchair. some of these characters are the same. it definitely requires a second reading, and even though it is only 152 pages, it reads slower than you would think, because you don't want to rush it. there is some beautiful, beautiful prose in here, and even though there are things about it i am a little puzzled about, my overall feeling is positive and intrigued. i managed to get the one copy in the warehouse into the store, so hurry up and buy it. but greg is allowed to borrow mine - the last thing he needs is more books...
come to my blog!
October 9, 2009
I have to agree with Karen's reaction to this one. I'm left loving it and completely confounded. Sort of like Evan Dara, but with the DFW-ish parts of Dara and replaced with Beckett, or kind of what I imagine Finnegan's Wake to be like, but without the nonsensical language stuff and a slightly more coherent form? I don't know what to think all of this book means, or what happened but it was a very beautiful trip.
Read
June 27, 2022Mixing Historical Periods
A circling, static, aphoristic, poetic, theatrical, intentionally disarticulated meditation on loss and memory, with a skeletal crew of characters ('William the Silent,' 'Bluebottle,' two dogs, a ghostly sister). All that is like Beckett, as reviewers say. But it is also densely installed with austere lyric fragments, as if it is one long lyric poem. (At random: 'Outside the stars were shards in the rotating vault above the house. I watched the sky. A star did shoot. I prayed for old age.')
This is a particular kind of lyric, pared down and non-narrative; it comes from Hoelderlin and Novalis by way of Trakl, George, and Rilke, in turn by way of Snyder and Merwin. It is a late romantic metaphysical nature lyric, and that is the problem: it does not belong with Beckett's mid-century existential paralysis. Beckett is founded on many rejections, and this is one of them. It's as if 'Ill Seen Ill Said,' which is also about a solitary person and surrounding woods and rivers, were to be sweetened with honeyed and vinegared images of the lonely natural world.[
The two modes just do not fit together: the lyric continuously tries to heal the hurt of the existentialist voice, while the existentialist voice seems inaudible to the characters who experience nothing by lyric rapture. It's missing a voice than can bridge the two, other than by implying that every lyric nature trope is existential, or by hinting that every moment of the realization of the impossibility of action -- every moment that recalls Beckett -- is somehow embodied in a falling star. Curran might ask himself: why did Beckett avoid nature lyric? 'Mopus' is mistaken in its understanding of those historical currents.
A circling, static, aphoristic, poetic, theatrical, intentionally disarticulated meditation on loss and memory, with a skeletal crew of characters ('William the Silent,' 'Bluebottle,' two dogs, a ghostly sister). All that is like Beckett, as reviewers say. But it is also densely installed with austere lyric fragments, as if it is one long lyric poem. (At random: 'Outside the stars were shards in the rotating vault above the house. I watched the sky. A star did shoot. I prayed for old age.')
This is a particular kind of lyric, pared down and non-narrative; it comes from Hoelderlin and Novalis by way of Trakl, George, and Rilke, in turn by way of Snyder and Merwin. It is a late romantic metaphysical nature lyric, and that is the problem: it does not belong with Beckett's mid-century existential paralysis. Beckett is founded on many rejections, and this is one of them. It's as if 'Ill Seen Ill Said,' which is also about a solitary person and surrounding woods and rivers, were to be sweetened with honeyed and vinegared images of the lonely natural world.[
The two modes just do not fit together: the lyric continuously tries to heal the hurt of the existentialist voice, while the existentialist voice seems inaudible to the characters who experience nothing by lyric rapture. It's missing a voice than can bridge the two, other than by implying that every lyric nature trope is existential, or by hinting that every moment of the realization of the impossibility of action -- every moment that recalls Beckett -- is somehow embodied in a falling star. Curran might ask himself: why did Beckett avoid nature lyric? 'Mopus' is mistaken in its understanding of those historical currents.
February 1, 2008
one of the best, genuinely experimental novels i've read in a long time... a daring and ambitious book, successful in its narrative high-wire act, oddly grounded in the current moment of apocalypse-always while circumventing completely the self-aggrandizing disaster movie poses. a consistent and non-sugary feeling of nostalgia, of remembrance of time just and long lost, sustained throughout.
structurally, this book's the shit. or, to say it differently, it's got beautiful answers to the novel's problems of character and plot. why have we spent time playing with mobius strips and contemplating klein bottles? because their strange topologies are not only uncanny in their impossible possibility--but because they are metaphors for (or doorways to) the collapsed multi-possibilities of each particular existence. curran has composed an equivalent in prose, where doubles and ghosts and doppelgangers and recursive loops and variations on themes are all used to profound effect.
it's a bit unsettling to not know where you are, which happens a fair amount, especially in the beginning, but the book slowly unfolds itself... and then refolds upon itself over and over... great books are worth reading again, but this one almost requires the second time through.
a close relative to two similarly slim, similarly cult-classic-y, dense episodic novels: david ohle's MOTORMAN and jaimy gordon's SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO... but while i love those two books, MOPUS' style, for better or worse, is less aggressive and confrontational than MOTORMAN's and less pyrotechnic look-at-me than SHAMP. MOPUS is more straight-up lyrical, with rich and graceful passages describing place and nature. one downside: while in the midst of the book's whirlwind, the characters' emotional lives are rendered fairly straightforwardly, more surface-level observations and depictions than the deeper interiors one might expect...
but pretty damn great book. oh, and: after donald harington's WITH and way better than auster's silly TIMBUKTU--it's got the best description of dog-mind i've ever.
structurally, this book's the shit. or, to say it differently, it's got beautiful answers to the novel's problems of character and plot. why have we spent time playing with mobius strips and contemplating klein bottles? because their strange topologies are not only uncanny in their impossible possibility--but because they are metaphors for (or doorways to) the collapsed multi-possibilities of each particular existence. curran has composed an equivalent in prose, where doubles and ghosts and doppelgangers and recursive loops and variations on themes are all used to profound effect.
it's a bit unsettling to not know where you are, which happens a fair amount, especially in the beginning, but the book slowly unfolds itself... and then refolds upon itself over and over... great books are worth reading again, but this one almost requires the second time through.
a close relative to two similarly slim, similarly cult-classic-y, dense episodic novels: david ohle's MOTORMAN and jaimy gordon's SHAMP OF THE CITY SOLO... but while i love those two books, MOPUS' style, for better or worse, is less aggressive and confrontational than MOTORMAN's and less pyrotechnic look-at-me than SHAMP. MOPUS is more straight-up lyrical, with rich and graceful passages describing place and nature. one downside: while in the midst of the book's whirlwind, the characters' emotional lives are rendered fairly straightforwardly, more surface-level observations and depictions than the deeper interiors one might expect...
but pretty damn great book. oh, and: after donald harington's WITH and way better than auster's silly TIMBUKTU--it's got the best description of dog-mind i've ever.
October 9, 2014
Oisín Curran writes:
William says, While stapling MISSING DOG signs to a telephone pole on Jade St., I saw a little boy toting a saucer of milk. He knelt by a grating in the sidewalk, put down the saucer and walked off a few steps.
Moments later a tiny paw stretched out from the grating, dipped into the saucer then withdrew. Next, the owner of the paw, a tabby kitten, squeezed through the iron grating, intent on the saucer. But no sooner was it out than the little boy grabbed it and kissed it madly as he slipped inside a doorway where a woman waited.
The saucer of milk remained. Around a corner came a big dog. Not mine. It bent to the milk and lapped it up with a single sweep of its tongue, then padded away. I crossed to where the sun burnt the sidewalk.
It was an omen, but of what? I could make neither head nor tail of the signs that troubled my sight that day. From the plaster of a streetside building a pattern of bricks stood out, spelling some message in a script I’d never seen.
In this part of town, laundry was slung between houses. There were little bridges arching over the laundry. Above me two men stood on such a bridge, smoking. One asked the other if he would be attending the meeting tonight. Of course, said his friend. They looked down at me as I passed. One flicked the ash from his cigarette and it fluttered to my feet. I picked up my pace.
At the arena I found a bench and sat, pulled out my book and read that classed among the impossibles are those things that neither are nor were, nevertheless the impossible thing exists, if only as a thought. A thought too has breath, organs, wind comes from its system, thus if an impossibility takes shape in one’s mind, one is exhorted to quell it at once, for it may possess the mind, wishing to have material existence, feeding on one’s capacity to do the impossible. In this way the gods desire themselves into existence, so too buildings and revolutions, ghosts, cars, pickled zebras, toaster ovens and all the excresences of humanity. All classed at one time into the impossibles, now thriving, impeccably empirical, swanning across our landscape, not merely possible but even more real than we are.
At this point I raised my head to gaze across the arena, a fawaway look in my eyes as I pondered the above. In the arena children played in the dust, kicked balls against the stone walls and took whacks at each other.
Someone lurked in a corner of my eye, I turned my head.
On the other end of the bench a woman had seated herself. She was looking at me. I smiled and turned back to my book which was saying that the origin of impossible things is not known, it may be that conscious thought itself is another life form, a type of parasite that inhabits the ether, bores itself inside the receptive skulls of human beings and organizes society into means of production of impossibility.
I stopped reading. Without turning my head I could see that the woman was still looking at me. Not surreptitiously. No, she had turned in her seat and was staring at me. I didn’t dare look back. Who was she? I could feel her gaze on the side of my face. It was not kind. Nor was it unkind, but it prickled my skin.
William says, While stapling MISSING DOG signs to a telephone pole on Jade St., I saw a little boy toting a saucer of milk. He knelt by a grating in the sidewalk, put down the saucer and walked off a few steps.
Moments later a tiny paw stretched out from the grating, dipped into the saucer then withdrew. Next, the owner of the paw, a tabby kitten, squeezed through the iron grating, intent on the saucer. But no sooner was it out than the little boy grabbed it and kissed it madly as he slipped inside a doorway where a woman waited.
The saucer of milk remained. Around a corner came a big dog. Not mine. It bent to the milk and lapped it up with a single sweep of its tongue, then padded away. I crossed to where the sun burnt the sidewalk.
It was an omen, but of what? I could make neither head nor tail of the signs that troubled my sight that day. From the plaster of a streetside building a pattern of bricks stood out, spelling some message in a script I’d never seen.
In this part of town, laundry was slung between houses. There were little bridges arching over the laundry. Above me two men stood on such a bridge, smoking. One asked the other if he would be attending the meeting tonight. Of course, said his friend. They looked down at me as I passed. One flicked the ash from his cigarette and it fluttered to my feet. I picked up my pace.
At the arena I found a bench and sat, pulled out my book and read that classed among the impossibles are those things that neither are nor were, nevertheless the impossible thing exists, if only as a thought. A thought too has breath, organs, wind comes from its system, thus if an impossibility takes shape in one’s mind, one is exhorted to quell it at once, for it may possess the mind, wishing to have material existence, feeding on one’s capacity to do the impossible. In this way the gods desire themselves into existence, so too buildings and revolutions, ghosts, cars, pickled zebras, toaster ovens and all the excresences of humanity. All classed at one time into the impossibles, now thriving, impeccably empirical, swanning across our landscape, not merely possible but even more real than we are.
At this point I raised my head to gaze across the arena, a fawaway look in my eyes as I pondered the above. In the arena children played in the dust, kicked balls against the stone walls and took whacks at each other.
Someone lurked in a corner of my eye, I turned my head.
On the other end of the bench a woman had seated herself. She was looking at me. I smiled and turned back to my book which was saying that the origin of impossible things is not known, it may be that conscious thought itself is another life form, a type of parasite that inhabits the ether, bores itself inside the receptive skulls of human beings and organizes society into means of production of impossibility.
I stopped reading. Without turning my head I could see that the woman was still looking at me. Not surreptitiously. No, she had turned in her seat and was staring at me. I didn’t dare look back. Who was she? I could feel her gaze on the side of my face. It was not kind. Nor was it unkind, but it prickled my skin.
June 27, 2008
This is primarily a work of fiction, but the language is poetic in a way that most prose isn't. By that, I mean that it often only makes "sense" in a tangential way.
The story is winding and shifting. Characters and narrators trade off without notice.
This is only author I've seen use a second person narrative effectively.
It can be funny in that heartbreaking way that Beckett can be. Directly influenced by Beckett's fiction, as far as I can tell.
Curran is a genius. I can't wait to read something else he's written. Buy this book.
The story is winding and shifting. Characters and narrators trade off without notice.
This is only author I've seen use a second person narrative effectively.
It can be funny in that heartbreaking way that Beckett can be. Directly influenced by Beckett's fiction, as far as I can tell.
Curran is a genius. I can't wait to read something else he's written. Buy this book.
May 26, 2025
Looping into eddies, Mopus is full of anachronism, simultaneity, dream selves, vignettes shifting and overlapping. It is populated with ghosts including an imaginary book within a book seen in glimpses (I believe it's the manual on pataphysics one of the characters is noted as having written), and tracks multiple shifting realities as perceived through the membrane of daydream.
Its narrative splits the other way through the grain so its themes and rhymes appear and are told from both ends at once; throughout, the tug of the self’s attempt to encounter itself; a quantum world that wasn't, the idea of a self being its self-creator. It is an experience to be carried along upon, generating its own state of consciousness that the reader has the joy of simultaneously being in and observing.
Its narrative splits the other way through the grain so its themes and rhymes appear and are told from both ends at once; throughout, the tug of the self’s attempt to encounter itself; a quantum world that wasn't, the idea of a self being its self-creator. It is an experience to be carried along upon, generating its own state of consciousness that the reader has the joy of simultaneously being in and observing.
July 25, 2020
Beautiful details!
August 28, 2010
Ostensibly, "Mopus" is William Bluebottle’s 24-hour romp through shifting times, places, and points of view in pursuit of his lost dog and ghost sister. Curran’s masterful work of concise metafiction is cinematic and dreamlike, but it is also understated and lyrical. Like Kelly Link’s stories, the telling is matter-of-fact, but there is something eerie about the world it is set in. Some other works that come to mind are: Danielewski’s "Only Revolutions," Mitchell’s "Cloud Atlas," Flann O’Brien’s "At Swim-Two-Birds," and Winterson’s "Art and Lies."
This book blew my mind, and you won’t find it in a chain store or the NY Times Book Review. It deserves so many more readers than I know it will get. It has been a long time since I finished a book and immediately wanted to read it again.
This book blew my mind, and you won’t find it in a chain store or the NY Times Book Review. It deserves so many more readers than I know it will get. It has been a long time since I finished a book and immediately wanted to read it again.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews