NYRB Classics discussion

This is the discussion thread for by James Schuyler translated by Harry Zohn and with an introduction by Budd Schulberg

One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.

I am opening the discussion but personally won't get to the novel till midmonth. Feel free to add your thoughts and be war of reading if you have not read the novel since spoilers are welcome.

Reviews:

https://theliterarysisters.wordpress....

https://www.stuckinabook.com/alfred-a...

Videos of Schuyler reading his work and of Ben Lerner on Schuyler:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9auf...

I have finished this very enjoyable little book and have been looking around the web for others' thoughts on it. In the course of this, I found this Paris Review piece, which is only tangentially about this book (although it does start from it), but seems quite related to it.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

For anyone who has gotten more interested in Schuyler, The Paris Review has just published as email a correspondence called Letters to James Schuyler:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

That is pretty tangential to this thread but within it there is a link to an interview with Schuyler that might be more on topic.

It's a pretty short portion that is unlocked for nonsubscribers (like me), but in case you have access or just are interested in reading a bit more about him, it's here:

https://www.theparisreview.org/miscel...

This was an interesting read. I am at a loss for more to say about the book because my enjoyment came from seeing Schuyler's experiment with structure and point of view, in having the novel narrated by children through diary entries and dialogue. It was a clever approach did not provoke further thoughts.