pynchon mention: wordless writers

[pynchonoid]

...apologies if this has been posted before (still on
the p-list digest), and
Happy New Year to all.
-Doug 

Wordless writers keep good company
- Brenn Jones, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, December 31, 2004

review of

Bartleby & Co.
By Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Jonathan Dunne
NEW DIRECTIONS; 178 Pages; $21.95 

Office work and writing fiction are diametrically
opposed pursuits. Yet, in his whimsical novel
"Bartleby & Co.," Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas
equates certain writers with the beleaguered office
grunt in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener."
Just as Melville's Bartleby preferred not to do the
menial tasks assigned him, so the writers who interest
Vila-Matas prefer not to write.

Though Vila-Matas maintains a strong reputation
abroad, "Bartleby & Co." is his first novel to be
translated into English. The logic and structure of
the book are as playfully circular as a gesture in a
Miró painting. Short, philosophical essays about
writers who don't write take the form of footnotes to
an invisible text by a narrator who works in an office
-- and professes not to write. The narrator enters, in
his words, the "labyrinth of the No" to hunt down the
"writers of the No."

[...] Decades ago, a writer friend of Vila-Matas'
interviewed the elusive Thomas Pynchon. More recently,
the writer was invited to a party and re-met Pynchon.
This, however, was a different person. "You'll have to
decide who the real one is," mocked the second
Pynchon. [...] 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/31/DDG6TAIRAB1.DTL

=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Send holiday email and support a worthy cause. Do good. 
http://celebrity.mail.yahoo.com