Subject: Re: AtD RE: ATD Spoilers

[Dave Monroe]

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
 
> this all happens in a book I just read--My Life in
> CIA by Harry Mathews (American member of the
> Oulipo movement)
> 
> Very amusing an well written.

Through a series of improbable coincidences‚ in the
early 1970s Harry Mathews‚ then living in France‚ was
commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest
friends had their suspicions‚ which were only
reinforced each time he tried to deny such a
connection. With growing frustration at his inability
to make anyone believe him‚ Mathews decided to act the
part. My Life in CIA documents Mathews’s experiences
as a would-be spy during 1973‚ where amid charged
world events—the coup in Chile‚ Watergate‚ the ending
of the Vietnam War—he found himself engaged in a game
that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies
were interested in him for their own dubious purposes.
Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a
spellbinding thriller that relentlessly blurs the line
between fact and fiction.

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/mathews.html#my%20life

Harry Mathews

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/mathews.html

And see as well ...

Harry Mathews, The Conversions

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 personalities: 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 coast 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.

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/mathews.html#The%20Conversions

Similarities with TCOL49 discussed in ...

O'Donnell, Patrick.  New Essays on The Crying of
   Lot 49.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521388333


 
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