The Captain's Fire

By J.S. Marcus

Most people can name some famous artists and recognize their best-known works. But what's behind all that painting, drawing, and sculpting? What was Leonardo da Vinci's snack of choice while he... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679401849
• ISBN13: 9780679401841
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Knopf
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Cartography of the Mind

In the stories in "The Art of Cartography," his delightfully original earlier book, Marcus made an artform of a constantly shifting focus, stories that began as an account of one person but then shifted to another, then another, rather like the meanderings of a bubble-headed gossip on speed. That chattering, miniaturist style, with its interweaving threads and outlandish divagations, has metamorphosed here to an interior monologue par excellence, darker and at the same time more substantive, with a seemingly undisciplined series of digressions, wheels within wheels, to make even "Wittgenstein's Nephew" sound linear and conventional by comparison. The narrator, a bookish young American Jew living in post-wall Berlin, full of observations variously geographic, familial and intellectual, was no doubt too worldly and literate to appeal to much of the American reading public, and this may account for the book's relative lack of success, in spite of a bookjacket encomium by Walter Abish. But make no mistake: Marcus is a major talent, a heavyweight in a generation with seemingly few of them, and moreover one of few writers around with the wherewithal to push language and novelistic form in a bracingly new direction. This work is a success in every important way. Why wait until the world catches up with Marcus? Buy a remaindered copy of "The Captain's Fire" and enjoy him now.