Journalist

By Harry Mathews

Book Overview

A blend of postmodern metafiction and old-style bedroom farce, The Journalist explores the elusive, sometimes illusive, boundaries between facts and the fictions we weave around them. The novel's protagonist, living at a time that might be the present in a city that might be anywhere, has decided for reasons of mental hygiene to keep a detailed record of his thoughts, words, and deeds. Very quickly, however, the project begins to absorb his entire life, as the increasingly meticulous recording of experience threatens to supplant experience itself. To make matters worse, what he records offers its own grist for worry: his devoted wife suddenly grows secretive, his equally devoted mistress turns evasive, his frustratingly independent son might or might not be visiting that same mistress behind his back, and his closest friend begins acting in mysterious ways (and is it just his imagination, or is this friend having clandestine meetings with his wife?). His ever more convoluted perceptions breed a dark muddle of suspicion, leading to a climax that is at once intensely funny and excruciatingly poignant.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564781658
• ISBN13: 9781564781659
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Ambitious

One of Harry Mathew' most ambitious and strikingly original novels. His fifth novel, The Journalist, confronts our present day disillusionment with reality and the art of writing. I recommend this novel for its summoning back of all those delicious qualities that I havd found both attractive and mind-expanding when first encountering Mathews' work. The concept is simple: the narrator keeps a journal to help him organize his life. But nothing is ever so simple. His ordinary life as a European businessman receives amazing scrutiny as he becomes meticulous in recording his life's events, shrews details, and his daily thoughts. The characters of his journal include his wife Daisy, his mistress Colette, his son Gert, and his friend Paul. Those designations don't in his life don't last long as the journalist worries about relations between his wife and Paul and his mistress and Gert. The journalist soon decides that his journal needs subcatergories: certain sections for the objective facts and other parts for his subjective thoughts. As he organizes the journal into more severe categories, the secret meetings around him proliferate. As an Oulipian, Mathews has emploed a poetical structive to create a world unto itself and has refined and updated his language with this novel which, in the context of contemporary Modernism, rivals both Nabokov's Pale Fire and Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

Comfort for the obsessive-compulsive

Have you ever worried about that thought that keeps running through your head, again and again? A line from a song that won't let go of you? A need to get into the details of the details of the details? If so, get yourself a copy of The Journalist. Read it. You'll immediately feel the tension draining away: You may be bad, but nowhere near THAT bad. What a relief!Of course, it won't hurt if you're also a Harry Mathews fan like I am. And an Oulipo fan. And if you're not acquainted with either, this is as good a place as any to get started with both of them. Enjoy!

Clever, thoughtful and most importantly, hilarious

For several days upon completing this book, I found myself laughing uncontrollably at the memory of certain passages. Does this book poke fun at Mathew's strategies as an Oulipian? We don't know. We just have to laugh and pity the character's obsession with order and structure. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in observing how we write, think and react to a crisis.

Truly Unique

The plot of the story, interesting as it is, becomes secondary to how this book is written. Addictive and hard to put down!