Scan barcode
awalkintheclark's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
4.5
phillipjedwards's review against another edition
5.0
Impossible Object very nearly won the first Booker Prize in 1969. Two of the judges - including the renowned literary critic Frank Kermode - favoured it, but were "soon silenced" by the others - it seems a particularly impossible one objected.
I waited a long time to get hold of a copy. It is an old book so I was in no hurry, but it intrigued me the way the library copy I was waiting for was continuously out on loan for several years - apparently someone was constantly renewing it, unable to let go. Why? It's not a long book. Finally it turned up - and, having read it, I think I understand why the previous borrower held on to it for so long. It's brilliant, but impossible.
"I wanted to write you something impossible," we are told at the end, "like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality."
It's a fascinating observation: some things that can be drawn in two dimensions are impossible in three. Like an Escher stairway; a triangle whose inside becomes its outside; or love.
Impossible Object mainly comprises eight short stories, one of which - A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People - is an extraordinary, bravura depiction of the internal monologues of a married couple who, from the moment they wake up, are trying to second guess each other - like chess players locked in a battle of attrition, anticipating their opponents' every move. In their mental calculations breakfast becomes a battlefield, and eggs grenades. After the husband leaves for work, his wife digs out some old love letters and reads this:
Published in 1968, this is meta-fiction that makes [a:Paul Auster|296961|Paul Auster|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1287451428p2/296961.jpg]'s career look like one long game of catch-up. It's the sort of book you have to read more than once. The first time in puzzlement, the second in awe. The writing is full of classical allusions, philosophy, and some eye-popping sentences:
In [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309282484s/18423.jpg|817527], published the following year, [a:Ursula Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg] said that "the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next." This reader certainly had no idea what would come next in Impossible Object, nor how it related to what had gone before. As the book progressed the stories became more entangled: the writer of one story becomes a character in another, while the narrator of the other seems to be a character in the first.
In Public House, a writer spends several lunchtimes eavesdropping on the assignations of a man and a woman who are having an affair, and who each narrate later stories. In Life After Death the man arrives home to find three men waiting outside his flat looking for the woman. Are they police? He fears she has murdered her husband. Then in The Sea, she describes the events of a holiday in North Africa previously glimpsed in Public House. Like the game of hide and seek in a dark cellar in the first story, Family Game, it doesn't end well. But which is the story, and which is the story-within-a-story? Which ending is true? Is reality the impossible object of fiction?
I wanted to review something impossible. Like a book full of stories that are subsumed by other stories within them. The object is that this is impossible; one cuts out certainty and creates circularity.
Does any of this make sense? Does love? Does life?
It's brilliant, but impossible.
I waited a long time to get hold of a copy. It is an old book so I was in no hurry, but it intrigued me the way the library copy I was waiting for was continuously out on loan for several years - apparently someone was constantly renewing it, unable to let go. Why? It's not a long book. Finally it turned up - and, having read it, I think I understand why the previous borrower held on to it for so long. It's brilliant, but impossible.
"I wanted to write you something impossible," we are told at the end, "like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality."
It's a fascinating observation: some things that can be drawn in two dimensions are impossible in three. Like an Escher stairway; a triangle whose inside becomes its outside; or love.
Impossible Object mainly comprises eight short stories, one of which - A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People - is an extraordinary, bravura depiction of the internal monologues of a married couple who, from the moment they wake up, are trying to second guess each other - like chess players locked in a battle of attrition, anticipating their opponents' every move. In their mental calculations breakfast becomes a battlefield, and eggs grenades. After the husband leaves for work, his wife digs out some old love letters and reads this:
"I have a terrible compulsion to do as much hurt as I can while I can. I think this is what love is, an attempt to get what you can't and then to destroy it. There's a shred of sanity left which tells you what's happening; but this doesn't help, it only means you can't escape it."Love: impossible to live with; impossible to live without - making life impossible either way? As another writer/character, in another story (A Journey Into The Mind) puts it:
"All life is impossible; you hope for reality."
Published in 1968, this is meta-fiction that makes [a:Paul Auster|296961|Paul Auster|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1287451428p2/296961.jpg]'s career look like one long game of catch-up. It's the sort of book you have to read more than once. The first time in puzzlement, the second in awe. The writing is full of classical allusions, philosophy, and some eye-popping sentences:
"My sons were embarrassed.
They went downstairs like ambulance men."
In [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309282484s/18423.jpg|817527], published the following year, [a:Ursula Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg] said that "the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next." This reader certainly had no idea what would come next in Impossible Object, nor how it related to what had gone before. As the book progressed the stories became more entangled: the writer of one story becomes a character in another, while the narrator of the other seems to be a character in the first.
In Public House, a writer spends several lunchtimes eavesdropping on the assignations of a man and a woman who are having an affair, and who each narrate later stories. In Life After Death the man arrives home to find three men waiting outside his flat looking for the woman. Are they police? He fears she has murdered her husband. Then in The Sea, she describes the events of a holiday in North Africa previously glimpsed in Public House. Like the game of hide and seek in a dark cellar in the first story, Family Game, it doesn't end well. But which is the story, and which is the story-within-a-story? Which ending is true? Is reality the impossible object of fiction?
I said "This is a fairy story. None of it is quite real."
She said "Do you think you're God?"
I wanted to review something impossible. Like a book full of stories that are subsumed by other stories within them. The object is that this is impossible; one cuts out certainty and creates circularity.
"Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round; have I told you this before?"
"He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather, that we should act as if everything did."
"As if everything we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."
Does any of this make sense? Does love? Does life?
"All life is a struggle; then you come to the end of it."
It's brilliant, but impossible.
briandice's review against another edition
5.0
How is this book not considered a classic? Why has it been buried in relative obscurity?
As close to perfection as one can get with a novel. Beautiful.
As close to perfection as one can get with a novel. Beautiful.
araumi's review against another edition
dark
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Similar style like if i survive you.
carmelitasita's review against another edition
3.0
It started off so promising (well, besides the little interludes between stories), but toward the end I was slogging through it just to get it finished. The second short story is definitely worth five stars, about a married couple in the midst of a fight. Those interludes though - I am not a big fan of stream of consciousness storytelling, even one with a premise underneath that more or less ties it all together. Maybe one star. The later stories, between two and three stars. By the end of the book, I was getting tired of the characters, of their way of thinking and acting and always going back on what they were saying or doing. Confusing, needless, and boring. But that second story - I almost clapped my hands afterward. Too bad the rest of the book dragged it down.
jimmylorunning's review against another edition
5.0
I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.It's important to remember that writers are magicians. Their art always starts with deception. In this way, writing is closely related to love. In the last section of the book, the author--Mosley--who happens to be a master magician, weaves an allegory about a princess and a woodcutter. But the magician--Mosley--casts his spell over his tale and reveals them as the witch and magician they really were. Thus another romance starts with deception and ends in the deception of art. For we find out later--too late?--that the magician--woodcutter--and the witch--princess--are both on stage, performing a ridiculous tableau.
"What is the point of being a witch and a magician," said the magician, "if we cannot become something different?"Meanwhile back in the "real"/main story, the female lover disagrees:
I knew that he always thought that life could be refashioned and go on, but I thought that it should not. There are some things for which one cannot be forgiven.But the magician--Mosley, in this case--does believe in this refashioning. His mode of magicianship has always been this art of transformation--rabbits out of hats, if you will--the metaphor and the simile, and he has never been shy about either.
p16: She sat with her hands between her legs; like mimosa.And he's written his novel around this heavy-handed sleight of hand: story after story, the interlocking mechanism is at first unclear--maybe a connection is made by a similar comparison of a face to Cleopatra's, or a mention of a seaside town. At first the pieces do not add up, like a jigsaw puzzle in which you have focused too much on one problematic piece. By the end, you see that all the pieces do indeed fit, but the problem is now that they fit in too well, like a staircase that has connected itself back to its origin, making a convincing but impossible whole.
p14: She had a soft mouth which birds could peck crumbs off.
p215: Beyond the waves their heads kept appearing and disappearing like oil.
"Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round ... He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather that we should act as if everything did." My wife said "Why?" ... I said "Because this is the only way in which life is bearable." My wife looked disinterested. I said "As if everything that we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."This is a theme in the book. The male idea of being able to repeat something over and over, and the female idea that some things cannot. Thus Mosley--magician-- repeats the age-old, almost impossible theme of love. Can it or can it not be repeated? Likewise can love be repeated or only the disposable actions of love. The idea of acting comes in often, artifice:
We had been sitting in the pub in London one day and I had asked--Then what is our point?--and he had said in his voice that suddenly became like an actor--To maintain ecstasy. (p. 208, emphasis mine)And the idea of a point. If the point is ecstasy, then love is just artifice, like writing. A set of mirrors to trick ourselves into thinking we are constantly at its height:
What I did not like was that for him life seemed to depend on complexity and flux: and this was not quite real, it was stimulated.This is a carefully constructed, cynically dosed conception of love, art, and war (if they are not the same thing) that may or may not have anything to do with reality. But I highly recommend you read it anyway.
litsirk's review against another edition
4.0
This book was neat because it had a lot of strange tricks to it, like for instance it had bizarre similes, and lots of interrelation between different stories (it's like a short story collection, but actually sort of like a novel). I don't know if I'd say it's super-awesome all-in-all, but pretty good.
readerstephen86's review
challenging
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Impossible about sums it up. A cluttered rag-bag of dislocated metaphors, swimming on a swell of tidal psychobabble.
The kaleidescopic multi-perspective sections worked to an extent, and just when I could have cheerfully thrown it across the room, it reeled me back in with looping repetitions (Rome, hide-and-seek, the emotions of going to war, Nietszche) that chanelled some of its loose fluidity. However, I was just trying to finish it off at the end, and even if it only took me a day to read its 189 pages, it was a million miles away from the absolute joy I felt 6 months back being swept up by Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse'.
It might just have been too clever by halves for me, and maybe I just didn't fully understand. Perhaps if I had actually read Nietszche rather than skimming over him in teenage years, it might have made more sense? God-as-Prometheus... The fickleness of love in adultery... Love as an illusion... Believing history is repetition as a way of fostering some sense of structure and stabilty. Is this what it was about?
Whatever it was, it was a disappointing end to my 1969 Booker shortlist year, even if it was in no way as execrable as that year's 1-star 'winner', 'Something to Answer For'. Spark's was mid-table, I quite like Williams's nihilistic Scottish coming of age tale, and would probably put it between Murdoch and England for my personal winner. The idea that a fairly graphic POW escape tale could have been my favourite flies in the face of expectations. Perhaps I'd built up hopes for Mosley, but it was baffling, and I'm just relieved that neither he nor Newby made the shortlists ever again.
The kaleidescopic multi-perspective sections worked to an extent, and just when I could have cheerfully thrown it across the room, it reeled me back in with looping repetitions (Rome, hide-and-seek, the emotions of going to war, Nietszche) that chanelled some of its loose fluidity. However, I was just trying to finish it off at the end, and even if it only took me a day to read its 189 pages, it was a million miles away from the absolute joy I felt 6 months back being swept up by Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse'.
It might just have been too clever by halves for me, and maybe I just didn't fully understand. Perhaps if I had actually read Nietszche rather than skimming over him in teenage years, it might have made more sense? God-as-Prometheus... The fickleness of love in adultery... Love as an illusion... Believing history is repetition as a way of fostering some sense of structure and stabilty. Is this what it was about?
Whatever it was, it was a disappointing end to my 1969 Booker shortlist year, even if it was in no way as execrable as that year's 1-star 'winner', 'Something to Answer For'. Spark's was mid-table, I quite like Williams's nihilistic Scottish coming of age tale, and would probably put it between Murdoch and England for my personal winner. The idea that a fairly graphic POW escape tale could have been my favourite flies in the face of expectations. Perhaps I'd built up hopes for Mosley, but it was baffling, and I'm just relieved that neither he nor Newby made the shortlists ever again.
More...