This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

By David Markson

David Markson was a writer like no other. In his novels, which have been called hypnotic,” stunning,” and exhilarating” and earned him praise from the likes of Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace, Ann Beattie and Zadie Smith. Markson created his own personal genre. With crackling wit distilled into incantatory streams of thought on art, life, and death, Markson’s work has delighted and astonished readers for decades.

Now for the first time, three of Markson’s masterpieces are compiled into one page-turning volume: This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel. In This Is Not a Novel, readers meet an author, called only Writer,” who is weary unto death of making up stories, and yet is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages and getting somewhere. Vanishing Point introduces us to Author,” who sets out to transform shoeboxes crammed with note cards into a novel. In The Last Novel, we find an elderly author (referred to only as Novelist”) who announces that, since this will be his final effort, he possesses carte blanche to do anything he damn well pleases.”

United by their focus on the trials, calamities, absurdities and even tragedies of the creative life, these novels demonstrate David Markson’s extraordinary intellectual richnessleaving readers, time after time, with the most indisputably original of reading experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781619028197

Reviews for This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

[jbushnell_5 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Novelist attempts to write an anti-novel, seeing what survives when you reduce narrative to a cascade of facts (literary anecdotes and gossip, mostly). The experiment yields its most interesting results over the first 40 pages or so, so the remaining 150 serve primarily as feeble inquiries into the effects of perserverance and duration, effects explored more intriguingly elsewhere.

[headless_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

entertaining, clever, surprisingly touching, but ultimately thin.

[bluepiano-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The only--ostensibly--fictional character in this novel is Writer. 'Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing,' the book begins, and scattered throughout it are Writer's thoughts on novels and writing, which eventually give way to personal information about Writer, information that the reader may already have gathered from the rest of the book.And the rest of the book is a collection of baldly-stated facts, most of them about writers and particularly about their deaths, brief quotations, and mere phrases. None of these is random nor are they irrelevant to each other and to Writer's situation--in fact, the book is a marvel of organisation--despite appearances:'Virtually every inadequacy in recent French literature is due to absinthe, Daudet said in the late 1800's.Annals 165. Where Tacitus actually does, does, call a spade "an implement for digging earth and cutting turf".Paul Klee died of cardiac arrest after years of enduring scleroderma.Sarah Orne Jewett died of a cerebral hemmorhage.Thomas of Celano.I have wasted all my youth chained to this tomb.Michelangelo protested to Julius II.Why hasn't Writer ever known? What is the black liquid that spills out of the dead Emma Bovary's mouth?'That's most of the page I chanced to open the book to and ought to give a perfect idea of what the writing is like. You could, I suppose, use it as a bedside book of trivia, you Philistine you, but in doing so you'd be losing the novel itself: There is a story here, though it's told in an untraditional way. And it's left me more keen than ever to read all that Markson wrote.

[kszym-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What this is: a list of short (1-3 line) anecdotes about artists. How they died, where they died, ways they insulted people, with occasional bits from Writer, who seems preoccupied with getting older, as well as the failure of his last book. Despite being devoid of plot and characters, there's quite a nice story here - mostly sad, but kind of funny. It's a quick read, and a good one.

[aliceunderskies · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Following the title, I wasn't expecting this to be a novel, but I did hope for some sort of philosophical statement about art & mortality. I found none. Why on earth was this even published? It's just a grocery list of anecdotes. Dull & uninspired.

[jamespaul977 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I did read this mish-mosh of historical/literary details & interspersed commentary fairly quickly, in line with the description of it being a page-turner. However the book's inclination towards the random & obscure, beyond a focus on causes of death, is puzzling.

[daedalus_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yeah, so the title doesn't lie. That's part of it's charm (insert modern literary theory commentary here). It's worth reading. It's fascinating. It's fun. Mostly it's fun and fascinating.

[beelzebubba_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A series of statements on the causes of death of writers, artists, etc... As well as quotes and anecdotes. Names and series of names.Epithets.Seeming disjointed and random.Meaningless?No, not meaningless. With three words towards the end, Markson ties it all together. And all of a sudden the book explodes in your hand, and you understand what it was all about. No, it is not a novel. Few novels could affect me as strongly as this book did. I will not soon forget it.If ever.

[blzcloud · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fragments so you’re not tempted to skip big lumpy paragraphs. Funny. Sad. Odd facts and coincidences in the lives of artists, baseball players etc. Traces of self-pity but if others wont you have to do it yourself.

[charon07 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is not a novel. I'm not sure quite what it is, because I'm not sure how much of it is fiction. Maybe none of it. A collage-style memoir, maybe.

But I liked it. As promised, it kept me turning the pages.

And Markson's style is infectious.