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    Chimera
    Chimera
    Chimera
    Ebook325 pages10 hours

    Chimera

    By John Barth

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A National Book Award winner, this bawdy, comic trio of novellas finds John Barth injecting his signature wit into three tales many times told: that of Scheherazade, storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights; of Perseus, slayer of Medusa; and of Bellerophon, rider of Pegasus and slayer of the Chimera.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDalkey Archive Press
    Release dateSep 19, 2023
    ISBN9781628974720
    Chimera
    Author

    John Barth

    John Barth is our most celebrated postmodernist. From the appearance in 1956 of The Floating Opera, his first published book, through the essay collection Final Fridays, released in 2012, he has published at least two books in each of the seven decades spanning his writerly life thus far. Thrice nominated for the National Book Award—The Floating Opera, Lost in the Funhouse, and Chimera, which won in 1973—Barth has received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he taught for twenty-two years in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He now lives in Florida with his wife Shelly.

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    Reviews for Chimera

    3.5/5

    146 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A collection of three intertwined novellas, all retellings of classical tales. I enjoyed the 1001 Nights retelling, but strangely enough, not so much the Perseus and Bellerophon ones. Or maybe it's not that strange at all; I'm fairly protective of my classical myths. Barth is clever and all in what he does with the stories, but it felt a little too...flippant for me. *shrug*
    • 4/5
      For her part (she would go on--what a wife was this!), she took what she was pleased to term the Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood: reckoning together their joys and griefs must inevitable show a net loss, if only because like life itself their attrition was constant and their term mortal. But one had only different ways of losing, and to eschew matrimony and childrearing for the delights of less serious relations was in her judgment to sustain a net loss even more considerable.

      A number of confessions should precede any analysis of Chimera. The opening section was the most fun I have had reading since the Derrida bio in late July. I enjoyed the second and third elements of the novel more than Calasso's marriage. That may prove heretical. I'll take my chances. One of the local liquor stores offered Goose Island Summer Ale for three dollars a sixer. I bought a case. Sure, it was outdated. I did not care. I halted my reading last night and turned to youtube. This is always a precarious decision and destination. If I then turn to Conway Twitty I know to run to our bedroom. Instead I watched interviews with John Barth and eventually discussions of Leopardi's Zibaldone. Associations were threshed and threaded. I pondered the historical arc of narrative and sighed, considering Barth's taxonomy of the endeavor. That isn't an impediment to an appreciation of such. The sequence in the final section which segues from Robert Graves to an anthropological examination of the Amazons - thus linking the first section to the subsequent pair -- was astonishing.


      This was a novel which needed to be read in one's 40s. Being married is also of benefit.
    • 5/5
      I read this first in the '70s, shortly after it was published in paperback, and I loved it -- so much that I've hung on to my cheap ($1.50!) paperback copy for 40 years. Nudged by reading 1001 Nights recently, I read it again, and I think I enjoyed it even more this time through, maturity and "widsom" allowing a richer appreciation of the tales.The book consists of three interrelated novellas that stretch and twist and tie in knots any sense of narrative in the traditional sense (though Barth takes a little time out for a little exposition on the narrative arc). The narrator changes, voice changes, the author makes appearances, characters change their names, shapeshifters shift their shape while somehow and slowly the reader is told extended stories of Dunyazade (Sharhazade's sister from 1001 Nights) , Perseus, and Belleraphon. It would be difficult to read if you tried to "understand it", but it's great fun if you just approach it as you would a story told you by an educated, clever, and thoroughly deranged friend -- it's literate, erotic (without even approaching pornographic), wise, silly, fun and good-natured. I can't recommend it highly enough.
    • 4/5
      This was a difficult read. The first of the three novellas contained in this book starts in the middle of the story. The second novella is told by two multiple narrators - sometimes at the same time. These are just examples of how John Barth plays with the standard form of the novel and keeps the reader guessing.John Barth is clearly a brilliant writer. His language is intense, focused, funny, and surprising. I really enjoyed his sentences. The re-telling of the tale of 1001 nights and of Perseus was enjoyable. But I was frequently challenged to understand who was speaking at any given point in the story, and where in the chronological or physical ordering of the story I was at any given time.This book would be great for an English Ph.D. interested in the re-invention of style and form. For someone just out to read a good book, I recommend picking up something else.
    • 1/5
      I read this book in college and just didn't get it. The first section was brilliant, but the rest was largely unreadable. I understand that it's an example of postmodern writing and it's very celebrated; now that I'm a little older and might have more perspective I should probably re-read this one.

    Book preview

    Chimera - John Barth

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