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the complete review - fiction

The Sinking of the
Odradek Stadium

by
Harry Mathews

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : imaginative, entertaining, pleasantly absurd

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium seems to me a comic masterpiece, as funny as Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, as intricate as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. (...) As Mathews' art has matured he has moved away from pearls of exotic narration strung on a slender thread of continuity. In The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, he has created a seamless fabric, as tense, light, and strong as stretched silk." - Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium is told almost entirely in the form of letters between Zachary McCaltex and his new bride, Tro-tsi Twang Panattapam McCaltex. Zachary is in Miami, Twang in Italy. Their correspondence moves through a variety of stages. At its core is their changing relationship (long distance makes it complicated) and the search for a treasure in Florida.
       Mathews mixes politics, literature, music, and the personal in the unusual give and take between the couple. There is also a lot of literary play. From Twang's written English (initially very poor, prone to amusing slips) to any number of textual tricks Mathews displays his craftiness.
       Random (and not necessarily representative) samples: Twang wonders about a title she's heard: "What is that 'Waste land' ? It's perhaps a nick name of Arizona ?" Or the plaint: "The events have left me feeling like a fragment by H.D."
       There's also an index to the novel (we approve heartily !), as cleverly done as the rest of the novel for anyone who cares to follow it. (In fact, it helps in the understanding of some of the allusions in the text that might otherwise be missed.)
       The story twists, skips and jumps in familiar Mathews style. Pleasantly absurd, intriguingly clever, with its short epistolary chapters it is an enjoyable though at times challenging read.

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Links:

• Dalkey Archive Press publicity page

• The complete review's Harry Mathews page.
• Brief biography and bibliography
• Interview with John Ashbery (from the Review of Contemporary Fiction)
• Interview with John Ash (from the Review of Contemporary Fiction -- no, it really is a different interview)
• Interview with Alexander Laurence
• Short biography
• Reading Harry Mathews by John Beer in Context
• Alexander Laurence essay on The Novels of Harry Mathews

• Stéfan Sinclair's OuLiPo page

• The Conversions
• The Human Country
• My Life In CIA
• S.
• Selected Declarations of Dependence
• Singular Pleasures
• Tlooth
• The Way Home
• See also: the Oulipo Compendium, co-edited by Mathews
• See also: AA files 45/46: Georges Perec + Paris

• See Index of Oulipo books under review
• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Harry Mathews was born in 1930. He graduated from Harvard. In 1952 he moved to Paris, becoming a member of the OuLiPo in the early 1970s.

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