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the complete review - prose

Selected Declarations of Dependence

by
Harry Mathews

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

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Our Assessment:

B : perverbs and paraphrases -- how can you not love it ?

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Mathews's Oulipo-enhanced texts are a pleasure. As for the drawings -- well, (...) these repetitive illustrations do little to enhance a reader's enjoyment of the book. But as the perverb says, "Bird in the hand, sailor's delight." " - Eric Lorberer, Review of Contemporary Fiction

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:

       Harry Mathews' experimental fiction Selected Declarations of Dependence offers a dazzling array of variations on familiar ideas and phrases. Mathews focusses on the proverb as the building block of his prose. A stitch in time saves nine and Every cloud has a silver lining and the like.
       The first, longest, section, called Their words, for you is an elaborate tale (of sorts) whose entire vocabulary is made up of the words contained in forty-six familiar proverbs. This obviously places a great number of constraints on the text, but Mathews still manages to make much of it. Decidedly Oulipian in approach, it is a perversely interesting effort.
       The rest of the book consists largely of so-called "perverbs" and "paraphrases." In perverbs proverbs are taken and perverted -- two disparate ones mixed and matched. The results lead to the bizarre and the obvious (and often the helpful):

Every cloud has its day.
A bird in the hand does as the Romans do.
Man proposes, but you can't make him drink.
It's an ill wind that's another man's poison.

"The sky was clear except for the fog rising to the east -- fermentation from the oak bog" is a paraphrase of the perverb "Every cloud from little acorns grows."

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Links:

• 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.
• The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
• Singular Pleasures
• Tlooth
• The Way Home
• See also: the Oulipo Compendium, co-edited by Mathews
• See also: AA files 45/46: Georges Perec + Paris

• Jeff Noon's metamorphiction, Cobralingus
• 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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