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DARK HORSEY SAYS- Like all books by Harry Mathews this has grown in reputation over the years of its unavailability. First published in 1977 by the fabulous Z Press, it's back in print now & with the original Alex Katz illustrations. Its basis is a set of forty-six proverbs - used & abused in various ways to produce the texts- providing, for example, the entire vocabulary for the opening story,"Their Words, For You"; they are cross-bred in the perverbs (two proverbs crossed - eg"A rolling stone leads to Rome"), curiously refracted ("All roads weave to Leeds"), and given dizzying, droll and hilariously extended workouts throughout via a number of procedures. A kind of classic - from America's only Ou Li Po master. Hence the emphasis on the liberating dependence of 'restrictive form'.Harry Mathews is one of the Ou Li Po masters (along with friend Georges Perec, Calvino, Raymond Queneau & others). Fabulously amusing & bizarro novelist, inventive prose stylist & poet. Other books include, memorably, The Way Home, Twenty Lines A Day, The Conversions, & Singular Pleasures. |
