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AmalgamemnonAuthor: Christine Brooke-Rose British Literature Series July 1994 144 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 paperback, 1-56478-050-3 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $9.56—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty, and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (The Observer) upon its original publication in England in 1984.
History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesize but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.
About the Author
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Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1923. She was raised in Brussels and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and University College, London. During World War II, Brooke-Rose served as an intelligence officer in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force, working at Bletchley Park. She began writing in 1956, her first two novels, The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were satirical novels of manners. From 1956 to 1968, Brooke-Rose worked in London as a freelance literary journalist. In 1968, she moved to Paris, beginning a career as a teacher of Anglo-American literature and literary theory at the University of Paris. She authored over a dozen books, among which are Amalgamemnon (1984), Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991). |
Praise
"This sort of metafiction can start like a rocket, then fizzle, but Christine Brooke-Rose's novel keeps gaining momentum, blazes with wit and regains for fiction some of the territory lost to critics in recent raids. On all counts it deserves the three stars from Orion's belt."—The Guardian"About what it feels like to be a word-addict—worse, a writing addict—in the brave new world of communications technology."—The Observer
"[I]t comes as a welcome relief to find one's intelligence forced into action, one's knowledge of cultural traditions taxed, and stylish wit and cultivated taste regarded as of vital importance. For Christine Brooke-Rose there is no kowtowing to fashion. . . . [Amalgamemnon] is a veritable tour de force of language exploitation and manipulation. . . . At the heart of Amalgamemnon is the volatile nature of the Western cultural tradition, something it is impossible to grasp in totality, a culture which refuses limitation by normative definition. . . . [T]otally fascinating. . . . [An] immensely rich book. . . . Amalgamemnon is a brilliant example of its author's thesis, proving the eternal creative flexibility of language and the restorative vitality of one person's cultural memory."—American Book Review
"[Amalgamemnon] will surely feature in the literary histories when Booker contenders have faded away. Only 140 pages, but informed by a delight in language and wordplay that attracts the pejorative label 'experimental' (authors should not display too much inventiveness and intelligence or be influenced by French modes if British). An ideal gift for readers who like to keep their wits about them."—The Bookseller