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The JournalistAuthor: Harry Mathews American Literature Series October 1997 256 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-165-8 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36 
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Book Description
As an aid to recovering from a nervous breakdown, the narrator of The Journalist begins to keep daily records of almost everything that goes on in his life, from how much he has spent on books and movies to what he eats. As the diary progresses, the narrator's entries become more and more detailed and increasingly bizarre, especially as he begins to devise elaborate classification systems for his unwieldy materials. Since these entries require more and more of his time, he begins to withdraw from family and friends, entering a world perfectly ordered, organized, and utterly weird.About the Author
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Harry Mathews was born and raised on New York's Upper East Side but left America for France in 1952 shortly after graduating from Harvard. He has written over a dozen books including the novels Cigarettes, The Journalist, and Tlooth, along with collected stories, The Human Country, and essays, The Case of the Persevering Maltese. Mathews is also the only American member of the Oulipo—the Workshop for Potential Literature— France's longest, and most active, literary movement. He divides his time between Paris, Key West, and New York. |
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Praise
"The calm with which Harry Mathews represents the elusiveness of the self in this riveting, masterful novel is like the calm in the eye of a hurricane. The Journalist will take your breath away."—Walter Abish"Mathews charts his descent into mania with clarity and wit . . . He has not eschewed the consolations of an ordinary novel—a clever, twisting plot, realistic characters and bouts of laugh-out-loud comedy—but there is nothing ordinary about this book. It is a brilliant demonstration of life as heart-breaking farce."—Time Out
"[In The Journalist] Mathews delineates with characteristically 'hypnotic passion' the misprisons of subjectivity, the anxieties of interpretation, the comic and terrifying perils of writing itself."—Times Literary Supplement
"The Journalist is both a slightly surreal comedy of manners and a frightening parable on the carnivorous nature of the written word. It's Mathews's most stunning and approachable fiction so far."—John Ashbery
"The complications offered up by Mr. Mathews are both daunting and funny, in a kind of psychoslapstick way."—New York Times
More Information
Also by Harry Mathews:20 Lines a Day
Cigarettes
My Life in CIA
Singular Pleasures
The Case of the Persevering Maltese
The Conversions
The Human Country
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
Tlooth