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TloothAuthor: Harry Mathews American Literature Series October 1998 192 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-194-1 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.00 
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Book Description
Set in a Russian prison camp, this novel begins at a baseball game featuring the Defective Baptists versus the Fideists. As in other Mathews novels, there is a plot (of sorts), and here it is one of revenge. Our narrator/hero is a dental assistant in the camp, and she begins to plot revenge against Dr. Evelyn Roak, who in removing a bone spur, managed also to remove an index and ring finger; the narrator had been a violinist. The plot reaches one of its climaxes when the narrator, the catcher for the Defective Baptists, attempts to substitute the ball with a bomb.
When Dr. Roak is released from the prison, the narrator escapes in order to pursue her, and thus begins the Mathewsian digressive journey from Afghanistan to Venice, then onto India and Morocco and France. And all of this takes place amid Mathews's fictional concerns and play with games, puzzles, arcana, and stories within stories.
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
"Harry Mathews's Tlooth fits no category I can think of . . . In his inventiveness and erudition he is like Pynchon, Barth, and William Gaddis."—Granville Hicks, Saturday Review"A brilliant book, in a very special way . . . While the method of telling it is quite sober, and the language plain, what actually happens is totally bizarre and wonderful. The descriptions that are blandly handed to you show an imagination and an ingenuity that are often just astonishing. The details are sometimes very savage and scabrous . . . But the book has nothing to do with modish sick humor . . . It is, for all its incidental excesses, fantasy, pure and simple . . . If you can take it, this is a journey worth taking."—Harper's
"I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing—John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon—but none so strong as this."—Thomas Disch, New Worlds
"An imaginative free-form exercise in the best advanced style, one carefully planned with conventions of plot meticulously disregarded . . . with an emphasis on bizarre subject matter paramount . . . Here in brief is a literary 'happening' not without some interest for its innovations in technique in a world evidently prepared to abandon the old and tried for the new and quite experimental, at least in prose fiction."—Virginia Quarterly Review
"[Tlooth and The Conversions are] comic extravaganzas that play mockingly with every device of fiction."—Washington Post Book World
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 Journalist
The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium